cowlby

6 ms·

31.
by cowlby 6mo ago
There's thousands of small and medium business though. They have maybe one true CRM, and a dozen spreadsheets/files floating around that would benefit becoming proper apps. People delete spreadsheets all the time! Sure don't
32.
by cowlby 6mo ago
I think of all the pent up demand for proper applications that are just infeasible when it would take a developer weeks-to-months to create. Now it's just a few days with an LLM agent. Examples for me are all the apps that live in a sp
33.
by cowlby 6mo ago
LLM agents are unlocking demand and supply for applications that wouldn't have been possible before due to time constraints though. There's a growing demand for single user or smaller scoped apps where giving LLM agents direct acc
34.
by cowlby 6mo ago
I believe they use Yodlee and yes there is a lot of trust in Yodlee/Tiller to keep data safe. The integrations go through an OAuth type flow where you hit say Chase first and approve/revoke individual accounts so it seems like it&
35.
by cowlby 6mo ago
It's great because Claude Code generated complex analysis/models 10X better than I was familiar with. The key was normalizing the payee/categories so we can analyze month to month, and separating fixed vs variable spend. It t
36.
by cowlby 6mo ago
It was all GitHub Spec Kit + Claude Opus tbh. I narrated a couple paragraphs of how I wanted to sync to flow and it knocked it out in one pass practically. Here's the initial spec it created. I started off writing to a local sqlite db
37.
by cowlby 6mo ago
I've been using Tiller since the pre-AI era. Plaid seems to be more B2B oriented so I haven't looked into it. But eventually yes that would be ideal to own the full pipeline.
38.
by cowlby 6mo ago
Tiller https://tiller.com/ is a good Plaid "proxy". It'll write data to a Google Sheets and can maneuver from there.
39.
by cowlby 6mo ago
I recently did this for myself using https://tiller.com/ to sync checking/credit-card transactions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then a GitHub action mirrors the spreadsheet to a free Supabase database. From there, S
40.
by cowlby 6mo ago
Ahh that makes sense. Sometimes it's convenient to re-use an older conversation that has all the context I need. But maybe it's just the last 20% that's relevant. It would be nice to be able to summarize/cut into a new l
41.
by cowlby 6mo ago
I keep reading about this lately but what doesn't make sense then is how few deaths/injuries there are relative to how much acetaminophen is consumed. If tens of millions take it every day, that's billions of doses a year of
42.
by cowlby 6mo ago
I "fixed" this for myself with tweakcc which let's you patch the system prompts. I changed the malware part to just be "watch out for malware" and it's stopped being unaligned. They really should hand off read(
43.
by cowlby 6mo ago
I'm fascinated that Anthropic employees, who are supposed to be the LLM experts, are using tricks like these which go against how LLMs seem to work. Key example for me was the "malware" tool call section that included a snipp
44.
by cowlby 6mo ago
Using tweakcc I can see the system prompt is supposed to mean “if it’s malware, refuse to improve or augment the code”. But due to all the malware noise it’s confusing the instruction as “don’t improve or augment after reading”. I thought t
45.
by cowlby 6mo ago
Sometimes it feels like as developers we live in a a bubble. Don't most jobs endanger human development? I can't help but think about all the billions of factory, food service, assembly line type jobs. Do these not threaten "
46.
by cowlby 6mo ago
I just discovered Pi Coding Agent and found that it's lean System Prompt + a tuned CLAUDE.md brought back a lot of the intelligence that Opus seemed to lose over the last month. Sucks to be pushed back to Claude Code with opaque system
47.
by cowlby 6mo ago
Vibe coding is also why this was released hours after leak instead of days/weeks.
48.
by cowlby 7mo ago
This is one of the things that GitHub Spec Kit solves for me. The specify.plan step launches code exploration agents and builds itself the latest data model, migrations, etc etc. Really reduces the need to document stuff when the agent self
49.
by cowlby 7mo ago
Who else struggles with both sides of this? My engineer side values curiosity, brain power, and artistanship. My capitalist side says it's always the product not the process. My formula is something like this: product = money, process
50.
by cowlby 7mo ago
I did some napkin math the other day, and my kids at half my size prob hit the ground with 1/2 the stress that I do. Certainly could take more risks falling with a 50% reduction in harm. The extra rotational energy from 70" vs 40&
51.
by cowlby 7mo ago
I'm starting to think for software it's produce 2,000 loaves per month. I'm realizing now software was supply-constrained and organizations had to be very strategic about what apps/UIs to build. Now everything and anythi
52.
by cowlby 7mo ago
Ever since Opus 4.6 came out, I've "vibecoded" a bunch of personal apps/CLIs that would've taken me months before. Some examples: - CLI voice changer with cloned Overwatch voices on ElevenLabs. - Brother P-Touch lab
53.
by cowlby 7mo ago
Isn’t the sustainability drive a function of how much humans have written about life and death and science fiction including these themes?
54.
by cowlby 8mo ago
Yes my hot take is that the real risk isn't skill atrophy... it's failing to develop the new skill of using AI. It's all abstraction layers anyway and people always lament the next abstraction up. 0/1s → assembly → C → h
55.
by cowlby 8mo ago
I picture like semi conductors; the 5nm process is so absurdly complex that operators can't just peek into the system easily. I imagine I'm just so used to hand crafting code that I can't imagine not being able to peek in. So
56.
by cowlby 8mo ago
I find “maintainable code” the hardest bias to let go of. 15+ years of coding and design patterns are hard to let go. But the aha moment for me was what’s maintainable by AI vs by me by hand are on different realms. So maintainable has to e
57.
by cowlby 8mo ago
I recently discovered GitHub speckit which separates planning/execution in stages: specify, plan, tasks, implement. Finding it aligns with the OP with the level of “focus” and “attention” this gets out of Claude Code. Speckit is worth
58.
by cowlby 8mo ago
Anyone else "vibe git-ing” lately? I just ask Claude Opus to clean it up and it does really well. Same for build commands and test harnesses.
59.
by cowlby 8mo ago
Welllll... I gave Opus 4.6 the repository and a sample .mono export and it nailed the file format. There's something to be said about tools and formats that are easy for human-AI end-to-end operation. ┌───────────────
60.
by cowlby 8mo ago
Alternatively, another second order effect is can't sip latte anymore because you're orchestrating 8 bots do the work and you're back to 80%-100% time saturation.

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