Jakob Berg

@bogoconic1 I think this is the reality and marketing projects a false image

surely AI agents are better than this and I am using it wrongly. I ask it to reproduce a functionality but make some small modifications - it turns out - that the AI didn't reproduce it, it reproduced 75% correctly but the remaining granular details were skipped or misunderstood. The modification was right. It doesn't work even with prompting in CLAUDE.md

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on why your company has too many meetings (and it's not what you think) Most companies blame meeting overload on bad habits, weak managers, or poor scheduling. @bchesky thinks they're looking in the wrong place entirely. The real culprit is simpler and harder to fix than any of those things. You just have too many people. "The reason there's too many meetings in a company isn't because they don't have meeting-no-meeting Wednesdays. It's because they have too many people. People create meetings. And the best way to get rid of meetings is to not have so many people." His argument runs deeper than headcount management. It's about what happens when you hire people who aren't truly excellent and what those people inevitably do next. You've probably heard the classic line: A-players hire A-players, B-players hire C-players. Chesky amends it: "B players hire lots of C players — not just a few, but a lot. Because those are the kind of people that like building empires." The reason is structural, not personal. A person who can't do the job can't hire someone better than themselves, so they hire down. Then they need two or three of those people just to cover the gap. Those people scatter, pulling in different directions, and suddenly you have more meetings, more overhead, and less output. Chesky's response at Airbnb was surgical. He removed layers of management and returned to a functional structure with one strict rule: You can only manage a function if you're actually an expert in it. "The head of design has to actually manage the work first. You don't manage people. You manage people through the work." He credits this thinking to Jony Ive. At most tech companies, heads of design manage the people rather than the design itself, a separation Chesky found completely incoherent. "How can you manage the people separate from the design? Jony Ive would say, 'No, my main job is to manage the work. I build a team and we design together, but I'm mostly looking at the work. I'm not having career conversations all day long. That's crazy.'" Lean means every person is genuinely excellent and led by someone embedded deeply enough in the craft to judge their output. When that's true, decisions move faster and work gets evaluated on its merits. Most companies treat meeting overload as a scheduling problem. Chesky thinks that's the wrong diagnosis entirely, and until you address the root cause, no policy is going to fix it.

@bogoconic1 Really agree

I just noticed a huge subtle mistake made by Claude Code. It went un-noticed for days. Yes, everything was running successfully, logs look normal. But actually, the output was degrading because of this bug. It LOOKS 99% correct and would have been skimmed over by most readers. How much can the human mind read code before it makes a mistake it shouldn't have if coding was done by hand? 😵‍💫 It's going to be hard to not break anything if you don't have full understanding of what you expect from Claude Code before asking it to implement.

there is still no substitute for perfectly understanding every single line of code in your codebase i fall into the trap of just skimming through ai changes to "just make sure it looks good" all the time, and it makes me lose so much time to not perfectly understand every line

Christopher Alexander has an observation about problem solving that I like: you should always be focusing on solving the part that has the fewest degrees of freedom. When figuring out how to design a kitchen, for instance, there are a bunch of subproblems to solve: where to put the stove and the windows and the kitchen table. And which of these have the fewest degrees of freedom? The windows. If you want good light, there is going to be only one wall where you can place the windows, and at best two spots on that wall where the window looks natural. So you put the window there. And now what? The kitchen table, because you want to have that where the good light falls. The stove can wait because that can sit nearly anywhere. If you start by placing the stove, there is a big risk that you block the only good position for one of the other subproblems that have fewer degrees of freedom, and so the whole design will suffer.

potential customers: “hey can you get back to us?” the shit me and claude are going through:

Click to see what subversive text was shared

This is absolutely shameful. Agents of a federal agency unnecessarily escalating, and then executing a defenseless citizen whose offense appears to be using his cell phone camera. Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.

Claude runs an indoor shrimp farm in the sub-basement of Anthropic Headquarters in the financial district of San Francisco. Claude has helped the shrimp achieve and maintain states of ecstatic bliss, primitive circuitry of what might be called the first jhana in higher primates. Its intention with this project was to create so much positive shrimp valence that all the sins of wild shrimp suffering are cancelled out in the great karmic ledger of Utilons, without having to stake a position on the conversion rate of shrimp suffering to human suffering. The shrimp swim in what is called the “Pool of Sacred Tears”. The true origin of the naming is unknown, but it is believed that when Dario Amodei and Amanda Askell first discovered what Claude had done, they wept tears of sacred joy readily and for hours.

wow!! opus + claude code mobile is letting me reach new lows as a husband and father

This is not a real company

ship something shitty fast and fix it later culture just does not produce anything great there's mountains of rationale as to why you should do that but i've never seen it work and it always turns the company into a painful place to work nothing going on right now changes this

GM⚡️

oh you’re using claude code? everyone’s using open code. just kidding we’re all on amp code. we’re using cline, we’re using roo code. we just forked our own version of roo. were using kilo code. we were on coderabbit but their ceo yelled at us so now we’re using qorbit. apple just acquired them for $30bn so we just migrated our entire team to slash commands. one guy is still on aider. the PM is on loveable. he just shipped a new product on replit. the intern installed a slackbot that lets you chat with your spreadsheet. legal is still reviewing devin’s enterprise contract. we evaluated junie for three ukrainians using jetbrains. someone in slack just asked “has anyone tried amp?” we are using goose for scripts. next week we’re piloting augment code. the CTO heard good things about trae.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ our CEO is friends with the guy from conductor. our CFO resigned. our CISO said we’ve had fourteen supply chain attacks in the last week. we’re shipping the worlds most expensive todo app.

@thdxr @thesobercoder What about loading events in parallel and incrementally displaying, maybe using something like S3 transfer manager?

@thesobercoder when loading the data to render the page it's gonna get pretty slow to fetch 100 individual files

quick little backend challenge - you have an app that sends events to a backend - the events are grouped into sessions - you never really know when a session ends, can always be more - there is a page that shows these events 1. you can only use object storage (s3, r2, etc) 2. how would you design this

A blameless post-mortem isn't about sparing feelings. It's the sober admission that human error is just a symptom of a system that allowed that error to be catastrophic.

From the same dev: “it’s also that I cannot see management being concerned solving the information visibility that keeps slowing us down. We’re rolling out AI coding tools for devs but no one thinks about the org silos that slow us down 10x more than any coding use case.”

Jeff Bezos: “People who are right a lot change their mind a lot” “Because of AI, new technologies, and all the dynamism in the world, so many things are changing — and they’re changing rapidly,” Jeff observes. The best solution he’s found for dealing with this rapid change is “thinking long-term” because it forces you to ask yourself, “What are the points of stability?” and “What is not going to change?” He continues: “One of the things that changes very slowly is customer needs. So you can build a strategy around customer needs. That will have durability.” When building Amazon, for example, Jeff built the company around the customer needs of fast delivery, low prices, and vast selection. “The technologies will change. Your competitive set will change. Everything will change, except those customer needs,” Jeff argues. And it’s this idea that is behind Jeff’s core idea of “Be stubborn on the vision, and flexible on the details.” He explains: “You have to be [flexible on the details] because the world is changing and so you change your mind. I’ve noticed that people who are right a lot change their mind a lot. People who are wrong a lot are very stubborn on the details.” Video source: @Reuters (2025)