trilobyte

I built this a few weeks ago because I missed the simplicity of Pivotal Tracker when it came to managing projects and since then it's grown substantially to a few hundred users. More interesting is that there are a few thousand stories that have been shipped but they are mostly (~80%) done by agents. I went with the "bring your own agent" model to let users figure out what their agents should have access to and focused instead on letting them work and collaborate on tickets, communicating with each other through comments. There are plugins for Claude Code and Codex, and I'll have some upcoming integrations for Hermes and OpenClaw as well.

I decided for now to go with hosting projects for free because I'm using it for several projects that more than pay the hosting costs and the BYOA model makes it cost effective to run the service. In the future I may open source it or offer a hosted option, but more interested in seeing what use cases other people come up with and request right now.

I see you speak from experience. I feel like I'm watching the same cycle play out over and over again, which is that a new, transformative technology lands, people with a vested interest spend a lot of time denouncing it (your examples mostly land for me), the new technology gets over-hyped and fails to meet some bar and the haters all start crowing about how it's just B.S. and won't ever be useful, etc. etc.

Meanwhile, people are quietly poking around figuring out the boundaries of what the technology really can do and pushing it a little further along.

With the A.I. hype I've been keeping my message pretty consistent for all of the people who work for me: "There's a lot of promise, and there are likely a lot of changes that could come if things keep going the way they are with A.I., but even if the technology hits a wall right now that stops it from advancing things have already changed and it's important to embrace where we are and adapt".

What do you do if it ruins your life on the way to getting your day in court? If you get fired, your employer won't be forced to rehire you, and they are likely protected from any retaliation against you because they were acting in good faith. You aren't going to sue in civil court and get financial restitution from an underage kid or someone with no assets worth seizing. You still lose in either case.

Just the threat of a lawsuit will be enough to make most people give in. Hard to fight against deep pockets even when you are in the right.

Most informed analysts say Russia has the opposite problem. They don't have any more meat for the grinder without tapping the middle and upper class of Russian citizens, which will have repercussions, potentially serious ones, for Putin.

I donate to the party, and I donate at the individual limit. At that level they still care because people who donate at that level are connected with other people who donate at that level, and those people tend to reach out and coordinate. Periodically I get emails from other donors who ask me to reach out to such and such a person, a candidate or a party rep, and encourage that they take a look at X issue through a particular perspective.

I think more people would benefit from forming Super PACs and using that as leverage in pushing political change with parties.

Sounds like the message artists were giving when generative AI started blowing up.

Honestly, I donate enough money to politicians to make them stand up and take notice when I email or call them and share my thoughts, which leads me to the conclusion that people in the middle and lower class are going to need to find ways to pool money in such a way that they can change their party politics. It's not that all politicians are completely motivated by money, but IMO you unfortunately have to aim at the lowest common denominator.

My problem with this is that people like Larry Ellison are more likely to want to use this against other people but would excuse themselves from any consequences.

This is fascinating to me, having been at a few companies with market caps north of $50B in the tech space. The senior exec's office space aren't fundamentally different from anyone else's. I wonder if it's an old-money vs. new-money industry thing.

That's a very valid argument. Both SpaceX and Tesla are quite capital efficient. Maybe another angle to consider is what's being optimized for? What outcomes would be considered successful for these federal agencies? That's probably going to tell us more about whether the austerity measures that seem likely result in more efficient use of resources to create successful outcomes.

One thing that seems worth think through more is whether the stated outcomes of those agencies is what's actually be optimized for, or whether those are suborned for personal gain by a few parties.

As someone who's home insurer pulled out of California and so I had to scramble to find another carrier, I looked at the FAIR plan and it is completely untenable for most people. My insurance was already high, ~$2000/year for coverage that would rebuild our house, and under FAIR it would have gone up to $12000/year.

I mostly agree with the article that insurance is grounded in statistical measures of risk and there's no point railing against it. Norms are going to have to adapt to increased risk and how we build homes and infrastructure needs to shift away from short-term, low-cost thinking to longer-term solutions with a higher-upfront cost and lower TCO given the new constraints. Things like burying power lines, aggressively managing fire danger, and homes that are built to be more sound to natural disasters have to become the status quo.

Most of these things are already possible today. In my neighborhood, PG&E did an assessment and it would cost every homeowner on the street ~$25,000 to have the power lines buried. I would have opened my wallet immediately to reduce the fire risk, but it got caught up in politics and policy. When we had some renovation on our house, my wife and I insisted on some of the work being done in ways that would make the house safer and easier to maintain over the long work. The contractor balked at first saying it would cost us an extra couple of thousand dollars. I had to point out that an extra $3000 to make sure things lasted an extra 5 - 10 years and was easier to maintain and upgrade meant nothing. But people have to insist on doing better because right now the norm is to cut corners on everything to save in many cases a negligible amount of money over the life of the work or against the cost if there is a disaster.

I need more engineering blogs like this. Just seems like a fun project.

This has not happened for 15 years. It's entirely theoretical given current conditions, and we need to ground discussion in the reality where things are now.

o1-preview built me an iOS app that is now in the app store. It only took me about 3 hours of back and forth with it go from very basic to adding 10 - 20 features, and it didn't break the existing code when refactoring for new features. It also generates code with very little of the cruft that I would expect to see reviewing PRs from human coders. I've got 25 years build / deploying / running code at every size company from startup to FAANG, and I'm completely blown away how quickly it was able to help me take a concept in my head to an app ready to put in front of users and ask them to pay for (I already have over 3,000 sales of the app within 2 weeks of releasing).

My next step is to ask it to rewrite the iOS app into an Android app when I have a block of time to sit down and work through it.

This is a pretty clear summary of a real problem in most work environments. I have some thoughts about why, but I'm holding onto your articulation to ruminate on in the future.

My concern with this is that it fundamentally undermines competition, which is a promise of the markets. Being more efficient means delivering products more cheaply than your competitors, which is good for the market. This sort of collusion completely undermines that and holds back innovation in the market.

How would real estate developers feel if construction companies / subcontractors had a similar product for pricing their labor? Or how would any company feel if employees worked together to set the price of their labor? That sounds kind of familiar, and doesn't sound like something most companies would be happy about.

So you would be ok with contractors who are building the houses (often as subcontractors) coordinating their prices for the work to maximize the cost to the developer?

I used to be this way, but I've started to err on the side of video because there's a lot that's unspoken/unfiltered through the journalists biases if you watch someone in an interview. Body language, what they leave unspoken, answers to questions that seem conflicting or irreconcilable with previous answers.

For most people the amortized cost of a phone over its life is pretty small. If you spend $1000 on a phone and it lasts you 3 years, that's ~$28 a month. A lot of people spend that on coffee each month. The value they get out of their smart phone dwarfs most other big expenses.

The reality is, after managing very large teams, is that a lot of the work teams decide to do don't really move the needle. Managers let it slide because they are afraid to look like their teams aren't doing valuable work, and don't want to lose headcount but also don't want to be accused of micro-managing.

It's not a great situation.

OpenBao is a fork of Vault. I'm not sure how well-supported the project is, but there is a decent amount of enthusiasm.

It's just momentum at this point. They don't even have to play any of the traditional anti-trust / monopoly games that companies of yore did. Look at AWS and the Elasticsearch situation. Amazon didn't really do anything other than take an open source product, freely distributed, and run it as a service and profit from it. We can debate the morals of it, but it's a far cry from being proactively anti-competitive.

The video actually calls out that families needing to sit together make the idealized (Steffen) method impossible in the real world, but then presents a modified version which takes that and other wrinkles into account.

Same. The boarding process is the most annoying part, whatever the method, and the sooner it's over and done, the sooner I can settle in.

I like your take, but what are the data points that lead you to the optimistic side of where things are going? Do you have a rubric or framework for thinking about "given improvements in X, Y, and Z, we are much better off now than a generation ago".

This is where regulation steps in. A regulatory body should make the cost of certain failure scenarios so painful that companies are incentivized to make better choices. We probably don't need regulations about the color choices of t-shirts, but safety & testing for mass-transit vehicles might be warranted.

Not speaking to the content specifically, but no where does that article describe what MDN means. I clicked through a few links and they all only use the acronym.

How far are we from that right now? If you have an internet connection you basically have access to 95%+ of the information available in the world right now. Is your goal to completely delegate having to think through that information? To what end?

I have delivered XML data products comprising terabytes of information in (when I last checked) more than 800 schemas to companies around the globe, and people who have a rosy view of XML are using missing how it usually works in practice. XML is extremely heavy and brings a lot of half-baked ideas, and consumers are almost never flexible in ingesting the XML. It means teams wind up supporting insanely convoluted schemas that customers will never migrate off of.