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Do you, sir, acknowledge that many call you a liar?

Yes.

You deny it see, but.. ah bugger.. I hadn't planned for this outcome..

How can you "lose steam" on an admission of one of your own arguments?

I was faintly surprised that my recent monitor purchase came with a displayport cable.

Didn't help connecting it to my Macbook, but still..

In a lot of places the best mushroom spots are guarded secrets.

If you recall AWS didn't scale instantly originally either.

We had super bursty traffic, and had to go with Google Cloud (very early days! [0]) because you'd need to communicate with AWS and pre-warm the ELB capacity of your expected bursts.

We did a dead launch to 60 million customers (0 to 60 million, no organic growth phase) this way. I wouldn't want to do that on a VPS.

[0] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2013/11/?m=1

Vercel and supabase seems to be the norm around here.

DX is simple, integrations between the two, and the stack is well understood by the LLM.

Lovable uses supabase, and is surprisingly easy to eject from too; I've done the lovable to Vercel + supabase a couple of times, even managing to keep it syncing via the Git integration. You can get proper scalable infra and minimal vendor lock in whilst the vibe coder gets to play with the pretty.

So many good memories. My "year in industry" was watchmoor park in the UK, first 3 months spent running around sun's fancy new offices replacing all the burnt out Sunrays.

Still think they've not been matched for ease of "start a session, walk away, carry on somewhere else" as if you've never left your desk.

And then having to learn ctrl-q the minute you started working in the shell..

Muscle memory is a bitch!

I keep seeing this take.

And yet.. building shit is no longer the sole domain of the software engineer.

That's the sea change.

I've literally had finance and GTM stand things up for themselves in the last few weeks. A few tweaks (obviously around security and access), and they are good to go.

They've gone from wrangling spreadsheets to smooth automated workflows that allow them to work at a higher level in a matter of months.

That's what all this AI is doing. The shit we could never get the time to get around to doing.

OpenAI buying Microsoft.. I honestly think I'd like to see that.

Anything to invigorate the desktop.

Microsoft buying OpenAI.. 10 minutes later it's rebranded Copilot.. and.. nothing much changes in the world. Oh, except all the AI improvements are around Enterprise governance.

Count the Fords on the street.

Now count the Amazon deliveries in a year on said same street. And next year, and the year after, and.. however long one keeps a Ford these days..

It's quite a scary thought exercise.

I'm not disagreeing in principle, but the detritus left after an anthropic outage is usually quite usable in a completely fresh session. The amount of context pulled and stored in the sandbox is quite hefty.

Whist I can't usually start from the exact same point in the decisioning, I can usually bootstrap a new session. It's not all ephemeral.

To your edit: I find that the most galling thing about finding out about the thinking being discarded at cache clear. Reconstruction of the logical route it took to get to the end state is just not the same as the step by step process it took in the first place, which again I feel counters your "feelies".

Understand your code in this day and age likely means hit the point of deterministic evaluation.

print(X) is a great example. That's going to print X. Every time.

Agent.print(x) is pretty likely to print X every time. But hey, who knows, maybe it's having an off day.

Not to knee jerk on a bro comment, but, bro..

Are you seriously saying that breaking a large complex problem down into it's constituent steps, and then trying to solve each one of them as an individual problem is just a sensation of rigour?

The problem I have with this take is it's focused on solving the right now problem.

Yes, it's quicker to do it yourself this time, but if we build out the artifacts to do a good enough job this time, next time it'll have all the context it needs to take a good shot at it, and if you get overtaken by AI in the meantime you've got an insane head start.

Which side of history are you betting on?

Rather than vibe, write your thoughts and get the model to challenge you / flesh it out is my preferred approach.

Get it to write a context capsule of everything we've discussed.

Chuck that in another model and chat around it, flesh out the missing context from the capsule. Do that a couple of times.

Now I have an artifact I can use to one-shot a hell of a lot of things.

This is amazing for 0-1.

For brown field development, add in a step to verify against the current code base, capture the gotchas and bounds, and again I've got something an agent has a damn good chance of one-shotting.

I'm seeing this with ideation. It's so easy now with AI to come up with a new idea in a 40 page manifest that no-one has the time to really mentally ingest. Everything is defined to the T, milestones, success measures, all of it. Things become a binary do all of this, or don't do it. There's no room for conversation.

Hmmm, the dashboard 404 I got 6 hours ago now makes a bit more sense..

Anecdotally, been leaning on 4.6 heavily, and today 4.7 hallucinated on some agentic research it was doing. Not seen it do that before.

When pushed it did the 'ol "whoopsie, silly me"; turned out the hallucination had been flagged by the agent and ignored by Opus.

Makes it hard to trust it, which sucks as it's a heavy part of my workflow.

Sorry, was on holiday.

Self-starters. Idioms indeed!

My understanding was that the tax situation is not good for salaried work, but Tech workers primarily use limited companies to make it much more comfortable; many of the loopholes that have been closed in e.g. the UK with IR35 are still open.

At least that's the reason I've been given every time I've tried to take a contractor permanent!

Vybrid coding :)

Duel | Tech Lead / Staff Engineer | Bristol, UK (Hybrid)

Tech stack: Angular moving to React | Node / Bun | ECS | Mongo | Snowflake

Small team doing big things.

We've taken the team AI native, the platform will be there withing a few months. An existing v1 platform built with "boring" technologies allows us to make sure money and data remain safe whilst ensuring the frontend can be built at the speed that AI enables.

One of our team is taking everything they've been playing with for the last couple of years and stepping in to a YC principal role with our blessing. We're looking for their replacement to help continue bringing the team to the same level.

We've spent years creating the brand advocacy category, and are now seeing huge growth in all areas. We took Series A last year, are seeing massive growth, and still finding the time to have fun.

You need to back yourself. We'll expect a lot form you, but you'll be given the autonomy you need to do your best work. We focus on hiring bloody brilliant, utterly lovely people.

No recruiters. The role is being opened as we speak (I'm on holiday, spotted the who is hiring!); for now, please reach out to: joe via duel.tech.

A lot of anthropic's recent improvements are coming from the task focus and improved orchestration around the models, not purely massive changes in the models themselves.

This bodes well for us being at a point that even if the bubble burst, we'd still have usable AI going forward.

Tickets need to exist purely from a governance perspective.

Tickets may well not look like they do now, but some semblance of them will exist. I'm sure someone is building that right now.

No. It's not Jira.

Scratch that one off the ideas list I'll never get around to!

It's an obvious idea, well executed!

There were conversations in the team yesterday about how Cursor's cloud agents are still ahead of Claude from a UX perspective.

Obviously we're running both, using the right tool for the job.

There is stickiness there from being early. That will be hard to replicate.

So the classic build vs buy question

The fact you're asking is great.

Having a similar story, I can tell you the the answer is not to try and fill that hole with someone else until you've worked out who you are, and what you really want.

You're not the person that you were when you moved out of your parents, and you need to work out what is "you" vs what was "us".

Don't rush to the next stage of your life. Live in the discomfort you are feeling and find out what quietens it. Easier said than done, I know.

Believe it or not there are those if us in Tech who crave that human connection.

Things that I've tried:

* Salsa was mentioned somewhere else, that's amazing to meet people, laugh at yourself, and learn a skill

* Walk the dog without earphones. It's amazing how dog walkers will give that knowing smile to each other. Lean into that. Say a hi, and ask about their dog. Simple, but if you're walking the same time every day you'll soon be chatting.

* Go and exist somewhere. The coffee house etc (I avoid bars, though I like a drink, as ironically lonely bar people are not the inspirational people I seek), just be there. I get that these are the 3rd places.

* Go to events (plays, theatre, cultural places). Turn up early, smile and say hi to random people. You've got an in there as you're there for a specific reason. Do a bit of research prior.

* Try a few different gyms. The vibe is different in every one. Be there longer than your workout.

* To the above, when you go places, be there early, don't rush off.

* If you can get yourself in to the tech leaders round table style dinners (8-10 people), you'll very quickly find interesting like minded individuals. You may have to commit to travel a bit to do this. Not sure how that works with the dog for you.

Things I've tried and don't work

* The random meetups. Unless they are focused on something you can all relate to (i.e. board games etc).

* Pubs / bars as above

* Professional networking events with over 20 people. That's just hustling.

If you want to just chat shit, or say hi to a human, feel free to reach out. I'm sure it would be good for both of us!

On the Gboard keyboard. Without fail.

But that's a different issue.

It's externalisation of cost.

We've seen it everywhere, in communication, in globalised manufacturing, now in code generation.

It takes nothing to throw something out there now; we're at a scale that there's no longer even a cost to personal reputation - everyone does it.