Building causal AI. Prev co-founder at Stackfix. Technically optimistic. Northern Irish.
San Francisco, CA
Joined June 2009
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Camin McCluskey retweeted
the years before the work finds its shape are the years everyone misreads. from the outside: aimlessness, indecision, a person who can’t explain what they’re doing because what they’re doing doesn’t have a name yet. circling a subject with a devotion that looks, to everyone watching, like paralysis.
from the inside: a fever. a low, constant, productive fever. the mind is assembling something that the craft can’t deliver yet and that the mouth can’t name and the inability to describe the thing you’re becoming to the people who knew the thing you were - that inability is its own particular wilderness. and I have lived in it, and the living in it was the making of me, though I couldn’t have told you that at the time. at the time, I would have told you I was lost.
it's kind of boring to review markdown documents to then watch someone else do my job for me
We're at an awkward transitional point where developers, who don't want to write, nonetheless have to because they're the only ones that know what to write.
Honestly considering adopting a different workflow:
1. Write a first draft plan with Codex
2. Pawn off all the trivial bits to Codex to implement
3. (rather than go back and forth in English on the thornier bits) Jump into Cursor, with the plan as context and implement directly
This obviously keeps you more engaged in the process (underrated). Secondly, lots of bad implementation decisions get made in documents - it's much harder to do this when you're hands on with the code.
Entire classes of issues go away also. E.g. dead code is impossible to spot in a planning doc, but easy to spot in the codebase.
I could see this being faster over time, even if every individual feature takes longer, as implementation stays tighter and reworks are less necessary.
(something, something, the agents are only going to get better... Sure but unless they can read minds*, I think it tops out)
*i.e. Even you don't know what you want when you spec a feature
tbh for non-coding tasks I've been using sonnet exclusively, with the exception of long form writing help. Opus has a more fluid and natural writing style
"Immigrants are going to replace our culture!"
What culture is that, exactly?
Is it the Iowa State Fair? Seeing the Hawkeyes play the Cyclones on Saturday night? Eating pork chops on a stick? Church choirs volunteering to help rebuild homes after a tornado?
Is it barbacoa on Sunday morning before mass and your little girl's quinceañera? Or accordion-driven Tejano music playing from a pickup truck?
Is it moms dropping their kids off for Calabasas ballet in Range Rovers and Teslas? Lululemon and Vuori? Angry meetings about fence heights at the HOA?
Is it salsa coming through open windows on hot days? Folding chairs gathered around a domino game? Puerto Rican and American flags everywhere to honor Marines coming home?
Is it Southern comfort food at Mary Mac's Tea Room? Morehouse and Spelman grads meeting to network? Southern rap blasting at Magic City?
People afraid of being "replaced" have too narrow a view of what America is about. And yes, America can include a statue of the Hindu god Hanuman in Houston. (Because, c'mon, what is more over-the-top Texan than a 90-foot golden statue of a dude wielding a huge bad-ass club?)
My American culture doesn't discriminate based on ethnic background. My American culture is one that can deal with immigrants because it embraces their myriad varieties. My American culture holds dear democracy, freedom, and independence.
My America believes in self-governance, from jury rooms, where 12 strangers gather to decide a fellow citizen's fate, to town halls, to local elections, to national campaigns. It's watching locals grill an annoyed city council about a new park or too much crime downtown.
My America believes in free speech so much that we put it at the top of the Bill of Rights. I get to call my leaders idiots and feel no fear of prison or punishment. I believe in allowing marches and protests, from the good ones (Selma and Stonewall) to the ones I dislike (Proud Boys or Antifa).
My America is proud to see rows of new citizens lined up at city hall, with many different skin tones but the same expression of hope and anticipation. Because my America is Ronald Reagan's America, "still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home."
So it's ok if some people march in a St Patrick's Day parade while others celebrate the Vietnamese (Tet) New Year, as long as they are all committed to freedom, democracy, the Constitution, and this amazing thing called "America."
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This might be the first time I've seen an LLM give an opinion when not explicitly asked for one. Not sure I love this:
- Where does the grounding for an opinion come from?
- For which unsettled issues will it proffer an opinion vs. stating the evidence on both sides?
- To what extent is its opinion enriched by memory, and therefore vulnerable to sycophancy?
@diabrowser
Hours 1-6 vibe coding: this is incredible, I'm literally flying rn, I never want to not do this .
Hours 6+: this fucking sucks, I don't know what's happening anymore, and my head hurts.
It's much like drinking in this way
