Jon Stewart

Quick tip: any startup idea built purely on vibe-coded software, no matter how smart or useful it is, won’t be seen as defensible. Anyone with the same subscription plan can copy it and build the same thing. That is the new rule: if it is just software, and it can be built quickly, it can also be copied quickly. If your product does not touch the real world in some meaningful way, or do something LLMs still can’t do, then you’re exposed.The industry knows this. People just tend to discuss it quietly, behind closed doors. A good software idea is not enough anymore. A lead of months or even years is not enough anymore. The real search now is for something that is hard to copy.

Ya'll worried about AI Coding slop, when there as an entire army of n8n experts who are installing unmaintainable visual workflow spaghetti in small/medium sized businesses at scale Literal merchants of complexity. Its so much worse than using claude code. It's an artifact of being stuck 6 months in the past and n8n is all you know.

it's strange to see the world of the past fade before my eyes from 2012 through 2024, I wrote code in long sessions of sitting in vim -- sometimes typing, mostly thinking, flipping between different terminals, making changes, looking at errors, googling, reading stackoverflow... I took pride in carrying in my head these towering abstractions. I knew every nook and cranny of my business logic, like a neighborhood you live in. I felt extra fast when tab-completing a single long variable name. Nice. I placed every parenthesis, every semicolon, myself. Hundreds of thousands of them. And like a great wave washing over your sandcastle on the beach, it is now all gone. Engineering will never again be as it once was. What's especially significant about it to me is that there's barely a record of the way it was: I've spent thousands of hours writing software, and I don't think there's a single video recording of me doing it. I remember how it was: the long breaks of meditative silence, the frustration of hunting a particularly tricky bug, the relief and joy in solving it, the expressions of taste and cleverness that come with any manual craft. But it's hard to communicate how it was to someone who has never experienced it. As with all histories, the narrative is lacking in depth: you really had to be there.

Technical interview question: Suppose you have 5 TB worth of text data and you want to count the total number of words, how will you do this?

Is there like an adult daycare for retired Bell Labs alums where I can send my father? These are the only types of people he enjoys interacting with

I believe this new model in Claude Code is a glimpse of the future we're hurtling towards, maybe as soon as the first half of next year: software engineering is done. Soon, we won't bother to check generated code, for the same reasons we don't check compiler output.