Steve Robinson

Just upgraded reluctantly to iOS 26 and it’s rubbish as expected. However the new Slack app experience was quite refreshing. I’m starting to see how this Liquid Glass concept can be applied well.

literally anyone can ship quickly if they sacrifice reliability. it’s not in any way impressive.

What enterprise AI acceleration looks like

@yuris build speed going up is obvious. what's less obvious is whether judgment is keeping pace. shipping faster means more decisions per week, and if the decision quality doesn't scale with the velocity, you're just accumulating mistakes faster.

AI is making CEOs delusional

@_svs_ We spent six decades refining and improving precise languages that can absorb the gap between imprecise human behaviour to precise machine behaviour. And now we suddenly find ourselves sitting on top of imprecise machine behaviour.

Agents are knowledge abstractions.

I am a diplomatic aide in the Sultanate of Oman's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My job is logistics. When two countries that cannot speak to each other need to speak to each other, I book the rooms. I prepare the briefing materials. I make sure the water glasses are the right distance apart. You would be surprised how much of diplomacy is water glasses. Too close and it feels informal. Too far and it feels like a tribunal. I have a chart. We had a very good month. Since January, Oman has been mediating indirect talks between the United States and Iran on Iran's nuclear program. The talks were held in Muscat and in Geneva. The Americans would sit in one room. The Iranians would sit in another room. I would walk between them. My Fitbit says I averaged fourteen thousand steps on negotiation days. The hallway between the two rooms at the Royal Opera House conference center is forty-seven meters. I walked it two hundred and twelve times in February. This is good for my cardiovascular health. It was less good for my knees. Both are in the service of peace. By mid-February, we had something. Iran agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium. Not reduced stockpiling. Zero. They agreed to down-blend existing stockpiles to the lowest possible level. They agreed to convert them into irreversible fuel. They agreed to full IAEA verification with potential US inspector access. They agreed, in the Foreign Minister's phrase, to "never, ever" possess nuclear material for a bomb. I have worked in diplomacy for seven years. I have never seen a country agree to this many things this quickly. I made a spreadsheet of the concessions. It had fourteen rows. I color-coded it. Green for confirmed. Yellow for pending. By February 21 the spreadsheet was entirely green. I printed it. It is on my desk in Muscat. It is still green. That phrase took eleven days. "Never, ever." The Iranians initially offered "not seek to." The Americans wanted "will not under any circumstances." We landed on "never, ever" at 2:14 AM on a Tuesday in Muscat. I typed the final version myself. I used Times New Roman because Geneva prefers it. The document was fourteen pages. I was proud of every comma. Here is what they said, in the order they said it. February 24: "We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity." — The Foreign Minister, private briefing to Gulf Cooperation Council ambassadors. I prepared the slide deck. Slide 14 was the implementation timeline. Slide 15 was the signing ceremony logistics. I had reserved the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Room XX. It seats four hundred. We discussed pen brands for the signing. The Iranians preferred Montblanc. The Americans had no preference. I ordered twelve Montblanc Meisterstucks at six hundred and thirty dollars each. They arrive on Tuesday. February 27, 8:30 AM EST: "The deal is within our reach." — The Foreign Minister, CBS Face the Nation. He sat across from Margaret Brennan. He said broad political terms could be agreed "tomorrow" with ninety days for technical implementation in Vienna. He said, and I wrote this line for the briefing card he carried in his breast pocket: "If we just allow diplomacy the space it needs." He praised the American envoys by name. Steve Witkoff. Jared Kushner. He said both had been constructive. I watched from the Four Seasons Georgetown. The minibar had cashews. I ate the cashews. They were nineteen dollars. The most expensive cashew I have ever eaten. But it was a good morning and we were within our reach. February 27, 2:00 PM EST: Meeting with Vice President Vance, Washington. The Foreign Minister presented our progress. Zero stockpiling. Full verification. Irreversible conversion. "Never, ever." The Vice President used the word "encouraging." His aide took notes on an iPad. The aide did not make eye contact for the last nine minutes of the meeting. I noticed this. Noticing things is the only part of my job that is not water glasses. February 27, 4:00 PM EST: "Not happy with the pace." — President Trump, to reporters. Not happy with the pace. We had achieved zero stockpiling. Full IAEA verification. Irreversible fuel conversion. Inspector access. And the phrase "never, ever," which took eleven days and cost me two hundred and twelve trips down a forty-seven-meter hallway. Every American president since Carter has failed to get Iran to agree to this. Forty-five years. Not happy with the pace. February 27, 9:47 PM EST: The Foreign Minister's flight departs Dulles for Muscat. I am in the seat behind him. He is reviewing Slide 14 on his laptop. The implementation timeline. Vienna technical sessions. The signing ceremony. The pens. I fall asleep over the Atlantic. I dream about water glasses. February 28, 6:00 AM GST: I wake up to push notifications. February 28: "The United States has begun major combat operations in Iran." — President Trump. Operation Epic Fury. Coordinated airstrikes. The United States and Israel. Tehran. Isfahan. Qom. Karaj. Kermanshah. Nuclear facilities. IRGC bases. Sites near the Supreme Leader's office. Israel called their half Operation Roaring Lion. Someone in both governments spent time choosing these names. Epic Fury. Roaring Lion. I spent eleven days on "never, ever." They spent it on branding. The President said Iran had "rejected American calls to halt its nuclear weapons production." Rejected. Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling. Iran had agreed to full verification. Iran had agreed to "never, ever." Iran had agreed to everything in a fourteen-page document that I typed in Times New Roman. The President said they rejected it. I do not know which document the President was reading. I know which one I typed. February 28, 18:45 UTC: Iran internet connectivity: four percent. — NetBlocks, confirmed by Cloudflare. Ninety-six percent of a country went dark. You cannot negotiate with a country at four percent connectivity. You cannot negotiate with a country that is being struck. You cannot negotiate. This is not a political opinion. This is a logistics assessment. February 28: The governor of Minab reported forty girls killed at an elementary school. I do not have logistics for that. There is no slide for that. The water glass chart does not cover that. February 28: Lockheed Martin: up. Northrop Grumman: up. RTX: up. Dow futures: down six hundred and twenty-two points. Gold: five thousand two hundred and ninety-six dollars. An analyst at AInvest published a note titled "Iran Strikes: Tactical Plays." The note recommended positions in oil, defense stocks, and gold. The most expensive cashew I have ever eaten was nineteen dollars. The most expensive pen I have ever ordered was six hundred and thirty dollars. The math suggests I have been working in the wrong industry. Defense stocks do not require water glasses. Defense stocks do not require eleven days. Defense stocks require one morning. February 28: Israel closed its airspace and its schools. Iran launched retaliatory missiles toward US bases in the Gulf. The Supreme Leader promised a "crushing response." Israel's defense minister declared a permanent state of emergency. Everyone is using words I recognize in an order I do not. I recognize "permanent." I recognize "emergency." I do not recognize them next to each other. In diplomacy, nothing is permanent and everything is an emergency. In war it is the reverse. February 28: The Foreign Minister has not made a public statement. The briefing card is still in his breast pocket. It still says "within our reach."

Very little about software engineering has changed over past last three months. A great deal has changed about coding, not unlike when we saw the rise of high order programming languages and compilers, the difference today being that the number of developers is far larger and distribution channels are such that the velocity and breadth of change is far greater. The entire history of software engineering is one of raising the level of abstraction.

The "distributed systems" dream usually survives exactly until your first 3:00 AM on-call shift dealing with a network partition or a race condition that only triggers on Tuesdays. We all start our careers wanting to build Google-scale infrastructure, but we eventually realize that complexity is a debt with a high interest rate.

@GergelyOrosz Most idiotic part of it. Yeah vibe code DoorDash/uber iOS app and then magically orders are being sent to kitchens / drivers around world when someone uses the iOS app.

everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code here's what things actually look like - your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping - majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life - they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend - the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon - even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real - your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills

🥹🥹

If you are a software engineer "experiencing some degree of mental health crisis", now hear this, because I've been coding for 50 years since the days of punched cards and I have a salutary kick in your ass to deliver. Get over yourself. Every previous "programming is obsolete" panic has been a bust, and this one's going to be too. The fundamental problem of mismatch between the intentions in human minds and the specifications that a computer can interpret hasn't gone away just because now you can do a lot of your programming in natural language to an LLM. Systems are still complicated. This shit is still difficult. The need for people who specialize in bridging that gap isn't going to go away. As usual, the answer is: upskill yourself and adapt. If a crusty old fart like me can do it, you can too.

@vysakh0 For the Ralph loop like workflow, would we tell Claude to clear context after finishing each task? Did that work?

Claude Code has a feature now in plan mode that lets you clear context and continue the plan. This alone cuts the need of Ralph like use cases for majority of the situation.

If Xi Jinping invaded Taiwan right now, and toppled the president there, on what grounds would the United States object? Or have any credibility to say anything?

This illustrates an aspect of AI that I hadn't thought about till now: it cuts through bureaucracy. If a big organization is paralyzed by indecision, AI doesn't care. It will happily generate a version 1. And that becomes the starting point, because there is no other version 1.

7/ I use slash commands for every "inner loop" workflow that I end up doing many times a day. This saves me from repeated prompting, and makes it so Claude can use these workflows, too. Commands are checked into git and live in .claude/commands/. For example, Claude and I use a /commit-push-pr slash command dozens of times every day. The command uses inline bash to pre-compute git status and a few other pieces of info to make the command run quickly and avoid back-and-forth with the model (#bash-command-execution" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">code.claude.com/docs/en/slash-…)

Exactly this. I am OK delegating writing the code to an LLM because I know what I want, how I want it, and can tell when it’s wrong. I have the structure in my head! As @Grady_Booch puts it: “The entire history of software engineering is one of rising levels of abstraction.”

Hard to kill 🙂‍↕️

Ummm not quite. Enterprise still thinks they need to adopt GraphQL to feel hip & modern 😅