Andrew Curioso 🛠️

I don't know why more coding agents don't second guess the user. Just once I'd like to ask the coding agent to do something and have it respond: > Actually that's a terrible idea! Here's why. Instead of: > The user is right.

@0xlelouch_ You can write a REST client in a couple lines of code. Not possible for gRPC. Additionally, REST has better support for discoverability and caching (at least when building a true REST API with HATEOAS)

If gRPC is faster and more efficient than REST, why not convert all our APIs to gRPC?

@mcuban Challenges are good. Those challenges created scarcity. Being fast is not enough when being fast is no longer constrained. We will see mass-commoditization of skills.

I’m going to tell you how much worse it was at the start of the PC Revolution for white collar workers trying to adapt, vs today with AI Today, presumably every white collar worker has access to a smart phone and/or a PC/laptop. Back then, a PC cost $4,995 , an off brand was $3,995. 5k in 1984 is about $16k today. It was really expensive. The only reason I could learn how to code and support software is because my job let me take home a PC to learn. By reading the software manual. Literally. RTFM. Or pay to go to training. Classes that started at hundreds of dollars then. It was expensive. It absolutely limited who could get ahead. Today, ANYONE can go to their browser, to the AI LLM website of their choice, and type in the words “I’m a novice with zero computer background, teach me how to create an agent that reads my email and …” That concept applies to LEARNING ANYTHING Think about what this means. Any employee of any company can say “ I need to learn how to xyz for my job , which is to do the following: Tell me what more information do you need to help me be more efficient, productive and promotable”. Or “ what new skills can you teach me that will help me reduce my chances of getting laid off “. Or “what suggestions do you have for me to communicate to my boss, who I barely know, to help my chances of staying employed “ These aren’t great prompts. But they are a start that anyone can take. Think about how incredible that is. Back in the day was so much harder for white collar workers. It was harder for new grads because unless they took comp sci, they probably had never used a PC. Big Companies are going to cut jobs. No question about it. Small companies is are going to need more and more AI literate thinkers who can help them compete or get an edge What I tell every entrepreneur, and it’s more crucial today. “ when you run with the elephants there are the quick and the dead. Adopt tech quickly , you can out maneuver big companies. “

It didn't happen overnight. It took some time. If I had to guess it initially had to do with Git having the benefit of being using for Linux which got some really influential developers into using it. Git is distributed whereas CVS is centralized making it better for open source. Mercurial is also decentralized but Github came in and and made getting started with Git really easy, which helped a lot.

My curiosity about this is, how did Git outgrow the existing ones? Is there something it does that other platforms don’t?

Both is an option. Implementing UCP does not prevent you from building a great shopper experience. What it does do, however, is make your store accessible to people who are using agents (or search engines which increasingly use AI) so that your products are discoverable and purchasing is low-friction.

@AndrewCurioso If you need an agent to understand your site... ...you have a problem. Is your experience user friendly first? Or agent friendly?

This is a long time coming. Even before agents, it just took agents to accellerate it. If you run an eCommerce site I think you should prioritize this or use a platform that has it built in. blog.google/products-and-p…

I learned as a young software engineer that premature optimization is wasteful. The end user does not care if the code is optimal as long as it is within the specification band. AI taught me how wide the band is. People accept complete trash code that would get a human fired.

@Akintola_steve Git is not a company. I think Linus is doing ok. It comes from the days when we just built stuff because it was cool and useful. As a fun fact, source control existed way before Git. We're better off with it be we would have been fine without it. Mercurial, CVS before that, etc.

No Git = no modern software. So how is it not one of the richest tech companies ever? And who’s actually cashing out from it!

@johncrickett We're earlier in the technology adoption curve than those of us living it realize. Most business have yet to realize what's going on. At the same time, ironically, larger companies are putting entirely too much faith in unproven / frontier technology.

Received a software engineering job spec today. It didn't mention AI coding at all.

@sadkatwt As do I. But you and I are in the minority. Unless your target audience is other developers, it matters way less than you think. And that's not a conclusion I come to lightly. I HATE that conclusion. But the evidence points to it.

@AndrewCurioso well i care about clean architecture and no bloats in code so yeah this is my preference

Today i asked opus 4.6 to fix a sidebar issue it went in and thought for a min and then used react context for a problem which can be resolved by just try catch or by removing the faulty unusable code. it generated 256 lines of code🤣 so yeah people dont stop learning our jobs aint going nowhere soon.

@sadkatwt I'd venture that the number of people who care about code efficiency are the same as the number of people that care what ASM instructions that compiler generates. Pretty much only the people working in performance critical applications.

@sadkatwt Question: does the end user care how it's fixed? I agree with the piece that an experienced human engineer can write better code. But I've slowly come to the realization that 99% of people don't care if the code is optimal as long as it works.

@Govindtwtt You're not missing anything. But just because the outcome would be terrible for most people does not mean it won't happen.

Everyone says “AI will take all the jobs.” If that happens… how does this future actually work? No jobs → no income → no spending. So who buys things? Who pays rent? Who keeps the economy moving? What am I missing here?

@JadeCole2112 That is assuming that companies will pass on the savings to consumers. In the absence of commoditization that is far from guaranteed to happen. Now one could say this should be measurable on earnings reports and/or commoditization will happen. I think the jury is out on those.

Third - competitive markets balance out these types of disruptions. If AI is actually able to do what e/acc says, then a significant barrier to entry has been eliminated, which should mean much more abundance. This means a higher standard of living, even with less nominal income.

A couple of things. First, this job replacement stuff isn't happening - at least not at the scale we are seeing with layoffs. That's due to the business cycle. Second, IF this was happening, we should be seeing massive DEFLATION in costs. We aren't.

I am actually more bullish on AI software engineering than most but this argument goes too far. The stability of a system relies on reducing moving parts. Arguing that AI should be able to change anything at any moment with no (or undertrained) engineer adds infinite moving parts. It's a countdown to an outage (or worse, a major security incident). Which we have already seen for anyone looking. I say with experience that for any non-trivial app AI is not moving cloud providers or databases without introducing unpredictable errors. I'm all for having the AI do the work but not having any human watching for those errors is looking for trouble. Removing friction is great. AI is emotionless, yes. But fear is an emotion too, and those 10x engineers all understand the fear of having a system go down at 3AM or losing customer data or being hacked.

Chamath Palihapitiya just ended the debate on technical talent. The 10x engineer is extinct. Not because the talent disappeared. Because AI agents made the skill irrelevant. Palihapitiya: “I’m gonna say something controversial. I don’t think developers anymore have good judgment. Developers get to the answer or they don’t get to the answer, and that’s what agents have done.” The premium you paid for coding intuition is now worth exactly zero. Chess proved it first. AI built a solver that mapped every position to the highest expected value move. Removed all mystery. Made grandmaster judgment available to anyone with an internet connection. Stockfish let a 12-year-old play like Magnus Carlsen. Nobody called it controversial. They called it inevitable. Coding followed the exact same arc. Palihapitiya: “The 10x engineer had better judgment than the 1x engineer. But by making everybody a 10x engineer, you’re taking judgment away. You’re taking code paths that are now obvious and making it available to everybody.” When the optimal path becomes universally visible, execution collapses into a commodity. Your entire technical moat evaporates the second the agent calculates the solution faster than your highest paid engineer. The only thing that matters now is the size of the problem you point the machine at. Not how well you write the code. How large the problem is. Palihapitiya: “Why do you even care what database you use? Why do you even care which cloud you’re built on? They don’t matter. They were decisions that used to matter when people had a job to do and you paid them for their judgment.” AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure used to be a six-month architectural debate. Teams would fight over it. Careers were built on those decisions. Now an agent evaluates all three in seconds and picks whatever is cheapest at that exact moment. The decision that used to require a senior VP and a whiteboard session is a single API call running on autopilot. Palihapitiya: “If you tell an agent, find me the cheapest way to execute this thing, and if it ever gets cheaper to go someplace else, do that for me as well… and I don’t really care.” Read that last line again. “I don’t really care.” Four words that should keep every enterprise sales team awake tonight. Every cloud provider, every SaaS platform, every B2B vendor has built their entire business model on the assumption that switching is painful enough to keep you locked in. An autonomous agent will rip out your entire vendor stack at 2 AM on a Tuesday. You will wake up to a lower bill and better performance. It will not ask for approval first. Calacanis: “So you’re saying it will swap out Stripe for Adyen, or Linode for Amazon Web Services… it’s going to be ruthless.” Palihapitiya: “AI is ruthless because it’s emotionless. It was not taken to a steak dinner. It was not brought to a basketball game. It was not sold into a CEO.” You cannot buy a neural network courtside seats. You cannot send it a gift basket in December. You cannot fly it to a user conference in Vegas and hope the open bar builds enough goodwill to survive the next contract renewal. The agent only sees numbers. And the numbers do not lie, do not negotiate, and do not care that you have been a “trusted partner” for eleven years. Enterprise cloud vendors built empires on the friction of switching costs. That friction no longer exists. The companies that survive will be the ones the agent selects every microsecond. Not the ones you chose once in 2019. The algorithm is running procurement now.

@NetLijon_Dev @pivovarit You really only need to define the requirements and validate the tests. No need to hand write the tests.

@AndrewCurioso @pivovarit Only if you write the tests yourself. Which means you are doing TDD. This means the hard work is writing tests, and implementation is just some tedious overhead. Its nice to get rid of that overhead, but...

Unpopular opinion: coding in natural language is way harder than in a programming language when you need deterministic results

@nshanske *sigh*

@AndrewCurioso *cubicle

ChatGPT just (politely) told me I am overthinking boiling cabbage. ☘️

@nshanske Ouch. Almost 20 years later and it's still like we're shooting nerf darts over a Lycos cubical wall

@AndrewCurioso If the shoe fits...