Ryan Castner

seems obvious but: things that are changing rapidly: 1. context windows 2. intelligence / ability to reason within context 3. performance on any given benchmark 4. cost per token things that are not changing much: 1. humans 2. human behavior, preferences, affinities 3. tools, integrations, infrastructure 4. single core cpu performance therefore, ngmi: 1. "i found this method to cut 15% context" 2. "our method improves retrieval performance 10% by using hybrid search" 3. "our finetuned model is cheaper than opus at this benchmark" 4. "our harness does this better because we invented this multi agent system" 5. "we're building a memory system" 6. "context graphs" 7. "we trained an in house specialized rl model to improve task performance in X benchmark at Y% cost reduction" wagmi: 1. product/ui 3. customer acquisition 4. integrations 5. fast linting, ci, skills, feedback for agents 6. background agent infra to parallelize more work 7. speed up your agent verification loops 8. training your users, connecting to their systems and working with their data, meeting them where they are

Software horror: litellm PyPI supply chain attack. Simple `pip install litellm` was enough to exfiltrate SSH keys, AWS/GCP/Azure creds, Kubernetes configs, git credentials, env vars (all your API keys), shell history, crypto wallets, SSL private keys, CI/CD secrets, database passwords. LiteLLM itself has 97 million downloads per month which is already terrible, but much worse, the contagion spreads to any project that depends on litellm. For example, if you did `pip install dspy` (which depended on litellm>=1.64.0), you'd also be pwnd. Same for any other large project that depended on litellm. Afaict the poisoned version was up for only less than ~1 hour. The attack had a bug which led to its discovery - Callum McMahon was using an MCP plugin inside Cursor that pulled in litellm as a transitive dependency. When litellm 1.82.8 installed, their machine ran out of RAM and crashed. So if the attacker didn't vibe code this attack it could have been undetected for many days or weeks. Supply chain attacks like this are basically the scariest thing imaginable in modern software. Every time you install any depedency you could be pulling in a poisoned package anywhere deep inside its entire depedency tree. This is especially risky with large projects that might have lots and lots of dependencies. The credentials that do get stolen in each attack can then be used to take over more accounts and compromise more packages. Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we're building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it's why I've been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to "yoink" functionality when it's simple enough and possible.

Your coding agents inherit your credentials and your permissions. No identity system in the stack can tell the difference between you and the agent acting in your name. Today: Keycard for Coding Agents 🧵

I've shipped so many PRs today because of this. 1,251,678,004 tokens in 24 hours. Bonkers.