Tom Holz

MSEE, MBA, and unemployed at 48. 1st career was modeling ocean acoustics & signal processing for the US Navy in classified labs. 2nd career went from private-sector industrial manufacturing & engineering into product, strategy, and governance. 3rd career will be... ???

@ph0rque this is the way

So my mac crashed and one of the chrome profiles did not come up properly... so I lost ~50 open tabs. One way to clean them out, I guess.

@bushidocodes It once took us 4 months to buy a network switch. But six weeks for something like that feels reasonable.

@tomholz 😅 Is this fast? I feel like I’m on the verge of a breakdown from the waiting. Maybe my colleagues sense this?

Some movement for me at the IRS. I can login to our Unisys OS 2200 mainframe dev environment, and my IT approval for GnuCOBOL on IRS laptops is in the testing phase, so the tool chain was pushed via endpoint management to my laptop. Took about six weeks to get here.

Before @gauntletai I was saying I was a 3/10 on AI. People thought I was underselling myself, because I tend to undersell, but in hindsight I was maybe 1.5/10. Some people in our cohort were up there, but everyone is getting better. The weekly progress is wild.

@bushidocodes In that context, security's job is to keep things secure, full stop. It's a hard paradigm shift from the private sector where security is almost always secondary to other business objectives.

Anyone been in a situation where your employer was blocking all top level domains other than dotcom and dotgov on your work laptop? I tried to present a reasoned list of important developer resources at other domains like dotdev and dotjava, but the security folks don’t care.

Personal Log: @gauntletai Week 5, Friday Night It's 10:24 PM in Austin and I started a new partner project an hour ago. I thought it would be boring and impossible, but now I'm hooked and I don't want to leave the office. Currently Playing: Pentatonix youtube.com/watch?v=q7ZlLN…

Lol I can't count.

Personal Log: @gauntletai Week 3, Friday Night It's 10pm and downtown Austin is buzzing with SXSW. Aside from the low thump of distant music, nobody in the gauntlet workspace seems to have noticed. People are heads-down coding or talking agents and models and demos.

@dexhorthy @tejasybhakta It’s Turing machines all the way down

@tejasybhakta Every coding agent will be a general purpose agent

every agent will be a coding agent

Personal Log: @gauntletai Week 4, Hello Austin The energy here is exactly as advertised. Overloaded and loving it. Currently Building: a progressive web app with a low-latency computer vision pipeline. Now Playing: Mongolian throat-singing folk metal: youtube.com/watch?v=QkWX1q…

@nakoerschner There's more coming and the impacts will be worse as agents are given more control over the real world.

So everyone has been clear about prompt injection in theory. I think this is the first high profile case where I’ve seen it in action.

AI is in its “let’s put windows 95 online” era. People are so busy chasing functionally that very few are thinking about security and liability. I predict a several large, public incidents followed by tighter governance.

Personal Log: @gauntletai Week 3, Final Submission -- The Shape of Code -- On the left is LAPACK, a Fortran linear algebra package. On the right is gnucobol, a... Gnu COBOL compiler. Running live here: gitnexus.smallcatlabs.com You're looking at a graph representation of each code base rendered on GitNexus, where agents can access this graph as through it were a RAG, but one based on symbolic chunks instead of semantic ones: github.com/abhigyanpatwar… However, GitNexus supports neither Fortran nor COBOL. For my week 3 @gauntletai project, I challenged myself to vibe-hacked both languages into my own fork of GitNexus: github.com/gerwaric/GitNe… That's what's running on Small Cat Labs right now. And aside from all the package dependency and deployment nightmares, this was terrible fun. And made in 3 days...

@bushidocodes If it's the verbosity of the keyword, would it help to replace them (and maybe variables and symbols) with non-ascii unicode characters, so the agents can speak to each other with a dense private language?

For large scale COBOL modernization with teams of agents, output token windows seem to be more of an issue. With Opus 4.6 1M, it’s 1M tokens in and 32k tokens out. That’s something like 23k after overheads or approximately 1,000 lines of code. Mind the handoffs between agents!

@bushidocodes That's a tough choice, but congrats on making the call when it was needed.

I’ve decided to give notice at the IRS. I’m going to crunch for another five weeks to deliver my current projects and hand in my badge on April 3rd. Not my ideal outcome, but I think it’s best to rip the bandaid off quick where there are major expectations misalignments.

@SeloSlav Literally, even. With apologies for the paywall: ft.com/content/a56d70…

@ChShersh @0xleegenz C++ is currently in the middle of saving my career

@0xleegenz Learned C++

During a very dark period, what was the best thing you ever did for your mental health?