Agreed.
LLMs are actually -the worst- at doing very specific repetitive things. It'd be much more appropriate for one to replace the CEO (the generalist) rather than junior staff.
Readit Newsmvkel commented on AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents agents.md/... · Posted by u/ghuntley
We're in a transition phase today where agents need special guidance to understand a codebase that go beyond what humans need. Before long, I don't think they will. I think we should focus on our own project documentation being comprehensive (e.g. the contents of this AGENTS.md are appropriate to live somewhere in our documentation), but we should always write for humans.
The LLM's whole shtick is that it can read and comprehend our writing, so let's architect for it at that level.
This is mostly true if the existing codebase is largely self documented, which is rare
> Fast for short intervals regularly, and longer fasts as they feel good to you.
You can effectively do this every day if you just eat once per day. When I was properly obese, this technique resulted in rapid weight loss. Zero exercise was required to see results, which was good at the time because the not eating part was about all I could handle.
Being in a fasted state is as close as you can get to actually reversing aging. Your body engages in a process called autophagy when nutrient-sensing pathways are down-regulated. When you are stuffing your face constantly (i.e., every ~8 hours), there is less opportunity for this mechanism to do its job.
Associating weight loss with the healthiness of oneself is a mistake.
One can subsist on Oreos at a "healthy" weight if they consume <2,000 calories worth of cookies per day. They will not be a healthy person.
mvkel commented on Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun: US Is Losing AI Race Due to Closed Models haebom.dev/archive?post=1... · Posted by u/haebom
Whether a model is open or closed is beside the point. How much value are they generating?
The one tip for quick success that the Human Developers don't want you to know: You don't have to pay down your tech debt if the company folds because hackers leak your customer database and refund all your income.
This counterfactual implies that successful companies that have not been hacked have done so because they pay down their tech debt.
I can name many companies that have Olympus Mons levels of tech debt, and are doing great. Here's one: Spotify
> Vibe coding is ultimately about getting ideas shipped faster.
Studies show that using LLMs for coding results in negative net productivity gains on average.
I would read that study thoroughly.
It had a very specific caveat of "within existing codebases that the engineer was intimately familiar with."
In all other instances, it was not slower
>unless you've bought one of the cheaper ones already.
You don't even get a foot in the door with 1 from Ferrari.
I read a Reddit post from someone who had an acquaintance that speed-ran the process (clearly a 9 figure+ individual), and it was ludicrous.
I think it took him something like 3-5 years, while it normally takes double that. I think right out the gate he had to buy a few of them, then he could buy the nice ones, and the special editions, then he bought a used f40 or something like that which was 7 figures, and started participating in the racing experience they have, so there's a parallel track where you have to buy some track focused cars as well. Along the way he made sure to show up at all of the events, and it's important to, because to get on "the list" there is a scoring system behind the scene where everything that a customer does is assigned a point value, and only the customers with the highest level of points get the allocations. That includes things like maxing out options on every curve you buy, and paying up for the bespoke personalization services.
I think it was something like 3 years, 10+ cars, and 10 million dollars to get through the gauntlet.
The entire Ferrari Challenge "race series" is guys shipping their cars around the country and participating in "races" exclusively so they can stay/be on the list for future allocations. It's wild.
A story about a non-technical friend: friend vibe coded a SaaS last year and started generating revenue with almost no marketing; all word of mouth and inbound in a niche industry. Used Replit and Supabase to build the thing; I am still really impressed by what he was able to do given how complex the app ended up becoming as he interacted with customers.
What I think happened: there are two incumbents in this space that are not happy about him showing up and charging a fraction of their monthly cost for a better, more modern product (their products are Windows-based desktop software). So they hired hackers to hack his SaaS (because these hackers have never demanded money). Unfortunately, that vibe-coding resulted in some bad code that made it easy to hack. First, the user list was leaked on the FE of the code and the hacker emailed all of the customers. Second, the hacker got a hold of his Stripe key and issued every customer a refund. Third, the hacker has been trying to inject XSS attacks into app (we'll see a random `<script>alert()</script>` tag in some fields)
I think indeed, vibe-coded software in the hands of the inexperienced is instant tech debt. But at the same time, he was able to prove out a viable business in a matter of a few months with no engineering background and no technical capability.
Now he's hiring a developer to shore it up.
Was it worth it? Yes, it is terrible, shoddy, insecure code, but he proved out a viable business with just a few hundred dollars of investment.
"Tech debt" is a misnomer. It implies that at some point it should be paid down. There are very few examples where dedicating real efforts exclusively to paying down tech debt led to anything beneficial for the customer.
Some of the software we know and love today started with someone writing their very first line of PHP code, or Rails.
Vibe coding is ultimately about getting ideas shipped faster. Code quality is an engineer recruiting/retention strategy.
As we saw with that Tea app (which wasn't even vibe coded), you're only as secure as your weakest firebase store.
mvkel commented on How to scale RL to 10^26 FLOPs blog.jxmo.io/p/how-to-sca... · Posted by u/jxmorris12
Grok 4 is effectively Grok 3 with massively scaled RL, and the improvements on the benchmarks (and experientially) are minimal.
Is this a flaw in theory, or application?
Ahmen! I attend this same church.
My favorite professor in engineering school always gave open book tests.
In the real world of work, everyone has full access to all the available data and information.
Very few jobs involve paying someone simply to look up data in a book or on the internet. What they will pay for is someone who can analyze, understand, reason and apply data and information in unique ways needed to solve problems.
Doing this is called "engineering". And this is what this professor taught.
Ahh, but this is part of the problem. Yes, they have access, but there is -so much- information, it punches through our context window. So we resort to executive summaries, or convince ourselves that something that's relevant is actually not.
At least an LLM can take full view of the context in aggregate and peel out signal. There is value there, but no jobs are being replaced