WoSSCapital

The state pension increased under the Triple Lock today. Almost no one understands how the system behind it actually works, why it’s failing, or why politicians refuse to do anything about it. I’ve written a full white paper on it, published today in the hope it finds some grounding. open.substack.com/pub/wosscapita…

Explainer from last night's article on Rent Controls. As a policy, the data suggests these are more about political theatre than addressing the very real housing crisis. Find out why they persist despite their record of carnage. Read in full.

We'll see how it goes. I'm nearer the end of my career then the start, so I'm in a fortunate position that it'll be great while I wind down but unlikely to impact me materially at this stage. I've lived through 4 of these already as an engineer, all saying similar things since the late 90's. One of them might replace us eventually I guess. I tend to think, like the previous 4, they'll revolutionise the way we do things and they'll make us much more efficient at what we do, but that the replacement narrative will ultimately fail. I think it'll augment skill and competence in the fields it's used in, rather than replace it entirely (reduce probably, replace I think not). Ultimately, a person still needs to be accountable. For the near future anyway.

Not meaning to be dismissive. I agree with what you’re saying but it’s kind of what I was saying with people aren’t using it correctly. This is current AI, if the AGI timetable is to believed then Peter and the majority are going to be able to do a lot more. I think we’re in for a monumental industry revolution. Scary times really.

I now understand why AI will eat the software industry. I used to have a web agency. With Claude over the last 3 days I have built and deployed a system that would have: - Taken 6 months - Cost £150-200k - Required 8 different skill sets I can't design. I can't code. I don't understand SQL, APIs, Cloud Storage - yet Claude has walked me through Github, Supabase, Vercel and it is deployed and working. A 100% custom software system - 3 days, 1 idiot. BLOWN AWAY!

OK, let's put aside for a second your dismissive views on other people's processes, we're never going to agree on that I'm sure. You and I are debating the semantics of engineering process, because we have that experience. Do you think Peter, or any of the other people creating and shipping code with NI understanding of these processes as he's acknowledged, knows anything about what you and I are discussing to be developing and shipping all you're suggesting? That was my point. You're an engineer, or at the very least have shown in this conversation you have experience and knowledge of engineering practice. Peter, and the millions like him generating code (and this isn't an attack on Peter, the appeal is obvious) aren't using AI the way you think is best controlled. So if your position is that it can produce production ready coffee, when used in your very specific SDL process......cool. That's not how Peter or the majority of non engineering people are using it. We're debating engineering process that none of them are using. Would you accept my point of valid with that in mind?

Sounds like you’re using it to produce code without having further run security tests, best practice, or reviews it against regulations. If for your example payment processes, if you have the regulations you should have tests in place for releases already, the same applies for human produced code.

He didn't have a boat. Zack did. He's already taken accountability for it, and fair play to him for doing the right thing rather than trying to talk around it like you are. It's all of our individual responsibility to know what tax we're liable for. And that's especially important when you're going after others you think aren't paying theirs.

The Tax expert who broke the story didn’t know about this before he started looking into it But he expected Zack too? Turns out no one in the Marina knew

Is your cutting edge leading enterprise class company in a regulated field or is the 30% of code it doesn't ship linked to regulated activity like payments processing? Sounds like we're two experienced engineers with very different experiences. But in general your position is, it would seem, in agreement. There's a reason you only use it for about 70% of code, not 100% like Peter's just done. I stand by my position. Even utilising test based pipelines that include code security stage gates AI hallucinates and makes general mistakes when writing code in the same way it does for everything else at the moment. I've already said it'll get better and I've already said it's a great tool for engineers. I use it in all of my workflows. My position isn't that we shouldn't use it, it's that any non engineering functions, like in Peters example, using it to ship code they have no idea what it's doing is, currently, taking a real and not insignificant risk that the code they shipped is secure, operable and scalable. It's an assumption that won't hold in many, many cases. It'll work. Sure. But you and I both know that in engineering, particularly at enterprise level, "working" isn't the yardstick. As a fairly simple example (and this is a personal one as it's recent) I used Claude code to help me with a Stripe webhook as a recent feature addition and integration of it into my platform. It couldn't understand the standard docs for Stripe properly and thus couldn't handle the asynch nature of Stripe. I had to read the relevant bits and tell it, and it still couldn't do it without my suggestion for temporary tables, recording all data as well receive it, in whatever order, then stitching at the end. That was the first problem. The second was that it didn't use prepared statements for the database calls so the code it supplied left it open to SQL injection attacks (which would have been picked up by the code security checks in my pipeline, sure, had I not spotted it myself). And the third was that it's design had me storing card details in said database, making me liable for PSD2 reporting, which I specifically had as a requirement (that I wouldn't do this) and that Stripe already does anyway. I don't need that detail, I can just reference it from Stripe via the payment ID. So this was both a regulatory overhead and a poorly scaled design (duplicate data) The code it gave me was about 70% solid. I agree with you there. The problem was the 30% that wasn't and some of the assumptions it has made, some of which were explicitly called out in the requirements. I knew that when I reviewed it, because it's my job to know these things. Would a non engineer just prompting a vibe coded app be able to spot and remediate these issues while shipping code? Would they be writing requirements or tests in the same way you would to build the codebase to catch some of these issues, or just asking Claude in the terminal to do stuff? I get that it looks magic to non Devs. What we do always has some to some degree. But the important bits of what we do has never been writing the code, it's in understanding what that code does, how we're going to build in the next feature with minimal change, how we're going to support it when it breaks at 2am and how it keeps our customers and their data safe. Claude is the best of them. And all of the LLM's currently are decent at code. But they're lacking significantly in terms of engineer replacement. Particularly experienced engineers.

@WoSSCrypto @PeterMcCormack Funny at my cutting edge leading enterprise class company it’s shipping 70%ish of production code. One of the biggest tech companies. And that’s now. In 5 years time…

Yeah, No. Not to enterprise standard it can't. Not yet. It'll get there, but at the moment in my experience it's just helping those who don't understand technology to ship dangerous code. It's great for productivity for engineers. It's not ready to replace engineers (or solutions architects for that matter).

@WoSSCrypto @PeterMcCormack You’re using it inefficiently and not to its full potential. With the correct implementation and process an AI workflow can be extremely powerful. Checks, tests can be put into place to increase security and code efficiency a ton.

Man who wants other people to "pay their fair share", didn't want to pay his fair share. Man who rallies against tax evasion admits to tax evasion. I'm afraid all the whataboutery in the world doesn't make either of them any more hypocritical than the other. You just like one more.

Man makes a mistake over council tax on a boat and apologises and is paying it back (and rightly so). (Boat council tax depends on your mooring and how often you are there, it’s not as straight forward) It would be about £1,000 a year Meanwhile, Farage’s Stamp duty would have been 10s of thousands. He continues to dodge questions about it and his £5,000,000 donations, has never apologised and will never pay anything back ever. Gutter press are raking through Zack’s bins before reporting on Farage.

Rent Controls. The economics of good intentions. Topical in the UK just now, but what does the data tell us about rent controls around the world? My new article covers just that wosscapital.substack.com/p/rent-control…

@BTCBreadMan From an article I wrote a few months ago. Net effect is the same, but if people thought about it more like the right graph they might buy more assets and spend less on goods and services.

The average person thinks that inflation means goods are getting more expensive over time. Almost nobody understands that inflation actually means the money is getting more worthless over time.

Ah, the classic mistake of conflating output with visible time. Productivity isn’t measured by how long someone sits staring at a screen. It’s measured by what they actually get done. Any company that prioritises performative presence over actual output will generally get less of the latter and more of the former. If someone can complete their work effectively, be available and also put a load of laundry on between meetings, that’s not evidence of failure, it’s evidence that knowledge work isn’t assembly line labour. That person is MORE productive, not less. Working from home isn't perfect and there are those who abuse it. But there are also those who do more. The location isn't the issue, the incentive structure and the quality of leadership in managing velocity of output is far more important than managing chair time.

If you work from home, you shouldn't get a full salary since you're basically Babysitting your own life on company time. If you have time to start a load of laundry between meetings, you’re technically a part-time employee.

Full article: wosscapital.substack.com/p/the-consumer…

Also, something a little different from yesterday. An explainer for my article on The Consumer, Debtor, Employee triad. Playing around with some video/audio generation to aid in speed of publication. Full article linked in comments. Also available on YouTube

WoSS Risk Barometer stays at moderate, but with some significant change last week. Supportive of Valkyrie portfolio positioning changes over the last month or so. The distribution is constantly evolving. Are you, or are you driven by belief?

From todays report, the current distribution of probable returns. Still left skewed (fat left tail), but that's been reducing over the last few weeks. The reducing skew (now at -0.5 from -0.8) supports the Valkyrie position on Equity, Gold & Bitcoin. How's your distribution?

Weekly Report Time. Enjoy. If X lets you see it. :D wosscapital.substack.com/p/22-weekly-ma…

"Fair Share" is an interesting study of language and human psychology. Almost no-one is against the emotional pull of fairness. But when you interrogate what's generally meant, it's almost never "fair" those saying it are after. It's "more". Harder sell politically that though

I think you're letting "every decent person" do a lot of heavy (emotionally loaded) lifting here. I want absolutely nothing to do with reform, or restore. And I'm a decent person. But suggesting that if you have no wish to see one extreme in power then you should be, by default, drawn to the other extreme, is quite the stretch. I don't like the intent of policies on the extreme right (I'm left leaning on many things), but I also don't like what I think will be (with my three decades adult experience) the outcomes of the policies on the extreme left, even if I'm on board with the intent for many of them. I'm also of the view that many of the green policies are being proposed simply to gain power, because they will obviously be popular. That sort of Trump style politics doesn't sit well with me. (And in fairness that's not an ad hominem attack on the Greens, because they're all at it and I'm not naive enough to think you could win an election today any other way) At this moment, because I refuse to play the partisan game we seem to have raced toward, where people support their political party like a sports team, there are no good options for me. Maybe you think that means I'm not a decent person. That's absolutely your prerogative.

If anything is going to push you to vote Green, please let it be this grotesque new policy from Reform. Let’s be honest-every decent person in the UK wants the absolute opposite of what Reform is planning. And the opposite is the Green Party 💚 Vote for kindness and decency 🗳️