I think we can reasonably expect they will become non-stateless in the next few years.
If agents are stateful a few years form now it will be because they accrete a layer of context engineering.
Readit Newstdaltonc commented on Launch HN: Jasmine (YC S22) – Automating REC compliance and payouts for solar · Posted by u/mmayberry
First, it's great to see new stuff happening in the solar space, and helping use incentives that are there. I wish you success!
> This domain is a good fit for automation and LLMs—not to generate text, but to (1) structure unstructured documents, (2) interact with legacy government websites where there’s no API, and (3) deal with repetitive bureaucratic language.
This isn't a criticism of what you're doing, but a more general gripe/musing about the wider software and AI ecosystem. I've seen this in my own work too. I feel very unhappy that we are using complex, nondeterministic, power-hungry "intelligent" machines to solve the problem of... unstructured data. Instead of... structuring the data.
I know you can't solve that problem. But nevertheless, wouldn't it be better for society as a whole if "we" agreed to make data accessible in machine-readable ways that don't require human-like agents to piece together the mess?
This is a writ-large version of the joke about writing an email in bullet points, inflating it to paragraphs using an LLM, then the receiver summarising the paragraphs back to bullet points using an LLM.
This is my roman empire, and I go back and forth on my conclusions at least once a day.
On one hand, clarity and structure make a platform that's easy to build and collaborate on. If the system enforces the rules, and the rules are a good model of reality, everyone knows what to expect. Pushing the world forward one ISO standard at a time.
On the other hand, greatness can't be planned. By the time we know enough to make a plan, the really important stuff has already happened. "Everyone" expected solar to always be a somewhat marginal energy source, so why spend a lot of time standardizing formats?
And it's not like this is a just a thing in tech. Buildings used to be fine tolerance artifacts built by craftsman. Now we slap them together prefab parts and just add more caulk until it works.
I'm genuinely shocked that the electrical grid works. And the more I learn about how it works, the more shocked I become.
Are we losing our attention spans as a rational response to a world that changing faster and faster; or is our lack of attention creating a less stable world?
Ultimately, we make progress not when the code runs fast, but when the humans run fast; but sometimes that means the code needs to run fast too.
And thank you for the well wishes!
tdaltonc commented on Launch HN: Jasmine (YC S22) – Automating REC compliance and payouts for solar · Posted by u/mmayberry
This is amazing and so necessary to drive down the cost of solar and speed up its adoption. Godspeed!
Thank you!
tdaltonc commented on Launch HN: Jasmine (YC S22) – Automating REC compliance and payouts for solar · Posted by u/mmayberry
tdaltonc commented on Launch HN: Jasmine (YC S22) – Automating REC compliance and payouts for solar · Posted by u/mmayberry
This is really great! I have solar on my roof at home but am not sure who owns the RECs - me, the installer, the utility company, rando Jon Doe? Does your platform provide a method to confirm that as well?
Yep! If you upload the documents requested by the app, we are able to determine that one way or the other.
Sometimes that's explicitly in the documents and other times it's based on the jurisdiction of the solar installation.
tdaltonc commented on Launch HN: Jasmine (YC S22) – Automating REC compliance and payouts for solar · Posted by u/mmayberry
I hope this doesn't sound rude, but I'm trying to understand the model here.
Does this mean that instead of incentivizing new utility-scale buildouts, you've now created a credits marketplace where no new solar is added but existing small rooftop installations are suddenly eligible, flooding the market with an artificially increased supply?
So companies can buy RECs that don't actually increase the installed solar base, claim that it offsets their pollution, but in reality it's just some accounting trickery that's newly counting solar that's already built?
That's what it sounds like at first glance, but maybe I'm misunderstanding?
Maybe in the long run, if the automation itself drives further adoption and increases solar uptake, it's a net positive..?
I think it's unlikely that much of the total capacity registered by Jasmine will be pre-2025 builds. So I think your last line is the most likely outcome. More access to the program means more efficient use of the incentive, means (hopefully) more aggressive RPS timelines.
Why do I think that we're unlikely to see a lot of pre-2025 builds?
1) Solar is on an exponential deployment curve, so by definition there's much more capacity in front of us than there is behind us.
2) As a practical matter, the go-to-market motion of on-boarding newly built systems is much easier than the go-to-market motion of on-boarding legacy systems. Channel parters (solar installers, solar point-of-sale systems, solar financiers) all deal with new systems, and new systems are top of mind for recent buyers. Getting our product in front of old system owners is just much harder.
OT but what's the best way to find incentives and rebates given a zip code? Google just suggests 1,000 ads...
DSIRE (Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency) is the database that all of those companies use.
Disclosure: I'm also a Jasmine cofounder.
That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in the interview or application process.
Having been on the hiring side of the interview table now many more times than on the seeking side, I can say that this is totally true.
One of the biggest misconceptions I see from job seekers, especially younger ones, is to equate a job interview to a test at school, assuming that there is some objective bar and if you pass it then you must be hired. It's simply not true. Frequently more than one good applicant applies for a single open role, and the hiring team has to choose among them. In that case, you could "pass" and still not get the job and the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better.
I can only think of one instance where we had two great candidates for one role and management found a way to open another role so we could hire both. In a few other cases, we had people whom we liked but didn't choose and we forwarded their resumes to other teams who had open roles we thought would fit, but most of the time it's just, "sorry."