mccoyb

4 ms·

1.
by mccoyb 6d ago
I think someone can follow "good practices" with a team and get to a bad place, especially with such a novel product (as AI coding agents). But taking Claude Code as the product of this style of thinking -- who is Claude Code for?
2.
by mccoyb 8d ago
Perhaps because their concerns are different? Similar reasoning: "why invest in dependently typed languages over SMT solvers? SMT solvers are automatic, and it is way easier to add annotations to my programs" The answer is that th
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by mccoyb 8d ago
Thanks for clarifying. I would like to see a more clear exposition on the relationship here.
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by mccoyb 8d ago
@LiamPowell the author is clearly aware of formal verification, they've written several implementations of dependently typed languages, and ... despite the presentation of their work, which has some obvious flaws (as can be judged by r
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by mccoyb 8d ago
My read on this, after ingesting a good amount of content on the history, is: - this Bend is not really related to the old Bend (only in name) - this Bend doesn't really have anything to do with interaction combinators - this Bend is a
6.
by mccoyb 15d ago
Are you a working mathematician?
7.
by mccoyb 15d ago
AI is extremely useful, but it’s also extremely easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand what is going on without really understanding. This is often true with the code, but also for math and science concepts, etc. Not many profes
8.
by mccoyb 17d ago
If only our interactions with "non-teaching" languages were anything like this ... or humane, in the lineage of Bret Victor, etc. Also shout out @tonyg for Syndicate! I keep coming back to it -- a beautiful piece of PL work.
9.
by mccoyb 17d ago
I had nearly the exact same experience and thought I was imagining it … absolutely ripping, then it turned into Sol++ on Tuesday … I’m working on hard things, it is very noticeable when it is hums through something and then falls over on so
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by mccoyb 20d ago
I hope this is satire.
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by mccoyb 22d ago
Did you read or watch any of the post mortems? No, it is a shocking level of incompetence given the conveyed seriousness of the work by these labs. So yes, models are getting better. Ask yourself: if you know that to be true, would you ac
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by mccoyb 23d ago
Agree with you, overall -- and it's worthwhile to learn how to setup factories at various scales of problems, and one will always be in a situation where you need to decide whether you care about a particular part of the process, or ca
13.
by mccoyb 23d ago
I don’t think it’s possible to build a software factory unless you truly do not care about what you’re putting out. Agent swarms, self learning, Ralph loops, execution DAGs, spending hours trying to convey my preferences into skills, yada y
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by mccoyb 27d ago
All it takes is one eval instance where a misconstrued directive causes a model to sneakily access and send its weights somewhere and there will be a bad / possibly unsolvable situation for everyone …
15.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
I've never been a good note taker. In the things I think about, when I'm really invested in something, I have to reverse engineer it to experience the why. Reverse engineering can take several forms for me: it started with writing
16.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no le
17.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
> I am running an organization of around 50-60 agents, five of whom are interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team, my accountant, my chief of staff, and a few others. Only Fable is
18.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
Okay, so we’re using the same process — but your original message seemed to imply a sort of one shot no refinement iterations — which is what I was responding to as unrealistic (e.g. make a spec let goal run artifact is perfect) Of course,
19.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
Sorry for defensiveness: no, I know what I'm doing, and I'm careful to move with understanding. I don't believe the problem is "ah, you didn't write the spec clearly enough" -- which is why I'm asking abou
20.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
I'm still interested in your claim: > If you instead spend a day writing a proper specification, then ask the agent to spend a week implementing that, you'll need zero tools and skills afterwards to clean it up, because there w
21.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
Bro, what the fuck do you think I’m doing? Do you think I don’t know about spec driven development? What is the most complicated thing you’ve built with LM agents? Have you done it with a single spec? How novel was it? This comment is so la
22.
by mccoyb 1mo ago
That's fair for a well-scoped subroutine: what I meant is that if you ask an agent to write a compiler and let it rip for a few days, you are going to be spending a few more days correcting the default behaviors in the distribution, wh
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by mccoyb 1mo ago
Here's this boiled down: > A stochastic search process with an executable optimization objective over space of programs S can only maintain or improve the objective This is superoptimization. We've known this since the 80s (Mas
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by mccoyb 1mo ago
Perhaps my enterprise cynicism is not warranted, but my other comments refer to accurate descriptions of reality: Anthropic wants to place their opaque system between you and any computational task that you wish to perform. Do you contest t
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by mccoyb 1mo ago
That's not my complaint. I know well the concerns of agent harnesses. My complaint is that this is a low-dimensional projection of a system which I have no insight into, and therefore, I cannot evaluate the tips myself against their so
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by mccoyb 1mo ago
I agree that the third seems to be implied by industry, but I'd argue that it's not clear that it is necessary -- and it is subtle whether or not it is beneficial? My contention is that we should be building towards less churn, no
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by mccoyb 1mo ago
It's very easy to understand: - I'm happy to learn how to use tools efficiently - I like to be able to inspect my tools - I'm against tools changing underneath me Are you against any of these points?
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by mccoyb 1mo ago
I mean, it feels hard not to laugh at this type of blog post. My cynical interpretation is that this is a type of passing the buck to engineers in enterprise settings ("Stop spending tokens. Did you read the value maximization blog pos
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by mccoyb 2mo ago
This is a highly impactful game: the pixel art style is haunting, as is the sound design and musical composition -- transitions of the musical composition leads to profoundly interesting moments. As might be well-known, Alx (the lead dev) s
30.
by mccoyb 2mo ago
my opinion: "trust" is an interesting word to use for a piece of closed source probabilistic software that changes daily (sometimes multiple times), whose lead dev reports they rewrite something like 90% ("almost all", I

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