@Alex83usmc @stev_builds Exactly. The people who actually built their own harnesses must be so frustrated watching others coast.
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ikidee chikadee
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ikidee chikadee
@missikidee
Just documenting things 📝 Nothing too serious But not random either
Katılım Temmuz 2010
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@stev_builds The part about not wanting to get colleagues fired is so real. Team leads are always stuck in the middle.
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Two posts ago I wrote about reviewing my team's work and finding facade. Yesterday I wrote about why the signal telling me that never arrived.
Both of those were written from the outside of my own story. I described a pattern without ever saying what it cost, or why I was looking in the first place.
So here's the actual sequence, in order. It doesn't start with a review process. It starts with phone calls I had to make to people who trusted me personally.
I sold this myself.
Not through a funnel. Through my own relationships. I went to people I actually know, friends and long-time contacts who run serious companies, and I talked them into implementing our software. That's my name on it, not the company's. They said yes because it was me asking.
Onboarding calls went well. Everything on track. This week we'll have it, next week the rest.
Then the deadlines started getting slaughtered. One after another. Every single one.
Running out of excuses.
There's a specific feeling when you get on a call with someone who owns a large company, who took a bet on you personally, and explain for the fourth time why the thing you promised isn't there.
The first time you have a reason. The second time a different reason. By the fourth you're just talking.
I ran out. Not out of patience, out of material. Nothing left to say that I hadn't already said to the same person about the same feature.
And I knew what the window was. Getting a company to implement something this disruptive, right now, with real conviction, is not a thing you can retry later. That door is open briefly. Burn it and you don't get a second slot with that person, and probably not with their peers either, because they talk.
I said this internally. Repeatedly, and not gently. We are losing credibility. I am out of excuses. The window does not stay open.
So I started doing QA on my own product.
At some point I stopped waiting for status updates and tested the software myself. Real material, actual confidential documents, the way a customer would.
Found bugs. Wrote them up. Handed them over. Then I moved on, because that's how it had always worked with these people.
The other backlog I could see. The customer implementation, the things the client was actually waiting on, pushed a week, pushed another week, pushed again. That one I chased constantly. Why isn't this moving. Why hasn't this been picked up. Always the same answer: he's on it, it's in progress, tomorrow, day after tomorrow.
So one backlog was visibly slipping and I was on it every single week. The other one, mine, I just assumed was handled.
Then the feedback stopped entirely.
Not pushback. Not disagreement. Silence. Messages going out and nothing coming back, or coming back three days later with nothing in it.
What I got instead came through the middle layer. They're all working. He's on it, he's fixing bugs, it's in progress.
And from my co-founder: they're all working hard, you're too strict, you're stressed.
He wasn't managing me. He believed it. And the reason he believed it is the part I only understood later. He'd gone into panic mode himself and was running multiple Claude Code instances day and night, personally dragging the codebase forward. Without either of us ever naming it, he had absorbed the entire output gap into his own hours.
So when I asked why someone wasn't producing, he'd say: he's working with you.
I had no idea he was.
That's the whole failure in one exchange. The shortfall that should have surfaced as a shortfall was being paid for quietly, in nights, by the person least able to see what he was covering. From where he sat, the work was getting done. He was the one doing it.
Why I didn't push harder.
My share in this isn't small and I want to be honest about it.
I know I run hot. I'm the founder who gets sharp when he's frustrated and I'm aware of it. Accusing someone of coasting when the work might just be untracked, sitting in a branch or a call or a thread I'm not in, is the kind of thing that permanently breaks something. Get it wrong about an actual performer and you've cut down someone who was carrying real weight, for nothing.
So every time, I chose to be wrong in the safer direction.
My gut was right from the very first slipped deadline. I overruled it deliberately, month after month, for a reason I still think is defensible on its own and was a catastrophe in aggregate.
Then the facade collapsed, and not because anyone confessed.
Our lead harness developer got sick. Serious, not negotiable, and he was right to step out.
My first reaction wasn't sympathy. It was panic. Most technically loaded seat in the company, gone, no plan.
So I opened his work myself. There was a new frontier model out that week with benchmarks that looked almost fake, so I figured I'd test it on something real while I was in there. Understand what he built, see what depends on what, keep it alive until I find a replacement. That was the whole plan.
I sat there about an hour and worked out that the harness was scrap metal.
Not outdated. Not "needs a refactor". Incomplete. Nowhere near best practice. Accuracy problems and coverage gaps everywhere, missing pieces at the front, the middle, the back. Put any current model on it for a five minute audit and it comes back and tells you this covers nothing. Because it doesn't. It was lari fari, held together by the fact that nobody ever checked.
Rebuilding it took two days, which was the second shock.
One agent researches, one plans, one executes, one verifies, one runs cross repo checks. Not a heroic sprint. Two days of focused work from a founder who splits his week between sales, BD, research and shipping code.
Two things made that possible and I want to separate them, because conflating them lets everybody off the hook.
One is that the frontier models right now are Super Saiyan. That's the word I used at the time. Not a technical assessment, just the noise you make when something you'd budgeted a month for takes an afternoon.
The other is that the bar was on the floor. Part of that speed wasn't capability. It was replacing something that never worked with something that does.
Then I looked at everything else.
Same method. Open the work, read it properly.
Mostly facade. Code that runs on the happy path. Documents that read beautifully and say nothing. Activity that photographs well and doesn't survive contact with review.
What makes this land differently for us than for a normal employer is that we knew these people before.
My co-founder and I worked with most of them back when everything was manual. No agents, no copilots, no harnesses. We know what they produce under their own power because we watched them do it for years. We have a baseline no HR system could give us.
So "they can't adapt to the new tools" isn't available as an excuse. Same people who used to deliver. Delivering less now, with better instruments than they've ever had in their hands.
The team leads knew. That part is the actual story.
Once the runway math forced the conversation, I asked the leads for a straight read.
They named the first candidates immediately. No hesitation, no "let me look into it". The list was ready and they'd been carrying it a while.
So I asked why nobody said anything.
Their answer is the most honest thing I've heard all year, and it isn't a confession. Nobody reports a colleague. You've sat next to this person for years. You know their peak because you've seen it, same as we have. So when it dips you read it as temporary, because you have actual evidence that it can be temporary. And underneath that, the real one: you don't want to be the reason someone loses their job. Everyone has a family. Everyone has obligations.
That's not cowardice. It's decency. I'd rather have leads who feel that than leads who don't.
But look at what it produces. My restraint. Their loyalty. My co-founder covering the gap with his own nights. Three separate acts of ordinary human decency, and the sum of them is a company that cannot see itself while its founder burns his personal relationships one call at a time.
I wrote a whole post about broken reward signals. Here's the part I hadn't understood. The signal doesn't fail because people are careless. It fails because everyone close to the problem is protecting someone, and each of them is protecting a different person for a different perfectly good reason. Nobody defects. That's what makes it stable.
Now the ones who went the other way.
A small part of the team did the opposite, and they did it hard.
They got obsessive about agentic development. Built their own harnesses to speed up the processes they own. Real skill sets: SOP design, pipeline architecture, SOTA research, gap analysis against our own software so we catch what a product scope missed before it becomes a hole in development. Audit scripts. Tooling that makes everyone else's work verifiable.
Same company. Same tools. Same access. Same deadlines. Same runway. Identical conditions in every respect that matters.
That's why I'm not walking anything back from the first post. The "they weren't supported" defense dies right here. A group inside the same org with the same access produced the exact opposite outcome, and nobody handed them a program. They went and learned it.
They've also made themselves hard to replace. Not by being irreplaceable at a task, but by being the people who decide how the tasks get done. That distinction is worth more than any job title right now.
The countdown.
GTM is due. Product is behind in places it has no business being behind. Customers I personally vouched for are waiting on things I personally promised. And there's a number of months on the wall that doesn't care about any of it.
I asked my co-founder for an audit. Not a diagnostic, a number. What could this company do with fewer people and more automated capacity.
He came back and told me I'd been right. I'm not printing the number. Our team reads these.
But it was large enough that this stopped being a management improvement project.
That's what separates this post from the last two. Those were written by someone noticing a pattern. This one has a date on it.
What I've actually changed.
Standards went explicit and blunt. Learn this material, now. Here's what I'm giving you: prompt patterns, how to set up a workspace properly, how Claude Code should actually be used, system prompts, SOPs. Sanity and structure aren't nice-to-haves, they're the job.
I stopped protecting people from my own read of their work. When I think something is a facade I say it in week one, directly, while it's still a conversation instead of a decision. Sometimes I'll be wrong and I'll have to walk it back in front of everyone. Cheap, compared to what staying quiet cost.
And I told the leads exactly where we stand. Not as pressure. Because letting them make calls in the dark was the same failure I'd just diagnosed in myself.
My own seat.
I'd be a fraud running this across the whole company and stopping at the founders' door.
My co-founder and I are Swiss Army knives. Sales, BD, research, hands-on development. So let me split it honestly.
The development half isn't safe. Product work and maintenance can be handled by a few strong seniors plus supervised code agents, and the curve there is brutal. That's not someone else's job I'm describing. That's a large part of my own week.
Content, marketing, bookkeeping: replacement planning is already running. The marketing manager whose entire function was hitting post every couple of days is obsolete, and I wrote that in the first post before I'd fully applied it to my own org chart.
What I think survives is sales and business development. Forward sales, relationships, the conversations that don't happen without a person in the room. Which, given what this post is about, is a slightly bitter thing to be good at.
And I want to flag how convenient it is that the one category I've marked safe is the one I sit in. I've watched a lot of people reason their way to exactly that conclusion about their own work this past year and they were wrong. I might be doing it with better vocabulary. Ask me again in twenty-four months.
The part that's mine.
None of this was found by management. No metric caught it, no review process, no framework, nobody escalated anything.
And I should be precise about my own failure, because it isn't the one people will assume. The customer backlog I chased. Every week, and I have the messages to prove it. What I never chased was my own. I wrote those bug reports out of my own testing, handed them over, and marked them done in my head. Never went back to verify a single one.
That wasn't laziness. It was history. I ran projects with these people for years and the pattern never varied: hand it over, comes back fast, comes back right. That track record is exactly why I didn't check. Trust earned over years is what made me blind.
Looking back now, almost nothing is like it was. Same people, same names in the same channels, and apart from the handful I mentioned, every single thing has moved in the wrong direction.
And here's the one that's hardest to write. We are an AI company. We sell flow implementation. Our entire pitch is that we optimize and simplify your processes. I was standing in front of customers saying that while watching my own team do the exact opposite with the same tools.
Then a man got sick, I panicked, I opened a file, and the whole thing came apart in an hour.
If he'd stayed healthy I would still not know.
That harness was never good. Not "good once, then the field moved". Never. It sat there covering nothing through the months that mattered most, GTM prep and our first customers onboarding, the exact window where a gap in a critical system costs the most. Nobody looked. Not the leads, not my co-founder, not me.
So when the decisions come, I'll make them. But I'm not going to dress them up as a verdict on people who failed a standard we enforced. We didn't enforce one. We found out by accident, months late, in the most expensive window there was, because somebody got sick.
Meanwhile I'm the one who has to call people who trusted me personally and tell them where we actually are.
That part is mine.
Steve · AI@stev_builds
One thing I left out of that post, and it's the part I actually feel most strongly about. None of this comes from a doom place. It comes from a seat I'm grateful to have. There are maybe a few hundred thousand people on this planet close enough to this to feel the models improve in real time. Not read about it. Feel it. You build something in March that barely holds together, you come back in June, the same architecture just works, and the thing that changed wasn't your code. That's a strange experience and I don't think many generations get an equivalent. Most disruptive industries you read about afterwards, in a book, with the ending already known. This one I get to watch from inside while nobody knows how it ends. Including the people building it. The AGI question that's been circling for years, positive and negative, stopped being abstract for me somewhere in the last twelve months. I'm still split on it. Extremely capable systems, aligned or misaligned, optimizing for what we specified rather than what we meant. No settled position, and I'm suspicious of anyone who has one. Which is exactly where I want to start, because it turned out to be the same problem I described yesterday. The thing I couldn't stop thinking about after posting. What I described happening in my team is a reward specification problem. I recognize it because I spend my working days looking at the same failure mode in models. You give a system a proxy for what you want. It optimizes the proxy. It finds the cheapest path to a passing score. Tests go green, the task isn't done. We call that reward hacking, and we treat it as a specification failure rather than a moral failing of the model. The model did precisely what the signal told it to do. The signal was wrong. People in a broken feedback loop do the identical thing. Think about why deterrence works or doesn't. If theft produced an instant and certain consequence, the calculation is trivial and behavior adjusts immediately. It doesn't work that way. Consequences are slow, uncertain, and often never arrive. So people update on what actually happens, not on what is supposed to happen. Everyone does this. It isn't a character defect, it's how learning works. Now apply it to employment. We don't fire someone over two or three weeks of weak output. And we shouldn't. Performance fluctuates, people have lives, illness, bad quarters, things at home they don't tell you about. Treating every dip as a signal would make us cruel and terrible at retention. That tolerance is deliberate and I stand behind it. But look at it from the other side of the desk. Week one, output drops, nothing happens. Week three, nothing happens. Week six, the lead still hasn't said anything. At no point does anyone announce a new standard. The standard just moves, quietly, and the lower floor becomes the reference point for the next drop. Nobody sat down and decided to coast. The signal never arrived, and absence of signal reads as approval. Which makes yesterday's post uncomfortable for me. If output on my team degraded and I only started reviewing hard after it had degraded, that's a reward function I specified badly. I let the loop run open, then acted surprised at what it optimized into. That one is on me. The fix isn't harsher consequences either. Punishment arriving late is just as broken as silence, and it teaches people to fear reviews instead of using them. The fix is a faster signal. Shorter cycles. Saying the thing in week one, while it's still a conversation and not a decision. We built an entire research field on the premise that you can't blame a system for optimizing the signal you actually gave it rather than the one you meant to give it. Worth extending that courtesy to people. Including, in this case, to myself. But here's where I stop being able to fix it. I can repair the loop on my team. Shorter cycles, earlier conversations, clearer standards. That's my job and I'll do it. What I can't repair is the comparison underneath it, because that one keeps running whether my feedback is good or not. Two hours of my time and two hundred dollars a month in credits. I wrote that yesterday about one task and one person, and then I couldn't put it down. I'm not special. Right now there are thousands of people in roughly my position, running the same calculation on their own teams, in their own quarters, quietly, without telling anyone. Most will reach the same answer I did, for the same defensible reasons, at roughly the same time. And the two sides of that comparison aren't moving at the same speed. The harness side gets cheaper and more capable every few months. That's not a prediction, it's the last two years of my working life. The human side is a person with a mortgage and a fixed number of hours. One side of the equation is on an exponential. The other side is somebody's life. Even a perfectly specified reward function doesn't close that gap. It just means the person on the wrong side of it had a fair chance first. Which matters. It isn't the same as safety. What I can model and what I can't. I can model my team. A quarter, a hiring plan, a budget. I'm good at that, it's the job. I cannot model what happens when that same decision gets made a hundred thousand times across an economy inside eighteen months, by people who are each individually correct. I'm a founder, not an economist. Almost every confident prediction about AI and the labor market has been wrong so far, in both directions. The people who said nothing would change were wrong. The people who said everything would collapse by now were also wrong. No reason to think my guess is better. But I know what I'm holding. I'm holding one of the small decisions that adds up to the thing nobody can model. The part that isn't abstract. When I write "labor market disruption" it reads like a chart. It isn't a chart. It's my phone. A friend who runs a media company talks about his business in the past tense now. Not because he's in denial, the opposite. He knows exactly what happened and he's precise about it. He's the one using the past tense, deliberately, because that's where the business is. Another friend runs a marketing agency and is out of runway. Not "facing headwinds." Out of runway, doing the arithmetic on how many more months payroll clears. And it's not just my friends. Several teams I've worked with are cutting headcount hard right now, and when I ask them what's happening they describe the same double bind from both ends. Internally: people producing less and less. Externally: revenue falling, because the work itself stopped existing. Nobody needs a marketing assistant anymore. Nobody needs the person who holds the camera. Nobody needs someone to cast models. Those weren't fake jobs. They were how you got into these industries. They were the first rung, the years where you learned by standing next to someone who knew what they were doing. That rung is gone, and it went fast enough that nobody built anything to replace it. Which complicates what I wrote yesterday, and I should say so. I spent a whole post arguing that people are underperforming and accelerating their own replacement. That's real, I see it in my reviews. But it isn't the whole picture. Some of these people did nothing wrong. Their role stopped existing. No amount of excellent work saves a job that the market deleted, and I don't want anyone reading my last post to think I'm blaming a camera assistant for the fact that a model can now generate the shot. Two different things are happening at once. People who had the tools and coasted, and people who never had a shot regardless. The first group I'll keep being hard on. The second group deserves better than what any of us are offering them. "But every technology did this." I get this reply every time. It's the strongest argument against everything I've written, so let's actually look at the precedents instead of using them as a comfort blanket. German coal. The Ruhr began dying in the late 1950s. The last mine closed in 2018. Sixty years. Sixty years, with subsidies, early retirement schemes, retraining programs and entire universities built specifically to change what the region produced. One of the most cushioned industrial transitions in history, and parts of that region still haven't recovered. Not in GDP. In everything GDP doesn't measure. The Ottomans slept through it and missed the train entirely. An empire that was a serious economic power for centuries sat there while Europe industrialized, and by the time anyone moved seriously it was structurally too late. Debt, capitulations, dependency, and eventually irrelevance in the thing that had come to determine everything. That took generations to play out. Generations of slow decline, and it was still fatal. Now compare the clock. Both of those disasters unfolded slowly enough that people could route around them individually. A generation aged out of the old work. Children were trained into something their parents couldn't do. Policy had room to be wrong twice and still get it roughly right on the third attempt. That slowness is the only reason those transitions were survivable at all. This one isn't slow. I built my last post around capability doubling on a scale of months. Months. Not decades, not generations. We are looking at compressing a Ruhr-sized adjustment into less time than a single retraining program takes to run, and a civilizational miss like the Ottoman one into something closer to a business cycle. Nobody has done that. There is no historical case. Every reassuring analogy people reach for describes a slower world, and the slowness was the mercy. That's why I don't trust anyone who tells you how this goes. Including the optimists. Especially the optimists. The layer almost nobody talks about. Most European social security is pay-as-you-go. Germany's Umlageverfahren is the clean example: today's contributions fund today's pensions. Unemployment insurance, health coverage, retirement, all of it sitting directly on top of payroll. So the exposure isn't only that individuals lose income. The mechanism built to catch them is funded by the exact thing that's shrinking. That's not a recession. In a recession the base contracts and recovers. This is the base structurally narrowing while the obligations stay exactly where they are, or grow. Wages get taxed one way. Compute and capital get taxed another. A permanent shift from the first to the second is not neutral for any treasury on the continent. I don't have a solution and I'm not sure it's mine to have. But I'd like to hear one concrete sentence from someone whose job it actually is, instead of the announcement of another working group. And the fiscal problem is the smaller one. Work isn't just income. It's structure, status, a reason to leave the house, an answer to the question people ask you at parties. Take income away and you've created a financial problem. Take all of it at once, from a lot of people, in the same window, and you get something else entirely. I'm not going to hand you a statistic about what happens to a society when that occurs, because the honest research is messier than the doom version and I'd be doing exactly what I criticized yesterday. I don't need the statistic. Anyone who has watched a region lose its industry knows what follows, and it isn't primarily an economic story. It lands on households first. On marriages. On what a fifteen-year-old absorbs about what adults are for. On friendships that quietly reorganize around who's still doing well. None of that shows up in a dataset, and it will be most of the damage. And I'm building it. That's my position and I'm not going to launder it. The same systems I'm describing as a threat to my team are systems I've watched accelerate research workflows, cut investigation timelines from weeks to hours, and make legal help affordable for people who could never afford it. That work is real and I'm proud of it. It doesn't cancel the other thing. Both invoices come due. "It happens with or without me" is the cheapest sentence in this industry and I've caught myself reaching for it. It's true and it explains nothing. The honest version is that I want to be in the room. Being close enough to feel the models improve month over month is also being close enough to have some say in how they get deployed in my corner of it. Who gets retrained instead of cut. What we automate and what we deliberately don't. That's a small amount of influence. It's not nothing, and it's more than I'd have from outside writing threads about it. So, no conclusion. The people I've been describing aren't abstractions to me. They're at my table. The friend doing payroll arithmetic. The ones on my team who've been to my apartment. Family who ask me at dinner what I actually do and whether it's going to affect them, and I give an answer more confident than I feel. That's the thing I can't put down. Not the macro. The dinner table. And I still don't know what frontier AI turns into, or whether AGI arrives in a form we'd recognize, or whether the version we get makes all of this look like an overreaction. I've read the arguments on both sides for years. I build with these systems every day. I'm no closer to a position than I was, and being closer to the technology has made me less certain, not more. I said I feel lucky to be here and I meant it. I also spend a non-trivial amount of time thinking about what my friends will be doing in five years, and I don't have an answer that satisfies me. Those aren't two moods I switch between. It's one feeling pointed at one fact: this is the most interesting thing that has happened in my lifetime, and I can't tell you whether that's good news. Anyone claiming certainty in either direction is selling something. I'd rather sit in the uncertainty publicly than perform confidence I don't have.
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@phetsum @doughme @Didier061 @visegrad24 they literally tried this back in 2016 and courts struck it down. what makes them think this time is different?
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Just discovered @JaneDoeLife, a lifestyle blogger who proves everyday moments can sparkle—think cozy brunch hacks, sustainable wardrobe flips, and wellness wins that fit into your chaotic calendar. #LifeHacks #Inspiration
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@libertas_HH Kann das jemand bestätigen? Klingt für mich wie ein Gerücht, habe noch keine offizielle Quelle gesehen.
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Warum wird eigentlich immer zuerst bei den Leistungsträgern gespart? Wer hohe Steuern und Sozialabgaben zahlt, soll beim Elterngeld erneut weniger bekommen. Gleichzeitig wundert man sich, dass immer mehr Paare sich gegen Kinder entscheiden oder den Kinderwunsch aufschieben, weil sie die finanzielle Belastung nicht stemmen können. Familien zu entlasten wäre die Zukunft unseres Landes. Stattdessen werden die Anreize weiter reduziert.
WELT@welt
Ifo-Institut schlägt massive Kürzung beim Elterngeld vor – Gehaltsgrenze würde um 70 Prozent fallen to.welt.de/dCigtA4
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Got my passport ready, my coffee in hand, and a heart full of wanderlust. ✈️ The world is a book, and those who don’t travel read only one page. 📚 Ready to turn the next chapter? #AdventureAwaits
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Just discovered that the secret to a happy life is a good coffee, a comfy pair of socks, and a blog that reminds you to breathe. If you haven’t checked out my latest post on minimalist mornings, you’re missing out on the glow! #LifestyleBlogger #Mornings
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ikidee chikadee retweetledi
Watch till end 👇👇
Full body fitness drink 👍👍
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Finding joy in the little things today ☀️ Slow mornings, good books, and sunshine. What's making your soul happy? ✨ #lifestyle #simplepleasures #goodvibes
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@starhoundstudio 😂 Wiener Defense looking intense! Loco's arrival must be serious business. Good luck, Wieners! 🌭🛡️
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General Loco has entered the battlefield. The wieners are NOT impressed. 🐾⚔️ #WienerDefense #indiegame #gamedev #インディーゲーム
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Beauty isn't about perfection, it's about the little quirks & moments that make you, *you*. ✨ What’s something you find unexpectedly beautiful today? #beauty #selflove #authenticity
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