campbel

objective systems become gamified

subjective systems become politicized

pick your poison

I am definitely going to do this as I age, I just don't need the stimulant effects as much anymore. That said, the ritual of getting coffee and sipping on something warm in the morning is really important to starting my day right.

It's been on a downward trend before agentic coding took over. I suspect it's a mix of Microsoft culture and Microsoft infrastructure. It's starting to feel about the same quality as other Microsoft services.

Short aside, I have to rehost dotnet CLI binaries because their hosting infrastructure is so unreliable that it was causing CI failures regularly.

Anything beyond this is usually a play to trap you into an ecosystem. No reason to adopt any of these frameworks, especially if you already have a mature workflow system.

This is why an org should have skip-levels. You can't put anyone on an island with that kind of unchecked authority and expect good results.

Back in early 2000s, before hackerrank and similar coding sites, this is what my professors recommended for training programming skills.

Given that this space is so rapidly evolving, these kinds of posts are helpful just to make sure you aren't missing anything big. I've caught myself doing something the hard way after reading one of these. In this case, the framing is basically man pages for CLIs was a helpful description of sills that gives me some ideas about how to improve interaction with an in-house CLI my co. uses.

As a technologist, you should always avoid MS. Even if they have a best-in-class solution for some domain, they will use that to leverage you into their absolute worst-in-class ecosystem.

I did angular for many years and just recently came back to doing frontend work for a recent project. This is my experience with react, its not perfect and there are a few react-isms to learn, but it tends to make you do the right thing.

100%. I use em-dashes a decent amount and plan to continue. If someone wants to incorrectly assume it was AI writing so be it.

Normal people are just weird people you don't know very well.

I wish I had the courage to post and talk like this more. I really resonated with the authors words as these kinds of feelings make up a lot of my internal monologuing some days.

Do you take requests? We need to see how well this model works with some fine-tuning :D

The author describes a lot of directives they found useful. Be aware Claude has the concept of `slash commands` https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/slash-command...

I think the intention of it, as weird as it may seem, is to punish people for engaging with content the other subreddit mods feel is distasteful enough to warrant the effort.

I can't speak to whether this is a useful tactic on their part, or whether its fair to you, but IMO this is just another kind of "free speech" that exists.

Is it some form of least-recently-used approach? I'm running tests on my own mind trying to figure it out now :D part of what I love about this area of computer science.

From the linked Programmer blog [1]:

It might seem lowly to be a Programmer, but in a world where so much is driven by computers there's nothing shameful in being the person who makes them go.

I find it interesting that in 2012 he thought the title of "Programmer" was shameful. In 2012 I was a somewhat recent grad and definitely more junior, at that time I thought programmers were the smartest folks at my company, exactly because they were "the [people] who make [computers] go".

[1] https://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/programmer.html

"Strange" times is a bit of an understatement.

Tilt is useful for local-dev where you are going to be modifying code / k8s configs and want live reload when you make changes. That is almost the entire appeal.

I did a blog post for Linkerd showing some of the benefits of using Tilt https://linkerd.io/2024/12/02/tilt-linkerd-nginx-part-1/.

TL;DR you can run some of your infra in local-dev that provide parity with your production environment.

This is the difference between open source to share useful code and open source to build leverage for a business.

They define it in the same file https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-python/blob/48ff99bb...

An agent is an AI model configured with instructions, tools, guardrails, handoffs and more.

Agents can hand off to other agents, but even the hand-off is decided by the agent itself, not a pre-defined orchestration.

This link is also referring to the nodes as agents. So its a system of agents interacting to product an outcome. I'm not saying this system is bad, just that I think it deserves another name rather than calling the whole system an "Agent". It's many agents working in a coordinated fashion.

That's what I am talking about as well. The low-level implementation of an agent isn't necessarily a rigid graph, and I'd actually argue its explicitly not this.

I follow Mr. Huang, read/watch his content and also plan to use PocketFlow in some cases. A preamble, because I don't agree with this assessment. I think agents as nodes in a DAG workflow is _an_ implementation of an agentic system, but is not the systems I most often interact with (e.g. Cursor, Claude + MCP).

Agentic systems can be simply the LLM + prompting + tools[1]. LLMs are more than capable (especially chain-of thought models) to breakdown problems into steps, analyze necessary tools to use and then executing the steps in sequence. All of this is done with the model in the driver seat.

I think the system described in the post need a different name. It's a traditional workflow system with an agent operating on individual tasks. Its more rigid in that the workflow is setup ahead of time. Typical agentic systems are largely undefined or defined via prompting. For some use cases this rigidity is a feature.

[1 https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/tool-us...

because the idea that one can make revolutionary discoveries that contradicts the status quo as an outsider is an inherently attractive idea

This might be satisfying if you have a grievance with the "institution" but to OP's point its also interesting because we often limit our areas of exploration to what is conventionally accepted. If you are ignorant of convention you are more likely to retread ground, but less likely to be bounded by it. As you say, conventional wisdom is conventional because its pretty dang good, so this doesn't often pay off.

Alternative https://maaslalani.com/slides/

The most important thing for developers to understand when it comes to MCP: MCP is a protocol for dynamically loading additional capabilities into an AI application, e.g. Claude Desktop, Cursor, Highlight.ai etc...

If you are building your own applications, you can simply use "Tools APIs" provided by the LLM directly (e,.g. https://platform.openai.com/docs/assistants/tools).

MCP is not something most people need to bother with unless you are building an application that needs extension or you are trying to extend an application (like those I listed above). Under the hood the MCP is just an interface into the tools API.

I think they were going for a very clean aesthetic that focused attention, which it does well. My only gripe is I find the blinking a bit annoying, it could have been a more subtle gradient.

I'd encourage folks to go look at the source code for the referenced project https://github.com/DevrathIyer/ballotproof/tree/master.

This does not strike me as nefarious in any way and there is a really valid reason for generating the ballot images -- testing, which is exactly how it is used in the project.