2,547 karma · joined September 29, 2010
> However, frontier AI models can now do large-scale ports almost independently in a matter of days
> I wrote zero code. Not "barely any". Zero
So we are going to move from a carefully handwritten port to an entirely AI-generated port. I know this is the way the industry is headed, I use coding agents a ton. But I still review their output because they often don't make sound architectural decisions. Maybe this is a sign that my way of working is going away. I'm not sure how to justify that kind of time spent when someone can do the same thing in a matter of days with barely any effort.
I am working on my own language now, I've spent most of this year on it. The idea that someone could just replace it in a matter of days is wild. Wonder how the TS team at Microsoft feels about this.
> I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. More disturbing still, it is participatory. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice.
I find myself worrying about this a lot. For what it's worth though, the non-grifters, the people interested in building a community, are still out there. To find them, you need to look for groups that add no financial value – join an art club, volunteer locally. When I spend time with those groups, I'm reminded that not everyone's a grifter in real life.
Also, this explorable by Nicky Case is evergreen: https://ncase.me/trust/
Historically, something like 3.5 percent of the population need to be really engaged to make change happen, and the US isn't there right now, because we're all on our computers. The election coming up is an important one, so if you want to do something, start door knocking, become an election judge, sign up to be an observer at the polls, donate money. Indivisible is doing a lot of great, local, on-the-ground stuff, join your local chapter.
Isn't 170GB/s slow for bandwidth?
> He approached me because he was really into startups and wanted to become a tech entrepreneur, and make the big bucks
It's a shame that so much of tech culture has become about money. Money was always a part of it, but living in the Bay in 2010, there was more of a focus on building things. But once people started getting rich, especially off bitcoin, it brought in a whole host of people whose primary passion seemed to be money. We moved out in 2018. Still bums me out, SF was my favorite city, and I hoped to live there for a long time, but the values weren't my values anymore.
To make any agent "good", there are two components: the model and the harness. Very few companies can train models, but anyone can build a harness. How much does the harness matter? Can I build a harness that's good enough that I can use open source models with opus level performance? That's the question I've been trying to answer by building better harnesses. None of the existing frameworks have the functionality I need to build a good harness. The features I need are language-level... and so I started building a language called Agency[0].
It's been six months and its going well. Some of the things Agency can do are wild:
- It can pause and serialize execution at any point, making HITL easy
- It has some neat safety capabilities such as handlers[1] and PFA[2]
- You can bundle up any agent as an HTTP or MCP server[3]
- I'm now working on a built-in optimizer to optimize agents (think DSPy).
Obviously, it's a huge undertaking, but having worked with the Agency for six months, I can't imagine going back to another framework. It makes things so easy. I'm working on its built-in agent now [4]. My goal it to get it to be as good as Claude Code, but using open source models. It's still early days, lots of rough edges, but if this sort of thing interests you, I'd love to have a few more people test it out.
[1] https://agency-lang.com/guide/handlers.html
[2] https://agency-lang.com/guide/partial-application.html
[3] https://agency-lang.com/cli/serve.html
[4] https://github.com/egonSchiele/agency-lang/blob/main/package...