3 ms·

I go to meetups and enjoy myself so much; 80% of people are showing how to install 800000000 MCPs on their 92gb macbook pros, new RAG memory, n8n agent flows, s

I go to meetups and enjoy myself so much; 80% of people are showing how to install 800000000 MCPs on their 92gb macbook pros, new RAG memory, n8n agent flows, super special prompting techniques, secret sauces, killer .md files, special vscode setups and after that they still are not productive vs just vanilla claude code in a git repos. You get people saying 'look I only have to ask xyz... and it does it! magic' ; then you just type in vanilla CC 'do xyz' and it does exactly the same thing, often faster.

abakker 10mo ago
That perfectly ties with my experience. Just direct prompts, with limited setup and limited context seem to work better or just as well as complex custom GPTs. There are not just diminishing, but inverting returns to complexity in GPTs
- serf 10mo ago
  limited prompts work well for limited programs, or already well defined and cemented source bases. once scope creeps up you need the guardrails of a carefully crafted prompt (and pre-prompts, tool hooks, AGENTS files, the whole gambit) -- otherwise it turns into cat wrangling rapidly.
  - anonzzzies 10mo ago
    Not in our (30+ year old software company) experience and we have large code bases with a lot of scope creep ; more than ever as we can deliver a lot more for a lot less (lot more revenue / profit too).
mikestorrent 10mo ago
This was always the case. People obsessing over keyboards, window managers, emacs setups... always optimizing around the edges of the problem, but this is all taking an incredible amount of their time versus working on real problems.
- sheepscreek 10mo ago
  Yes, the thing they realize much later in life is that perhaps they enjoyed the act of gardening (curating your tools, workflows, etc) much more than farming (being downright focused and productive on the task at hand). Sadly gardening doesn’t pay the bills!
  - hdjrudni 10mo ago
    If I only spend $1000 on hydroponics and 3 weeks tending to a vertical garden I can grow a $1 head of lettuce FOR FREE!
    - DANmode 10mo ago
      What if I haven’t spent anything, and I’m making money with lettuce I grew in the woods? (or, in Anthropic/sama’s backyards)
    - ben_w 10mo ago
      I tried growing lettuce in some cut up plastic bottles at university in soil from the nearby footpath, I think even with the cheap student approach I spent more on the (single pack of) seeds than a fully grown lettuce costs, and only managed about four individual leaves that were only about 1cm by 5cm.
  - anonzzzies 10mo ago
    yep, and I have the same thing, but then I am not going to tell everyone it is super productive for the actual task of farming. I say that I have a hobby farming (which I do) and talk about my tools and my meager yields (which won't make any money if sold). I am not going to say that my workflows are so productive while my neighbour who is a professional farmer just has old crap and just starts and works from 5 am to 9 pm making a living of his land.
  - fc417fc802 10mo ago
    I like farming but a lot of the tools are annoying to use so I find myself tinkering with them (gardening in your analogy I guess). It's not that I prefer tinkering in the shop to farming. More that I just have very little patience for tools that don't conform to the ways in which I think about the world.
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
No, no, you misunderstand, that's still massive productivity improvement compared to them being on their own with their own incompetence and refusal to learn how to code properly
- cindyllm 10mo ago
  [dead]

abakker 10mo ago

That perfectly ties with my experience. Just direct prompts, with limited setup and limited context seem to work better or just as well as complex custom GPTs. There are not just diminishing, but inverting returns to complexity in GPTs

serf 10mo ago
limited prompts work well for limited programs, or already well defined and cemented source bases. once scope creeps up you need the guardrails of a carefully crafted prompt (and pre-prompts, tool hooks, AGENTS files, the whole gambit) -- otherwise it turns into cat wrangling rapidly.
- anonzzzies 10mo ago
  Not in our (30+ year old software company) experience and we have large code bases with a lot of scope creep ; more than ever as we can deliver a lot more for a lot less (lot more revenue / profit too).

mikestorrent 10mo ago

This was always the case. People obsessing over keyboards, window managers, emacs setups... always optimizing around the edges of the problem, but this is all taking an incredible amount of their time versus working on real problems.

sheepscreek 10mo ago
Yes, the thing they realize much later in life is that perhaps they enjoyed the act of gardening (curating your tools, workflows, etc) much more than farming (being downright focused and productive on the task at hand). Sadly gardening doesn’t pay the bills!
- hdjrudni 10mo ago
  If I only spend $1000 on hydroponics and 3 weeks tending to a vertical garden I can grow a $1 head of lettuce FOR FREE!
  - DANmode 10mo ago
    What if I haven’t spent anything, and I’m making money with lettuce I grew in the woods? (or, in Anthropic/sama’s backyards)
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    I tried growing lettuce in some cut up plastic bottles at university in soil from the nearby footpath, I think even with the cheap student approach I spent more on the (single pack of) seeds than a fully grown lettuce costs, and only managed about four individual leaves that were only about 1cm by 5cm.
- anonzzzies 10mo ago
  yep, and I have the same thing, but then I am not going to tell everyone it is super productive for the actual task of farming. I say that I have a hobby farming (which I do) and talk about my tools and my meager yields (which won't make any money if sold). I am not going to say that my workflows are so productive while my neighbour who is a professional farmer just has old crap and just starts and works from 5 am to 9 pm making a living of his land.
- fc417fc802 10mo ago
  I like farming but a lot of the tools are annoying to use so I find myself tinkering with them (gardening in your analogy I guess). It's not that I prefer tinkering in the shop to farming. More that I just have very little patience for tools that don't conform to the ways in which I think about the world.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago

No, no, you misunderstand, that's still massive productivity improvement compared to them being on their own with their own incompetence and refusal to learn how to code properly

cindyllm 10mo ago
[dead]