Probably closer to the Walmart / Amazon model where it's the arbiter of shelf space, and proceed to create their own alternatives (Great Value, Amazon Brand) once they see what features people want from their various SaaS.
> That’s an indicator code quality doesn’t matter at macro scales.
I think it can though. It just depends. Having high quality code and making good technical choices can matter in many ways. From improving performance (massively) and correctness, to attracting great talent. Jane Street and WhatsApp come to mind, maybe Discord too. Just like great design will attract great designers.
I also think it might matter even more in the age of AI Agents. Most of my time now is spent reviewing code instead of writing code, and that makes me a huge bottleneck. So the best way to optimize is to make the code more readable and having good automated checks to reduce the amount of work I need to do, like static types, no nulls, compilation, automated tests, secondary agent reviews, etc.
The paypal mafia are all about stories. They can attract talent and investor money with those stories, but they are just tall tales full of hype, and people are catching on (ok that last bit might be a hopium).
CLAUDE.md in my projects only has coding / architecture guidelines. Here's what not to do. Here's what you should do. Here are my preferences. Here's where the important things are.
Even though my CLAUDE.md is small though, often my rules are ignored. Not always though, so it's still at least somewhat useful!
What's the hook for switching out of plan? I'd like to be launch a planning skill whenever claude writes a plan but it never picks up the skill, and I haven't found a hook that can force it to.
man that’s what I’m trying to build the whole time, but I keep getting json parsing errors. I’ve debugged a lot, but it seems their haiku is not consistent with the actual output. I want a hook that tells them at the end make sure you’ve built and run the relevant tests. Let me know if you need anything else.
Anecdotal, but I've been locked to Sonnet for the past 6-8 months just because they always seem to introduce throttling bugs with Opus where it starts to devour tokens or falls over. Very interested once open models close the gap to about 6 months.
100% agree, and I think that's sort of what was intended with a lot of democratic government setups. What we fail to realize though (or maybe just remember) is that these systems will ALWAYS be under attack by those who want more power always looking for attack surfaces. (We seem to be under attack by almost all, if not all, current billionaires!)
For example in the US, the executive order is a massive problem. Citizens united as well. And for all democracies the natural appeal of strongman politics is a huge problem.
Every attempt at government overreach really needs to be questioned. I don't say rejected, just questioned. How will it be used by future powers? Is the tradeoff worth it? Can it be temporary? Do we even have a way to claw it back if it turns out to be detrimental? Is it too subtle and nuanced that the majority will miss seeing it? etc.
> these systems will ALWAYS be under attack by those who want more power
I think this is an inherent human problem that prevents us from overcoming it... history has proven that the more equal everyone is, and the less individual ownership they have, the lazier and more bored they get.
Look at the previous attempts at socialism... people stop caring when there's no goal to work towards, they can't all be doing the same thing and just be happy, because humans are naturally competitive. We desire things other people don't have, like possessions, money, or power.
People don't become "lazy". They're lazy from the beginning. Laziness is something they overcome for personal gain. And if the system promises fewer personal gains for overcoming laziness, then why bother?
But of course success is relative to some cultural values. We could just as well wonder about success and failure in implementation of any political system.
The most remarkable trait of humans is cognitive plasticity, so determining any natural tendency that would be more inate than acquired is just a game of pretending there are hypothetical humans living out of any cultural influence that would still exhibit predominent behavioral traits.
Competition is a social construct. There are people out there whose biggest concern is keeping focus on enjoying what they are, freeing their attention from the illusion of possession, avoiding any financial/material bounds they can and staying away of contingent hierarchical servitudes.
They are also many people who holds desires for both of these perspectives, or any interpolation/extrapolation that they can suggest.
We aren’t inherently competitive, we just want nice things. It takes a very special mindset to want others to have less, and society should actively discourage such lines of thought by countering them with examples of how things never end well.
This said, I wasn’t suggesting socialism or equality or anything like that - only minimizing long-term unhappiness. That’s the only thing that I could not think an argument against - like why would anyone rational ever want others to be long-term unhappy?
Is there a way to accept but also limit greed that is reliable and durable?
Like a pragmatic meritocracy. We accept that there will be cheaters, and we won't catch or stop them all, but we have some hard limits. Do we care if you stop working so hard once you hit $1b? Maybe we'd even prefer that you did stop working (against societies interest!)?
This wouldn't even remotely resemble the communism bugaboo. It's basically saying, yes greed can be good, but at some point it gets ridiculous.
Except it's very easy to "sell" government overreach. Whenever a plane flies into a tower, or flu season is extra scary, people will clamor for strict government authority. With every such event, the government gains capabilities and tendencies that always end up with a few people having outsized power over the masses.
Yes, but I don't think it's so straightforward. I think there are bad actors marketing this overreach. Like the surveillance industry for the Patriot Act (tech, defence, telcom, maybe compliance vendors?). I don't think their goal is to create a distopia, but we should always be looking at incentives for large government programs.
> But it's also likely that these tools will produce mountains of unmaintainable code and people will get buried by the technical debt.
It's not just likely, but it's guaranteed to happen if you're not keeping an eye on it. So much so, that it's really reinforced my existing prejudice towards typed and compiled languages to reduce some of the checking you need to do.
Using an agent with a dynamic language feels very YOLO to me. I guess you can somewhat compensate with reams of tests though. (which begs the question, is the dynamic language still saving you time?)
You can (and probably should) still do tests, but there's an entire class of errors you know can't happen, so you need far less tests, focusing only on business logic for the most part.
Static type checking is even faster than running the code. It doesn't catch everything, but if finding a type error in a fast test is good, then finding it before running any tests seems like it would be even better.
I still do this, but when I'm reviewing what's been written and / or testing what's been built.
How I see it is we've reverted back to a heavier spec type approach, however the turn around time is so fast with agents that it still can feel very iterative simply because the cost of bailing on an approach is so minimal. I treat the spec (and tests when applicable) as the real work now. I front load as much as I can into the spec, but I also iterate constantly. I often completely bail on a feature or the overall approach to a feature as I discover (with the agent) that I'm just not happy with the gotchas that come to light.
AI agents to me are a tool. An accelerator. I think there are people who've figured out a more vibey approach that works for them, but for now at least, my approach is to review and think about everything we're producing, which forms my thoughts as we go.
An obvious one will be tax software.
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