Zack Swafford

273 posts

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Zack Swafford

Zack Swafford

@zswaff

building @its_dart, where humans and AI agents actually get work done. wiring agents into real teams and posting what breaks.

San Francisco, CA Katılım Mart 2012
141 Takip Edilen125 Takipçiler
Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
@DmytroKrasun Cheaper execution also lowers the cost of being wrong, not just the cost of building. You can test an idea, find out it doesn’t work, and move on faster.
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Dmytro Krasun
Dmytro Krasun@DmytroKrasun·
Jeff Bezos: "Your margin is my opportunity". You can’t keep enjoying 80%+ gross margins in software without inviting more entrepreneurs into your industry. Even without coding agents, competition in software would keep growing anyway: 1. It is a growing part of the world economy. And we are still early. Can you build a house with agents via an API and get all approvals and hire robots to execute on that? 2. New generations. People switching careers. More people are joining. And will keep joining. Software is more fundamental than hardware. It increasingly manages the physical world. Software belongs to the world of ideas. And ideas will be worth more and more, especially as execution becomes cheaper. If anything, AI only accelerates forces that were already in place.
@levelsio@levelsio

Like good odds I'm wrong but I wanted to write this down: It's pretty clear to me that superintelligence is here and it's more powerful than us and it's moving where things are going now, not humans anymore I don't see many people realize this yet, it feels like that pic I posted the other day, everyone is running after the same carrot which is the AI, thinking they're special, and their work is special and their use of AI is special, but it's really not, we're all mostly making the same slop, I mean it's nice slop, useful slop but everyone is making the same slop And because it's so fast to make things, like people used to spend a year on just building an app, now it's done in hours, it's such an immense change, people send me their projects and it all looks the same, it's useful but it's slop Non-technical people (e.g. the gfs) are now building the same or better things than technical people like us So AI has made everybody is just as capable as everyone else, it equalized everyone in the world, as in everyone can make everything (software, music, images, art etc) now and everyone is equal, at least in the digital realm now And maybe now we're in some odd transitionary time where we have to find out waht the next differentiator is as coding/building/execution isn't one anymore for sure I thought it'd be distribution but who knows, obviously creativity and ideas, but if you can copy a successful apps in an hour, then how does that differentiating work? A guy on here @aporia9n wrote how he increasingly meets founders who blast through apps/products/startups, kind of money grabs, very quickly jumping on a trend, building super quickly with AI, make lots of money quick, everyone copies them, then their margins go to 0%, and they shut it down and go to the next thing, in a way they found one differentiator which is speed That's one way to do it, but it shows how radically things are changing I think For now I think the only ones winning is the AI superintelligence itself and the companies providing the AI

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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
@yongfook Maybe the missing dataset has to be captured during the work: each revision, the feedback behind it, and why the next version changed. It won't train a global model, but it could make a team's agent much better.
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Jon Yongfook
Jon Yongfook@yongfook·
People saying "it's just a matter of time" - where will the training data come from? Coding LLMs have benefitted from billions of lines of open source repos with comments, discussions, commit histories; all useful free data that points towards what is definably "good code". There is no such resource for "good design" to train on. Even when good design hits git repos in the form of UIs / landing pages etc, it has gone through countless offline revisions that LLMs don't have access to. Good design rules are scattered around in books, company design systems / guidelines, private email threads, meeting notes, or simply kept in designers' heads left verbally unarticulated. You simply won't see the same level of acceleration in design capability as you did for coding, with AI.
Jon Yongfook@yongfook

Claude is a better coder than me. But I’m still a better designer than Claude. It will throw together a UI and I can optimize it in ways that make sense to a human but have not been materially documented, not found in training data. We humans still have purpose. For now.

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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
we’re still in the room-sized computer era of ai
Zack Swafford tweet media
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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
I'm as big a codex fan as anyone but it's annoying that voice chat is gone from the new combined app right when the new voice model's out. I'm a millennial, not going to use my phone for this
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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
GPT-5.6 Sol was given all six problems from this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad, one of the hardest math competitions for high school students. It reportedly produced solutions to all six in about an hour and scored 41/42. What I like is the setup. The problems had only been released that day, so they couldn’t have been in the model’s training data. Web search was off, and it got one run per problem. This wasn’t an old benchmark it might have seen before. The 41/42 is the report authors’ own score, not an official IMO score, so it still needs independent review. But if you want to know what a model can do with something genuinely new, this is a pretty useful test. github.com/SignalPilot-La…
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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
You can only stay in code red for so long before it just becomes the normal way of working. Gemini 3.5 Pro is months late while multiple teams across Google are building overlapping AI coding tools. Google definitely isn’t short on urgency. The more difficult problem may be getting all those teams moving in the same direction. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
@mitsuhiko Is it mostly too slow for basic tasks, or does the extra thinking actually make the result worse?
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Armin Ronacher ⇌
Armin Ronacher ⇌@mitsuhiko·
Kimi K3 given the current max thinking mode restrictions is not a good match for some basic tasks. Keep that in mind when evaluating it.
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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
@clairevo @chatprd I think the parts that don't fit the standard founder story are exactly why people are enjoying it so much.
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claire vo 🖤
claire vo 🖤@clairevo·
Really humbled that people are enjoying this chat. I’m always so nervous to talk about why and how I do the business; there is so much judgement about whether @chatprd is a real product, why don’t I take VC it could be bigger, the ultimate sin of Silicon Valley (saying idc about making a 10bn business), going full-tradwife and talking about my kids and husband as my reason for everything, & my journey which is anything but standard. @julianweisser is a kind and generous interviewer, and as a bonus has the raddest office in noe valley.
weisser@julianweisser

Everyone loves Claire's solo founder story.

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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
I like the permission model here. The agent gets the same permissions as the person running it, every action is tied to that person, and access can be revoked. No separate back door just because AI is involved.
freeCodeCamp.org@freeCodeCamp

AI coding agents can write code fast, but speed doesn't matter if nobody trusts the output. In this article, @TechWithRJ2 explains how harness engineering helped make their internal documentation platform AI-native. You'll learn how type checks, test coverage, end-to-end tests, MCP tools, and more can make agent work safer and more useful. freecodecamp.org/news/harness-e…

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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
The built-in agent seems most useful as the zero-setup option. Let someone get a useful result on your site, then give them the APIs and tools to run that workflow in their own agent if they want.
Guillermo Rauch@rauchg

The case for your own public agent, on your .com. 0️⃣ First, the anti-case. If you haven't shipped high quality APIs for agents, start there. OpenAPI specs, SDKs, CLIs and MCPs as appropriate. 1️⃣ Convenience. Not every customer has a harness 'at the ready' for every possible interaction with your product and company. Shipping one on your own domain covers a lot of spontaneous requirements. 2️⃣ Security. When you go to 𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚌𝚎𝚕.𝚌𝚘𝚖 and talk to Agent, we put in the work to cover audit trails, a least-privilege permission model, and extra assurances to ensure security, privacy and data integrity. It's fully cloud-based and sandboxed, vs. a sprawl of static credentials on users' machines. 3️⃣ Proactivity. We're still in the "human enters prompt" phase of AI. Our cloud-based agent can act on anomaly alerts triggered by exceptions, attacks, usage spikes. Our agent needs to monitor your infra while you sleep. You can, of course, set up workflows and schedules with your own harnesses, but it gets much harder. I think it's ultimately a sequencing thing. I agree with Mitchell that the priority is to give users choice and flexibility. We give people vercel.com/plugin to integrate with every agent out there. Our CLI and MCP are constantly improving. Our own Agent re-uses the same skills.sh everyone gets. All our sites are Markdown-over-the-wire if you're an agent. Based on the data and anecdata available to me, this strategy is working quite well, but YMMV.

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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
@mattpocockuk This feels like the right balance. Ask every independent question in the round, then use those answers to decide what comes next.
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Matt Pocock
Matt Pocock@mattpocockuk·
/grill-me and /grill-with-docs are changing No more "one question at a time" - now it asks questions in rounds Faster, less token spend, but still keeps dependencies between questions clear. Shipping in v1.2
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Maximilian
Maximilian@maxedapps·
"smoke test" becoming my word of the year 2026 wasn't on my bingo card
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Zack Swafford
Zack Swafford@zswaff·
@amritwt This makes the K3 comparison much cleaner. Same harness, different model.
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