barrkel

3 ms·

1.
by barrkel 5d ago
You hobble the expressiveness of the LLM and reduce its capability. Think of an agentic harness as like a kind of body for the LLM. It gives it primitive inputs (read_file, web_search or whatever) and primitive outputs (edit file, respond t
2.
by barrkel 5d ago
CLIs, run in a sandbox as tight as your preferred choosing, live in an ecosystem, where, via pipes and redirection, input and output can be easily manipulated. An agent can do similar things but more laboriously (and less token efficiently)
3.
by barrkel 5d ago
What they do instead is scoop up execs when they travel through the US. Peter Dicks, David Carruthers State violence is used to ensure compliance, so that companies self-censor.
4.
by barrkel 5d ago
A CLI doing all this is still a better UI for the agent though.
5.
by barrkel 6d ago
Mutability vs immutability describe the relationship between identity and state. Mutable values retain identity when their state changes. For immutable values, getting a new state requires a new identity, and importantly, existing identitie
6.
by barrkel 12d ago
When I've worked with systems that had these kinds of characteristics, we had checklists. A long list of "have you thought of X". You can't rely on someone writing a design to think of these things either! You need to ha
7.
by barrkel 12d ago
If the feature works, and passes AI auditor agents with various hats (thinking of auth and security in particular), did that code you're not thinking of need to be touched? What effect did it have that cannot be captured in side effect
8.
by barrkel 12d ago
I'm not suggesting using AI generated code as a proposed design. I would try and get an understanding of design space by giving a good agent a high level goal and seeing what it does, then getting a summary of the approach. When you do
9.
by barrkel 12d ago
Instead of thinking through all the places in the code the AI is going to have to touch, why not kick off three parallel agents implementing the thing and finding out what they did and the tradeoffs they found? Planning is essential but it
10.
by barrkel 12d ago
The biggest thing AI enables is cheap code. That means you could choose to try three (or more) genuine implementations and explore their tradeoffs, instead of making three proposals in a document with one recommended (and the other two usua
11.
by barrkel 12d ago
OpenAI was a charity, and the alternative was a mass move to Microsoft.
12.
by barrkel 12d ago
There's more usable space in station wagons, as a rule. And personally, if I'm cornering hard, I prefer to be closer to the road, not higher up...
13.
by barrkel 13d ago
A good chunk of engineering is putting together reliable systems from unreliable parts. You build in safeguards, redundancy, defense in depth, recovery systems. You build models of the system and prove characteristics about it. Software is
14.
by barrkel 17d ago
This would be contract law, and it would also be a huge reputational risk. All it would take is a whistleblower and there would be billions lost.
15.
by barrkel 25d ago
Labyrinth is synonymous with maze in English. The labyrinth symbol, as a decoration or motif in ancient Greek artifacts, isn't generally a maze, but the labyrinth of myth is. Theseus had to use thread, given to him by Ariadne, to find
16.
by barrkel 28d ago
Your point seems to be that if you use a slow standard library and complain, it's not a problem with the slow standard library because you can just reimplement the slow parts independently. The problem with your argument is that it&#x2
17.
by barrkel 29d ago
For some reason PayPal is still quite big in Germany; about 28% of online revenue in 2025. Also Austria, perhaps Italy, but I have less direct experience there.
18.
by barrkel 1mo ago
It makes every commit small, so they can be reviewed quickly and easily. Small commits can often be tested faster, since irrelevant tests don't need to run. Small commits are less risky. The smaller the delta of change, the lower the p
19.
by barrkel 1mo ago
jj support doesn't force an org-wide change. jj is compatible with git. It's just that the mental model is more aligned to Gerrit and stacked PRs.
20.
by barrkel 1mo ago
Jujutsu has a mental model that aligns far more closely to Gerrit than GitHub etc. It uses a persistent changeid to model a change mutating over time, like Gerrit uses Change-Id in the description footer, and unlike git. Jujutsu can be colo
21.
by barrkel 1mo ago
You'd expect a tool-enabled model to leverage crop and zoom tools to inspect and validate what it thinks it's seeing, though.
22.
by barrkel 1mo ago
How do you do drop shadow layer mask effects with Pinta and KolourPaint?
23.
by barrkel 1mo ago
I guess the idea is you can do edits via non-destructive layer effects and compositing a stack of layers, where somewhere amongst the stack is your original unmolested data. Though that has not been my experience with Gimp - it's far m
24.
by barrkel 1mo ago
I don't care. 99% of my uses of an image editor are for ad hoc edits. I never want to clutter my disk with project files on the off-chance I want to preserve layers or whatnot. I have zfs snapshots and cloud backups should I want to re
25.
by barrkel 1mo ago
If you run DNS at home (even just dnsmasq) and you bridge your home 192.whatever to tailscale, you can make the same domain name resolve both at home and via tailscale.
26.
by barrkel 1mo ago
Export and Save As should be the same menu item with an option in the dialog. There are many many more but start with the app having the overbearing assumption that it thinks you want save to its file format rather than make an ad hoc edit.
27.
by barrkel 1mo ago
It is not the literal example because I told it to rename the function, but the function had the form thisNotThat for a boolean predicate that had a far more conventional name.
28.
by barrkel 1mo ago
I naturally write half like Claude, but not the antithesis half - that's not me, that's Claude.
29.
by barrkel 1mo ago
I have a chunky bit of functionality in my hobby app using babylon.js to render 3D worlds using things like portals and LoD rendering to manage the visual load. I built it out with a combo of Fable and Opus 5. I too got fed up with the pros
30.
by barrkel 1mo ago
Go is particularly hilarious because it will just go and create a thread for every hardware thread in your system (my home system has 192 hardware threads), just in case it needs to scale up. So tiny utilities, little network proxies and th

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