258 karma · joined February 26, 2014
We hooked up fly.io's sprites mcp to our company claude and now all employees can spin up dev envs and actually prototype, verify or reproduce something before coming to engineering; doing it directly from web or wherever and it's properly authed and sandboxed through their accounts
It's one thing to get an llm to do something unattended for long durations, it's a other to give it the means of verification.
For example I'm busy upgrading a 500k LoC rails 1 codebase to rails 8 and built several DSLs that give it proper authorised sessions in a headless browser with basic html parsing tooling so it can "see" what affect it's fixes have. Then you somehow need to also give it a reliable way to keep track of the past and it's own learnings, which sound simple but I have yet to see any tool or model solve it on this scale...will give sonnet 4.5 a try this weekend, but yeah none of the models I tried are able to produce meaningful results over long periods on this upgrade task without good tooling and strong feedback loops
Btw I have upgraded the app and taking it to alpha testing now so it is possible
ETL pipelines, we catalogue and link our custom transformers to bodies of text that describes business cases for it with some examples, you can then describe your ETL problem in text and it will scaffold out a pipeline for you.
Fullstack scaffolds that go from models to UI screen, we have like a set of standard components and how they interact and communicate through GraphQL to our monolith (e.g. server side pagination, miller column grouping, sorting, filtering, PDF export, etc. etc.). So if you make a new model it will scaffold the CRUD fully for you all the way to the UI (it get's some stuff wrong but it's still a massive time save for us).
Patterns for various admin controls (we use active admin, so this thing will scaffold AA resources how we want).
Refactor recipes for certain things we've deprecated or improved. We generally don't migrate everything at once to a new pattern, instead we make "recipes" that describe the new pattern and point it to an example, then run it as we get to that module or lib for new work.
There are more, but these are some off the top of my head.
I think a really big aspect of this though is the integration of our scaffolds and recipes in Cursor. We keep these scaffold documents in markdown files that are loaded as cursor notepads which reference to real source code.
So we sort of rely heavily on the source code describing itself, the recipe or pattern or scaffold just provides a bit of extra context on different usage patterns and links the different pieces or example together.
You can think of it as giving an LLM "pro tips" around how things are done in each team and repo which allows for rapid scaffold creation. A lof of this you can do with code generators and good documentation, but we've found this usage of Cursor notepads for scaffolds and architecture is less labour intensive way to keep it up to date and to evolve a big code base in a consistent manner.
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Edit: something to add, this isn't a crutch, we require our devs to fully understand these patterns. We use it as a tool for consistency, for rapid scaffold creation and of course for speeding up things we haven't gotten around to streamlining (like repetitive bloat)
Rails and especially Ruby lends itself to describing business logic as part of source code closer to natural language than a lot of typed languages imo and that synergizes really well with a lot of different models and neat LLM uses for code creation and maintenance.
I prefer a hybrid work area with three zones
1. Open plan chaos, lots of people talking and going bonkers
2. Smaller office 3~4 people, maybe your team or people you like more than others
3. Solo office, or hot desk in quiet zone. For deep focus. This one has a great view of the mountains in the area, which I find helps me think.
I bounce around these at my office depending on mood and task at hand. That variety is the main thing I like about our office setup
Unless you automate it devs will have to remember to migrate both when making a change which adds some overhead, not a lot, but it's just something to consider here imo as some migrations (schema and/or data) can become nasty and complex
Other than a means to gain advice, I've found this question a good gauge for collaboration compatibility.
I often ask it in interviews on both sides to give me insight into what someone currently values.
It's sort of like asking someone to define "better" be that in skill, or happiness or avoidance of pain.
My main interpretation of the post would be a high value placed on pragmatism, gained via a journey of experimentation. Put crudely there is no silver bullet but try a few for a while
I think point 10 is highly underrated in my opinion
Not sure if it's a possibility or something you even want, but it sounds like you're invested and have thoughts around the role.
Maybe if it comes to quitting..before you do that have a conversation with the CEO about taking on the role?
Otherwise the best alternative would be something like https://materialize.com
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/121322/32070715-16...
Would've been great if something like Cruncy Bridge, PgAnalyze and Citus were merged into one company so that you have managed Postgres over the 3 major providers with the best pg tech out the box.
Having your DB and apps in different providers is a stuff up, the latency and data transfer costs killed us, so Citus was a non start (we don't want to manage it ourselves in EC2).
Interestingly gitlab pricing influenced us to rethink our own pricing and we spent a month building out granular permission controls to allow sales to craft licenses bespoke to a client needs and charge less.
After a year our revenue has 2x and there's a nice upsell flow towards enterprise.
They just didn't manage the risk of a market "correction" and high interest rates. The tech sector was/is due a correction, but this isn't 2008
My plan is to poc a tool that allows you to edit metabase config as files and secondly something that can replicate cloud instances to other environments like local docker image or staging instance
Was looking for something to read json files which will house the config via SQL, i.e. a human readable db as an alternative to what the BI tool is using for it's config persistence.
Will give DuckDB a go, thanks for posting!
Is it that AGI will take over all jobs? Or are we talking Von Neumann probes or what? Because I just see a bunch of fear mongering words.
Personally I think this is the greatest thing since slice bread and is going to increase efficiencies across several data intensive industries. The future is bright!
You mention business efficiency being built on the back of a responsible government, but I've often heard here where I live (South Africa), if you want to know where to deploy capital look for companies doing something the gov should be doing...because it's easy to compete (port management, electricity, rail, air lines, mines, refuse management)
> The inherited cartilage defect causes other, more problematic deformities throughout the body, resulting in a condition called Osteochondrodysplasia. This is an incurable disease that causes painful, swollen joints for the Scottish Folds from as young as 7 weeks old and for the duration of their often short lives.
Didn't even know folded ear cats were a thing, strange.
Because that's the core driver for me. I often feel other programmers fall into this trap of technology usage for the sake of technology usage and less about solving real problems.
I think having a distaste for process is justified when working in environments where there's no buy in from the team...but don't assume that applies to "many of us"