Readit NewsI'm just making a slight point that walking is probably the simplest most effective thing you can do to improve almost every aspect of your life.
I would love to subscribe to / pay for service that are just APIs. Then have my agent organize them how I want.
Imagine youtube, gmail, hacker news, chase bank, whatsapp, the electric company all being just apis.
You can interact how you want. The agent can display the content the way you choose.
Incumbent companies will fight tooth and nail to avoid this future. Because it's a future without monopoly power. Users could more easily switch between services.
Tech would be less profitable but more valuable.
It's the future we can choose right now by making products that compete with this mindset.
Like, somehow I could tell my agent that I have a $20 a month budget for entertainment and a $50 a month budget for news, and it would just figure out how to negotiate with the nytimes and netflix and spotify (or what would have been their equivalent), which is fine. But would also be able to negotiate with an individual band who wants to directly sell their music, or a indie game that does not want to pay the Steam tax.
I don't know, just a "histories that might have been" thought.
The problem is these metrics aren't really scalable productivity metrics. If you doubled cost, it might go to 100:1, if you tripled cost, it might go to 0.5:1
Each dollar generally gets more expensive to capture.
And yet it happily told me what I exactly wanted it to tell me - rewrite the goddamn thing using the (C++) expression templates. And voila, it took "it" 10 minutes to spit out the high-quality code that works.
My biggest gripe for now with Gemini is that Antigravity seems to be written by the model and I am experiencing more hiccups than I would like to, sometimes it's just stuck.
I have noticed that LLM's seem surprisingly good at translating from one (programming) language to another... I wonder if transforming a generic mathematical expression into an expression template is a similar sort of problem to them? No idea honestly.
It's not very complex, but a great time saver
Also for reference, in 2024 the IRS had a rate of return of 415:1, they'll obviously target the lowest hanging fruit first but for every dollar of funding received they collected 415 dollars of tax revenue that would have been missed. This is an obscenely efficient organization.
I'm a former Googler and know some people near the team, so I mildly root for them to at least do well, but Gemini is consistently the most frustrating model I've used for development.
It's stunningly good at reasoning, design, and generating the raw code, but it just falls over a lot when actually trying to get things done, especially compared to Claude Opus.
Within VS Code Copilot Claude will have a good mix of thinking streams and responses to the user. Gemini will almost completely use thinking tokens, and then just do something but not tell you what it did. If you don't look at the thinking tokens you can't tell what happened, but the thinking token stream is crap. It's all "I'm now completely immersed in the problem...". Gemini also frequently gets twisted around, stuck in loops, and unable to make forward progress. It's bad at using tools and tries to edit files in weird ways instead of using the provided text editing tools. In Copilot it, won't stop and ask clarifying questions, though in Gemini CLI it will.
So I've tried to adopt a plan-in-Gemini, execute-in-Claude approach, but while I'm doing that I might as well just stay in Claude. The experience is just so much better.
For as much as I hear Google's pulling ahead, Anthropic seems to be to me, from a practical POV. I hope Googlers on Gemini are actually trying these things out in real projects, not just one-shotting a game and calling it a win.
tldr; It is great at search, not so much action.
My only pushback is using sqlite. I am a big fan of just using simple (structured) text files that can be edited by hand when needed. Your computer is more than capable of doing all the joining/querying/aggregating/whatever with the text file itself rather than relying on a database. I personally find these sort of file structures comforting as it means they can be easily modified in unsupported ways.
What I’ve seen suggests the most common answers are (a) “containers” and (b) “YOLO!” (maybe adding, “Please play nice, agent.”).
One approach that I’m about to try is Sandvault [0] (macOS only), which uses the good old Unix user system together with some added precautions. Basically, give an agent its own unprivileged user account and interact with it via sudo, SSH, and shared directories.
0. https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault
I try not to run LLM's directly on my own host. The only exception I have is that I do use https://github.com/karthink/gptel on my own machine, because it is just too damn useful. I hope I don't self own myself with that someday.