Ben Patton

@kentcdodds I think we will eventually converge back on indie level things just with more power behind us. There was an incredibly exciting wave of software right before AI boom AI is definitely exciting but I feel it’s a pause while we collectively level up and then get going again

100% This is why I think it would be futile for me to teach you coding workflows. By the time I've put together good material, everything's already changed. Durable skills (product sense) are what you should be working on and that's what I'm teaching next.

@NotionHQ @brian_lovin @WisprFlow Bruh, just copy and past google docs with complicated setup and formats into notion and it just works. What an excellent product.

I just want to say 2 things 1) @NotionHQ embeds are just phenomenal. Kudos. The only person I think I am aware of/have interacted with there is @brian_lovin so much gratitude 2) @WisprFlow....(me in hushed tones)...."thank you. just an incredible experience"

@jonathan_wilke @nextjs But these Stats! (please note the extreme sarcasm) x.com/nextjs/status/…

Holy crap... with the @nextjs 16.2 update the next server is now using 10GB+ of memory and my MacBooks fan is running constantly (before it never even turned on). What's going on here...

late to this but when I was job searching and got stressed about something I talked to @threepointone and he was so supportive and uplifting (as always). very cool guy

I love that interesting people are shipping code. That people who thought their code shipping days were over are shipping code I bemoan the reality that most of what we see being shipped is “AI this”…”AI that” I want AI to lead to ppl shipping wild things

Universal sign of a 10x engineer: They drop “blah blah blah” incredibly frequently

When an AI asks: "What would you like me to do with this spec" Me: "ummmmm....Start Building"

@alexhillman Yeah I just meant something working together to read document extensions then going through them. Love it.

@benapatton epub is pretty easy already, isn't it?

So not 100 pages per second but this still rips.

@StatisticsFTW Trying to walk in my house. Trying to scare me with stories. Then trying to guilt trip me for “not protecting my family more” Like, wat?!

@benapatton You must viscerally feel the need for a product if you're going to buy it.

I just want a world where home security people don't solicit or at least listen to you and don't use threatening tactics.

@RhysSullivan @dillon_mulroy eff-next. Sorry. Felt like a good opportunity 🫠😅

holy shit they're doing it again

@tdesseyn Future Marketer

the way my daughter is fighting me that 7+2 is 12 im starting to believe her

@wagslane There’s a guy charging 4800 a year for devops over on skool Course and bootcamps are still doing just fine Seems people can’t ask a second question or challenge their initial assumption. Just because AI can and will do things doesn’t mean the other way of doing it are dead

Any good course isn't about gatekeeping knowledge Knowledge hasn't been gatekept since waaaaaaay before AI The Internet was the magic technology that broke that barrier

@AvgDatabaseCEO Also a bit of irony when they invest in something but release competing products 🫠 probably nothing wrong but just seems off putting

Stones from glasshouses. Same guy who released “Vercel for Postgres”. Which was actually downtime/dataloss slop Neon Postgres. That’s an actual swindle. It went so badly you had to kill it to save your reputation. Speaking of real damage, downtime and data loss. That’s real.

@DavidKPiano @threepointone The tone that they used “really really” shouldn’t have sounds like a playground bully “You’ll be sorry!”

Vercel wrote an article against @threepointone and they really, really should not have

@jamesperkins When are sporks appropriate

Everyone talking about slop forks, i’ve always eating my slop with a spoon… more surface area

@StatisticsFTW I meant story, not store. Makes sense why you were confused 😂

@StatisticsFTW Your graphql Amsterdam talk when you were a detective and the graphql schema saved your life

Introducing Barnum, or... how I ship hundreds of PRs per week, burn through backlogs, and automatically fact-check documentation. LLMs are incredibly powerful tools. But when we try to use them to drive more complicated refactors or more intricate workflows, their shortcomings are quickly revealed. When their context gets full, they get forgetful, and they can't be relied upon to necessarily do the steps that you ask. They often cut corners. Put simply, having an inherently probabilistic process perform what should be deterministic work necessarily comes at the cost of reliability. And you can't build a complicated workflow off of unreliable foundations. That's where Barnum comes in. Barnum is the missing workflow engine for agents. Rather than having agents be responsible for upholding guarantees (e.g., always lint and commit your changes atomically), agents instead do just what they're good at: reading text and reasoning. Everything else is done deterministically, on the outside, by Barnum. This means that you can build bigger, more involved workflows without sacrificing reliability. Because you can intersperse bash scripts, you save on token usage. The agents performing a micro-task only receive the instructions for that specific task, meaning that context does not get overwhelmed and they don't get forgetful. And because all inputs, outputs, and transitions are validated, the agents can't wriggle out of doing the work. This workflow is essentially a state machine described in a config file. And the best part? The configuration has a JSON schema, so agents are actually really good at writing the workflow! It's already been used to ship hundreds of PRs, run automated refactors, burn through various backlogs, fact-check every statement in documentation, and build a deep-research clone! The attached image is a representation of the workflow that I use to identify and implement automated refactors. I follow this up with a separate workflow that splits each commit into a separate PR, judges the refactor, and potentially completes the refactoring (for example, by modifying call sites if the refactor changed some public API). So go on, give it a try. Check out barnum-circus.github.io, star the repository, and join the Discord! I can't wait to see what you build with it! And I'd love for you to get involved!