Thomas Kwon

Harness inside the sandbox, or outside the sandbox? Why?

prediction re the end of spreadsheets AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness. think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row. The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero. this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure. The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.

we are spending too much on agent sandboxes. cost per execution is priced at easily 100-1000x bare metal cost after layers of the cloud supply chain resolve. no wonder sandbox companies are popular putting this market on notice

MCP sucks honestly It eats too much context window and you have to toggle it on and off and the auth sucks I got sick of Claude in Chrome via MCP and vibe coded a CLI wrapper for Playwright tonight in 30 minutes only for my team to tell me Vercel already did it lmao But it worked 100x better and was like 100LOC as a CLI

Alright *cracks knuckles* Time to build an application that tells me the weather in SF

Been wrangling a lot of time how to deal with the onslaught of PRs, none of the solutions that are out there seem made for our scale. I spun up 50 codex in parallel, let them analyze the PR and generate a JSON report with various signals, comparing with vision, intent (much higher signal than any of the text), risk and various other signals. Then I can ingest all reports into one session and run AI queries/de-dupe/auto-close/merge as needed on it. Same for Issues. P rompt R equests really are just issues with additional metadata. Don't even need a vector db. Was thinking way too complex for a while. There's like 8 PRs for auto-update in the last 2 days alone (still need to ingest 3k PRs, only have 1k so far).

Claude Code has regressed an absurd amount in the last few days. Timestamps no longer update unless you un-focus/re-focus the tab. "thinking" doesn't show at all. I had a query run for 6 minutes with 0 output. This is genuinely unpleasant to use.

The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.