michaelbuckbee

This sounds an awful lot like the early how to get on to the internet highway classes that existed. I don't think the classes had a lot of worth in the strict educational sense of like "here's how you do X Y & Z" but... We're I think much more effective at saying, you know, "X Y & Z are now possible."

It does take time and a little skill to know the edges of the AI tools. What's reasonable? What's not? What's likely to hallucinate? You could get something in the rough bounds of trust.

I can see a class helping with that.

The relevancy here is that he's denied the git history, versioning, branches, implicit documentation that even bad source control practices would have given him.

I have a friend that just picked up a new consulting job resurrecting an ancient Windows desktop application. No source control, no tests. And it's spread out over a dozen different folders with names like "_old", "_new" and "dates". Claude's doing a tremendous job in getting him to grips with what is actually happening in the application, what's relevant, what's not, what's different. I think it's literally saving him days and days at work.

Old person here. I think it's really hard to convey the extent to which smoke literally permeated everything. It's not just the immediate air quality aspects of it, but there was just a residue on all the surfaces, every cushion and fabric held onto the stuff.

I can recall the week that no-smoking indoors at restaurants/bars passed and it was literally shocking to walk into a place and not have it be hazy. It really felt weird.

Anyway, air quality + quality of life was much worse. Sometimes the future does get better.

To be clear, I tried to install it and it was a shitshow.

For years the family joke has been that when we take a family picture we need to take 5 because I will inevitably have my eyes closed in the first 4.

So I made an IOS app just for us that does face detection and won't take the actual photo until all of the detected faces have their eyes open.

I know a few people that are more or less prototyping little agents with it that monitor stuff for them and make some kind of discernment/decision about alerting them.

Nothing mission critical in any sense of it.

I ran a fairly large production test of this and on _every_ measure except for privacy it was worse than a free tier server hosted LLM.

Not happy about that as I would like to see more local models but that's the current state of things.

https://sendcheckit.com/blog/ai-powered-subject-line-alterna...

She's 50 years old has a doctorate in pharmacy and has worked as a hospital pharmacist for two decades.

I don't say this as a "gotcha", but more that even with all that experience she still finds it beneficial and helpful.

Good catch, there was an issue with the second hardest thing in programming (caching).

Here's an updated eval with the proper models https://a3bmfqfom3.evvl.io/

My sister in law is a pharmacist and the heaviest non-dev ChatGPT user I know and her main use case is writing professionally polite messages to doctors on how the drugs they prescribed to a patient would have killed them had she not caught a particular interaction or common side effect.

There's a lot of "tone" in it as she's not trying to anger these folks, but also it's quite serious, but also there's just everything else happening in medicine.

Feels like a great use.

I did a quick eval comparing Grok 4.3, Opus 4.7 and GPT 4.1 and they actually seem pretty similar:

https://ofw640g9re.evvl.io/

They all did pretty well at a more "formal" tone, but GPT4.1 was the only one that didn't make me cringe with a "casual" tone.

[edit] fwiw, grok was also the fastest+cheapest model, claude was slowest and priciest.

This feels like a restating of the idea that for any given endeavor AI raises the floor of quality but doesn't push the ceiling.

Fwiw - I did a fairly large comparison of Gemini Nano (the in browser ai model) vs a comparable free hosted model of Gemma (from OpenRouter) and the hosted model absolutely trashed the local model on every aspect of speed, reliability, availability, etc. [1]

I'm not particularly happy about that outcome as I wish we had more locally run AI models for reasons of privacy and efficiency, so this is more just a warning that at present there are some severe tradeoffs.

1 - https://sendcheckit.com/blog/ai-powered-subject-line-alterna...

Maybe check out TRMNL, they've got a Home Assistant plugin.

From the article: "Polar bears are still sadly expected to go extinct this century, with two-thirds of the population gone by 2050,"

There's a push and pull here, Typescript + React + Vercel are also very amenable to LLM driven development due to a mix of the popularity of examples in the LLMs dataset, how cheap the deployment is and how quick the ecosystem is to get going.

So we have two things here:

1. "Mythical Man Month" which is the shorthand for a whole book + concept that you can't just throw more people at a software development project and get linear productivity improvements as the communications overhead (meetings, emails, mistakes due to poor assumptions, etc.) deeply eat into the raw number of productive hours that a new person added to the team brings.

2. AI automation tools (Claude Code) are often described as a "junior developer" which is an imperfect comparison as while you could potentially sort of set them up that way many people use them as more of a singular force multiplier.

I use them to work on many more projects in many more ways and ship far more than I could even if I had a "junior developer" sitting alongside of me as there's not the same level of communication needed.

Memory makers make capital investements (build different factories, convert physical production lines, etc.) to meet orders that have been place for the next ~5 years.

OpenAI (or whoever) crashes and can't pay for the order leaving the memory makers in a tough spot.

Partially this was solved by the ZipDrive being designed for portability as well (I'm not even sure if there was ever a built in model). So if you needed to copy a large file and take it to a friends house you just took the drive with you.

More importantly it collapses mythical-man-month communication overhead.

What's weird though is the bifurcation in pricing in the market: aka if your app can function on a non-frontier level AI you can use last years model at a fraction of the cost.

This is one of those slippery slope things where Grammarly did "just" Grammar and then slowly got into tone and perception and brand voice suggestions and now seems to more or less just want to shave everything down to be as bland as possible.

Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?

Two things:

1. Tests have always been both about the function of the application, but also the communication of what should be occurring to the larger team or yourself six months down the road.

With automated software development the communication with the LLM itself is a much larger part of it so I feel like it's "ok" to have lots of easy tests that are less about rigor and more about "yes this is how this should work"

2. Ideally we're going to get to the point where the tooling allows for adversarial agents with one writing code and one writing tests. Even for now just popping open a separate terminal window and generating+running tests in it from your main coding terminal is helpful.

I feel like AI just raises the floor but doesn't push the ceiling on the quality of creative works.

There's still space for creativity, novelty, invention and human intuition.

MCPs are for documentation. CLI->API is for interaction.

Very strongly reminds me of Mac Mini Colo - https://www.macminivault.com/mac-mini-colocation/ - it's a clever idea.

As doom and gloom as things are generally, I do think things have gotten better. Due to legislation and commercial pressure things like wifi routers shipping with the same default password and open settings have gotten better. Webhosts and ISPs have implemented many improvements to protecting their residential customers.

I take your point, but think that it's also maybe too far.

Bunny has a lot of that (they have a sqlite compatible API, edge functions, but the call it something different, etc.)

That being said, I had enough issues with Bunny and CF debugging across regions that I made this free tool to do both remote HTTP and TCP traceroutes to keep my sanity: https://dnsisbeautiful.com/global-http-availability