Vincent Murphy
996 posts
Banger of a piece, from start to finish. 🔥
"We have handed agents the codebase, the tests, the docs, the specs, the commit history."
"We haven't handed them the one artifact that actually survived — the record of what users have been asking the system to do, every day, for years."
"Until agents can read that layer — not as log lines, but as behavioral contracts, as the accumulated promise a system has made to the people who depend on it —harness engineering in brownfield and blackfield will remain a human problem with an AI assistant bolted on."
linkedin.com/pulse/producti…
English
A few days ago, I mentioned an old talk by @gregyoung about being able to just delete code whenever you want. It's still profound even after all these years, and I highly recommend watching "The Art of Destroying Software".
Which is exactly why I'm really bullish on ralph and/or whatever @GeoffreyHuntley is working on next. Having just watched @ThePrimeagen put it in (way too many) words: AI lets me quickly build things I would never have normally built... and throw them away later!
We are living in the future and this is just the beginning.
youtube.com/watch?v=gRi82P…
YouTube
English
@swyx "instead of logs, write to sqlite whatever you will want to query as eval"
English
probably the single most helpful vibe coding tip i can offer that i havent seen anyone talk about yet:
in development, log ~every execution step out with the idea of helping your LLM debug its own code
help your LLM help you. one upfront intentional investment in logging, then you just copy paste bugs and execution traces to modify (even dynamically linked runtime) behavior with high certainty that the LLM will "get" what you need.
English
I’d rather be stranded on the side of the highway in my old broken Benz than be seen driving in public in a perfectly reliable, comfortable, brand new Kia.
Bella B@mrsbellabankss
Getting an old ass Benz just to say you have one really kills me. Baby get a Kia it’s okay
English
i find claude code, codex cli & gemini cli really annoying
makes no sense to make a fullscreen React app in terminal that hides inputs/outputs when they fill available space
these tools should be scrolling stdin/stdout tools that feed other UI wrappers that control them
English
Terraform is still the best. But I'd like to see someone replace it. The major alternatives aren't interesting to me cause they're too iterative and copycat. I want to see fundamentally new ideas take hold. IaC feels stagnant.
Adam Dingman@adam_dingman
@mitchellh If YOU had to build in the cloud today, would you pick up Terraform or something else?
English
coding agents need sandboxes where they can roam freely within. in there, they can access the terminal
all their behavior should be terminal commands, NOT json function calls
every single tool available to the AI should be directly callable by a human in the SAME way.
everything from grepping, to merging described changes into a file, to running tests, to installing dependencies, to putting DB tables into context, to scraping websites, EVERY SINGLE PIECE needs to be a stdin/stdout shell command with args
the AI, instead of MCP or whatever, should be given a man page of all available cli commands, and so the human can also run these directly from the terminal
this way the AI and human can share the terminal in a collaborative way as well. all sync/async behavior is also directly emergent as a result of forking processes from your shell.
additionally, this needs to happen in a virtualized and snapshotted OS environment so AI can try things without asking for permission like a baby and stop nagging the human to get things done. when problems occur you can simply revert to snapshot. the virtualized OS should have the app dev env running with app changes immediately available to the user (or ai) to test
anyways long story short i think im gonna do this because i've had ENOUGH with people's closed wall app environments where the best pieces can't be mixed and matched
English
AI coding tooling & coding agents being packaged into products (and even worse, cloud products) is the wrong path
tool use from MCP/JSON also wrong path
using unix tooling, and BUILDING unix tooling is the CORRECT path (and no that doesn't mean cli GUIs)
let me explain:
English
"Perhaps paradoxically, the success of UNIX is largely due to the fact that it was not designed to meet any predefined objectives. …
Our goals throughout the effort … have always concerned themselves with building a comfortable relationship with the machine"
—Ritchie & Thompson
English
This originally Japanese invention for single pour-over coffee is popular all over Asia. Has anyone seen them on the West? Or are we condemned to espresso here?
English
@levelsio ruckus unleashed from ebay connected by invisible optical fiber
aliexpress.com/item/100500531…
English
I got this Deco WiFi mesh set up for the house
It works for a few days then randomly shit just starts cutting out and goes down
Is it a shit product? Or what do I do?
3 concrete floors and need WiFi everywhere, I guess wiring the mesh extenders w/ LAN is the only way? Now they extend the mesh WiFi signal through the house by extender to extender
English
Final conversion of searchcode.com to SQLite... I think I might need to apply some compression. Anyone done so using something like github.com/phiresky/sqlit… or such?
English
@btaylor Random question , how do you access your old blog posts on your site ?
English
What ideas are we missing to enable software development to be truly autonomous? backchannel.org/blog/autonomou…
English
I'm increasingly interested in making 'bespoke CAD tools for makers'. I love #clojure for this sort of thing, but wonder if there are other companies, tools, people that are already doing this exact thing that I can learn from or connect with?
English
@HenrikMolgard @stevenbjohnson +1, slider for how many times to say "that's wild" defaulted to never
English
@stevenbjohnson What I would really love to have is sliders for:
Seriousness
Interruptions by the hosts
Number of "Uhuhs" and "Ahas"
The expert level of the hosts. Are they explaining the Neuroscience text to a Neuroscientist or a five year old.
Freestyling - Sticking to sources or going rouge
English
New feature now live at NotebookLM.google.com: "Convert notes to source."
• Focus the AI on your sources and notes at the same time
• Follow inline citations directly to relevant passages from your notes
• Generate Audio Overviews based on your notes
You'll see this feature at the top of the screen in an open notebook, right next to "Add note." By default it will give you the option to convert all of your notes into a single source. But you can also select notes manually and convert them to a source as well. Whichever option you choose, it will combine your notes into a single source, with each note separated by a divider, and it will give the source a name like "All notes 10/18/24."
It's also an easy way to back up all your notes -- just select all the text in your "All notes" source and paste into an another app. FYI, any notes that you have converted to a source will not auto-update if you change the original note text. (I have basically gotten into the routine of combining all my notes into a source once a week, and then deleting the earlier compilation.)
The previous mechanism for focusing the AI on your notes (by selecting notes and then using the chat) may continue to work for the next few weeks, but we are going to stop supporting that approach soon when we roll out some exciting new UI elements. More soon on that front...
English
Ooh man, bummed to hear Equinix Metal is shutting down. I loved the original Packet service and later the @equinixmetal version. Ran many of my network perf testings and BGP anycast pet projects on their amazing infra. End of an era. 😔
English
@PTrubey @pronounced_kyle like this? #Bidirectional_line-switched_ring" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrono…
English
The interviewer was having a hard time understanding their topology, and I don't blame him, it wasn't explained very well.
Sounds like they are using 10G Ethernet from building to building with an Ethernet switching architecture in each building. Normally that would spell disaster, since Ethernet provides no effective isolation between different customers in one building, but since they make their own customer hardware, they can make it work.
They also loop their building to building network into a ring, and their (again in-house developed) routers/switches can quickly fail over to sending packets in the opposite direction in the loop should a fiber cut occur. This replicates the SONNET architecture that Telcos used to have for fiber, but never get used down at the individual customer level.
This is very smart since the router based fail over protocols are ridiculously complex and still routinely cause Internet outages due to misconfiguration issues.
I would very much like to learn more about the details since it sounds like a very innovative Fiber To The Home architecture as compared to the GPON topology that 99% of fiber to the home networks use.
English
Somos Internet is a Y Combinator startup that lays 2 km of fiber every day in Colombia.
They already have 27,000 subscribers — because people want what they offer: 100 Gbps internet connections for just $80/m.
How is that possible? Somos is building a new kind of network from the ground up — plugging into transatlantic fiber, building his own backbone, connecting into apartments, and building custom routers that can handle that much throughput.
Forrest (@forrestheath3) visited me at my office, and we talked through the technical details. I think you'll love it.
HD Version at the link in my bio.
Timestamps:
00:00 — Introducing Somos Internet
02:40 — Nobody Understands how Telco Networks Work
03:51 — How to Learn About Telco Anyways
04:53 — How Forrest Won Over the Local Drug Lords
06:50 — The Idea Maze: from Wifi to Fiber
09:25 — What Somos Internet is Building: Enterprise-Grade Fiber to Your Home
12:05 — How Telcos Work Today (and Their Fundamental Flaw)
15:46 — "The Core Innovation of Somos Is..."
17:40 — HOW IT WORKS: A Nested-Ring Topology, Not a Tree
21:43 — An End-to-End Service
23:57 — (Including Routers)
25:00 — How is 100 Gbps per Customer Possible?
31:08 — How They're Cheaper: Switches, not Routers
35:00 — Why Sell a Consumer Service?
39:40 — Why Doesn't Bell Labs Still Exist? (It's the MBAs.)
42:28 — Customer Service is Easier When You Build Everything Yourself
43:37 — Telcos Have Given Up on Innovating
47:46 — How to Build a Team Smart Enough to Execute This Vision
51:41 — Is This a Hard Idea to Pitch a VC?
55:58 — Could Somos Have Started in America, not Colombia?
59:23 — How Did Forrest Learn All of This From Zero?
1:02:36 — What Technical Challenges Are Next For Somos?
English
