Dustin Getz

Lightning talk! A Datomic Entity Browser for Prod — Clojure Conj 2025 #ElectricClojure

@PhilipJohnston @ycombinator early stage updates that are not backed by clear traction (i.e., accomplishing what you said you would) are damaging. And it just takes one strong update demonstrating a leap forward to get investors excited again and put everything back on track.

Early-stage founders should send more investor updates. There, I said it. As a (very) small time angel I now see that maybe half of founders send regular updates, which suprised me a bit tbh. At the end of every @YCombinator batch they give a speech which is essentially: “Just don’t die.” Every founder has their own way of interpreting/internalising/actioning that, but mine is: “Religiously send an update at the start of every month.” I never skip and I’m never late. 100% of companies that die, stop sending updates at some point. Its simple to the point of stupidity really: If I’m still sending updates, I’m still alive. Also has some nice externalities like investors are more likely to be there for you when times are tough.

@arian_ghashghai The problem with weird bets is they compete with consensus bets that raise big $$$ and then never actually exit, but the seed fund still gets paid through secondary even though the bet was wrong. Seems like a lot of seed funds made good money just riding up gusts of air.

@arian_ghashghai do they raise their A's?

Many deals I invested in early (that later became a degree of "legible" or found great business traction) somewhat scared the crap out of me when committing because either (or all): 1) the idea is kinda nuts (but also totally makes sense) 2) I doubt they'll raise money from anyone else atm (risky as a tiny fund) 3) the problem space is stupidly hard (but has enormous upside if it works) Nonetheless, I feel like I'm not really pursuing alpha if the deal doesn't frighten me slightly (i.e. not thinking big enough)

@BraaiEngineer same

I can only keep track of 3 parallel agents, even within the same project. I've tried 4, but I lose track of what they're working on and sometimes send instructions to the wrong window

@BraaiEngineer /r/replit

who is using Replit? I don't know anyone using Replit. everyone I know building with AI is using Codex or Claude Code

Meetup alert! TOMORROW, Tuesday March 10 I'll be presenting clojure.net, a new Clojure UI experiment from Hyperfiddle. Embed service management console UIs in enterprise microservices that only have a backend, with zero frontend code! Get a great management console UI for your enterprise services with absolutely no client-side framework, no REST APIs, no Dockerfiles! Join us TOMORROW (March 10) at 2:30 ET / 1830 London for this virtual event: meetup.com/london-clojuri…

@stevekrouse Nice!!

i regret to inform you that i found a legitimate use-case for crypto: killing api keys

@dmitriid electric clojure distributed process supervision

The only languages you should switch to for concurrency are Elixir/Erlang. Everything else is meh, and revolves around the same thread/lock/shared data ideas from 60 years ago.

"exponentials feel like nothing for a very long time and then feel like everything all at once"

@urivalev named output ports doesn't seem that ergonomic in text, because the caller must unpack the names. It seems a lot more ergonomic as a flowchart lang

haskell.org/arrows/syntax.… may be it, though it represents multi-outputs as tuples. Electric functions can return "multiple outputs in superposition" via an amb-like structure but it is intended to encode concurrency, it is not named output ports. I have definitely seen a structure in the wild where nodes have named output slots but i cannot recall

How to use AI to recursively eliminate tech debt, completely autonomously: 1) encode your system as a program DAG (the hard part) 2) have the ability to visualize the DAG 3) give the agent the ability to visualize the DAG 4) tell the agent to look for locally tangled connected components in the DAG 5) use AI to automatically refactor the tangle to locally increase referential transparency, thereby simplifying the DAG 6) verify that the resulting programs are referentially equivalent

> The remaining unsatisfied inputs of target, sourceA and sourceB bubble up as the composed component's new required inputs. The result is (again) a component with a set of known typed inputs and output. that's interesting and i need to think about it! Is there a composition structure in haskell or other prior art that is shaped like this?

@dustingetz dustin wdyt about github.com/uriva/graft

@rikarends to our benefit, the boomer management doesn't know how to operate their laptop let alone AI

I really wonder whats going to happen when most of the middle of society realises they are already unemployed, just nobody told their employer yet. This can't go over well.

@MrJTroyer @MaineFrameworks Yes, I do think we'll get a tidal wave of long tail applications built on saas-era tech stack that flood into hard to reach places that were too expensive to serve before

@dustingetz @MaineFrameworks Yeah, the best thing to do by far is just make prototype after prototype after prototype until you find what sticks the best. Once the models get good at game dev I suspect we'll get an explosion, because good game dev is like 80% prototyping.

The world underestimates how difficult frontier software products are to build. Take the PKM category, ALL major players are FROZEN with ZERO product velocity, including Notion and their reported $600M ARR! What agentic coding methods seem to have done is reduced the cost of replicating previous-generation methods. Indie devs (and VCs) building pixel art nintendo games. Soon games built on top of Unreal Engine, because they can program the Unreal framework about as well as they can program Python, which is spectacularly. But without developing new frameworks, the agentic methods will simply reproduce the same set of flaws and issues that the current generation of growth stage products have. Which means they are (1) uncompetitive, and (2) late. The fundamental problem of software is that it becomes difficult to change once you have users and revenue. Being 100x faster to generate code does not solve that problem that landing the code in prod breaks the user's workflow and generates churn. Agentic coding methods also accelerate research and development, so I anticipate a new generation of more agile products. But still, these will be built by more competent founders, not less. AI reduces switching costs and accelerates learning. The advantage right now is to R&D teams that figure out how to take advantage of the new capability frontier to accelerate their very slow R&D lifecycle.

@oliverbeavers I'll believe it when I see it, Notion engineering has been taking about Notion 2.0 or whatever for 10 years now, and I also reject generally the idea of an offline-first architecture for an enterprise product, because "enterprise" rhymes with two things: SECURITY and SCALE

I mostly agree, but (and I almost hate to say it) Notion is right in the middle of the exact technology pivot that you say won't be done. They're moving the entirety of their architecture onto an offline-first concept with all of the novel version control/agent unlocks that you'd expect from such tech adoption. It's pretty cool to watch that happen live for a product at that scale.

@HackingLZ it's bifurcating, high agency people are working more, but lower end folks are washing out and struggling to stay employed

Still waiting to meet the person who's actually working less because of LLMs. Everyone I know is just doing more. Faster PoCs, better R&D, RE goes quicker, all of it. nobody's clocking out early.

@fbrasisil i agree with this, but isn’t providing the right abstractions exactly your role in this interaction?

In this instance, I made an intentional effort to implement a new http library 100% via Claude Code. We got quite far, but the code is just not good enough. It can grind to make something work but finding the right abstractions is nowhere near its capabilities

Seeing people say "coding is solved" when I'm fully rewriting a couple weeks of work with Claude Code is a bittersweet thing. I love the tech and it was a good way to explore what needs to be implemented but the reality is that we're still..... so far

New demo: Netcel is a network/graph-based spreadsheet designed to be a better Excel. Netcel now supports formulas with EDN/CSV/JSON & XML and gracefully handles adversarial formulas like `(while true)` or `(into [] (range))`, which are infinite loops: you'd expect it to blow up, but it doesn't. Because Netcel is good now. Netcel can be managed by AI agents and can also use agents. To-date, there exists no good UI for the last horizontal data structure: graphs. Netcel is still early with lots of room for improvement. My research on bounded resource estimation using control system techniques will feature heavily. The dataflow runtime will soon support friendlier formulas above & beyond Clojure and it will hopefully "just work." The right company to buy Netcel is led by @satyanadella or Sergey Brin. Netcel is built in Clojure and uses SCI by the great & powerful @borkdude for evaluation, sprinkled with some Missionary by the great and powerful @36Rleonoel.