rednb

Exactly what i came to write as well. I'd expect Microsoft to invest in F# so that python can slowly fade away the way php did.

This is exactly what OP was conveying, but in a more proverbial manner (ie. Companies need arms, legs and relationships).

Oh makes sense thanks, so i'll forbid agents from running builds and tests.

Thanks this is very helpful, i didn't realize that. But not sure what to do since running tests is how Claude often catches mistakes and iterates. If i run them myself, the cache will still expire.

However where i think you have a point is that it tends to run tests quite casually where a reviewer would have been enough to catch mistakes.

IMHO, the real problem is the 5min cache way too small. They should up it to 1 hour.

.NET solution having 120+ projects, with 7000 tests of which maybe 1500 are integration and/or component tests.

Buid alone takes 4 minutes. Test suite heavily parallelized runs in about 2 to 3 minutes, infrastructure dependencies fully containerized using podman, no external API call.

And this is without mentioning the 5000 frontend tests (angular), including Playwright end-to-end tests wired to the backend (about 3 to 4 minutes run without the e2e tests).

And this is running on a dev machine with 64gb of RAM and an NVMe disk.

Some systems are just massive, and even if you run focused tests, it's easy for a change to have a large blast at least requiring a large rebuild, and at times to rerun a larger set of tests.

These days, I spend more time on Gitlab reviewing code than in my IDE, and it's been the case for a couple of months already.

In my opinion sunsetting JetBrains Space was a major strategic mistake. It would have given them the moat they currently crave for to compete in the AI space, by enabling cool AI powered features (codex like sandboxes connected to their ides etc...).

All their AI products currently feel like desparate shots in the dark, while Jetbrains Space would have been a natural home, delivering strong value and differentiation.

Once Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode matured and discredited Junie, the next thing i looked for was a code review and CI/CD environment that was as seamlessly integrated to my IDE as possible. I was baffled to discover that JetBrains had just that but decided to sunset it in the midst of the AI war. Absolutely baffling....

An Astra powered site is your representation of a polished and capable business website. For the average joe, a Wix website fits the bill, their representation is not the same as yours. They focus on items such as whether or not the theme is beautiful.

Polished and easy to use website builders have been around for a long time, from Wordpress all the way to Wix.

The fact is, most people aren't builders and never will be. Building software is about formalizing and automating processes, and 95% of folks aren't interested in putting even the most basic effort into improving their business by approching it at a strategic level. Too focused on keeping the lights on and/or more interested in field operations.

For another example look at the many businesses using @gmail addresses to run their business while Google Workplace has streamlined custom domains for a while.

So in practice, ChatGPT Sites will mainly enable software agencies to build websites and offload maintenance to the customer : just manage it from your ChatGPT account. The equivalent of Bring your own cloud for Mom and Pop businesses, and other small companies. Not even sure ChatGPT Sites will create meaningful downward pressure on agency rates.

Lesson learned the hard way.

I use the direct API from deepseek using Opencode, no problem to report, works like a charm.

Except maybe that the model often believes that he is running out of context, and needs to rush so i occasionally need to jump in to tell it that it still has plenty of room left.

But this does not degrade the quality of my overall experience in a meaningful way.

I don't think so, because so called nerfing manifests itself in ridiculous code quality, or even in failing to do a comprehensive code analysis which results in "actually there is a bug in the implementation i've just done because this flow has 5 steps and i didn't bother to review them all before confidently laying down my plan", and this can happen 4 times in a row during a session.

This is definitely not about dealing with the frontier of AI. I wasn't part of the nerfing chord, but Astra changed my mind. Quality got me to upgrade from Pro x5 to Pro x20 on launch day. A couple of days later was dumb af, horrendous code quality etc...

Something fishy, or at least unethical is going on. Not sure it impacts API users though.

I'd take this kind of benchmark with a grain of salt. At this point, I have a set of comprehensive guidelines covering both backend and frontend work, and for the frontend we go as far as explaining what we a good design is in our visual system, and even how to conduct a visual review when screenshots are handed to the model.

Deepseek 4.1 ranks very low in this benchmark but it has proven so capable that after being simultaneously on Max x20 and Pro x20 subscriptions, i've transitioned to using DS 4.1 as a daily driver and am very satisfied.

My point is, i think their overall ranking makes sense, matches my experience with out of the box capabilities for vague and underspecified tasks. But seeing a model rank low in their ranking does not mean that the model is incapable. Having skills and guidelines has a lot of influence on what you get out of a model.

Have you used 10b/5b tokens over the course of a week or over the course of a month?

It is because of things like that that i'm using Android. I feel like one of those boomers having no clue about tech whenever i am handed an iphone: everything feels like a trick, a set of secret gestures and recipes that everybody has mastered but me.

Not criticizing because i can see that many people love Apple products precisely for this reason. Apparently this makes the UX friendly and intuitive. But it didn't click for me.

I think you underestimate what a massive country China is and the scale of their military. Russia is already quite an adversary, but China is at an even higher level. By some metrics, they have already surpassed the US military.

So it is very unlikely that a neighbor will have the audacity to attack them, and even if this happens, i'd expect the war to be over rapidly. Just like if Canada or Mexico tried to attack the US.

> OpenAI reduced prices and Anthropic increased weekly usage limits.

As a Max x20 and Pro x20 subscriber, can tell you that it doesn't matter since they continually move the baseline of token use So in practice you feel that you're continually getting less from your subscription.

While it never happened to me in the past, i reached my weekly limit within 3 days using Opus 5. And the Open AI weekly limit essentially is a Claude Max x20 5-hour limit. Not even talking about the baseline in intelligence : on release day Astra was so good that it lead me to move to Pro x20. Now it's dumb af and token use is insane.

Deepseek 4.1 Flash has been a lifeboat for me, finally able to work without being constrained/distracted by limits and with what is in my view even better intelligence than Opus 5 for a fraction of the costs. DS is not messing up my brain with load-bearing pseudo jargon in every sentence. It respects coding guidelines, and completes even the most complex tasks most of the time in one shot.

DS 4.1 had been able to add complex features to my repo without breaking a sweat (330k lines of F# + 4M circa lines of an Angular frontend). Writes very idiomatic F# and respects our guidelines and style perfectly. Just completed an extensive UI/UX research and implementation work.

I am ditching both x20 subs and will only keep a Pro x5 because wife does a lot of design work and needs solid image generation capabilities.

I 100% agree that their business is operated extremely well and delivers lots of value.

I am just saying that in my opinion, society would be even better off if this industry wasn't controlled by a cartel and i pointed 2 examples of how.

One difference between this and turbines, is that payment networks are sitting at the heart of the economy of countless countries. Turbines have a very different risk profile, much more modest and localized.

Russia was for example cut off from high-tech maintenance contracts but has been able to deal with it by manufacturing their own replacement part + there are maintenance cycles and spare parts so any disruption in service is not immediate unlike payments.

You are literally linking to a page published by Visa's Investors Relations Department.

The problem is that like all cartels, they hold progress back. Things could be even more efficient than the current state of affairs. For example we could have open standards with thousands of local players, much faster settlement times etc...

There are also aspects such as the fact that due to this concentration of power, the whole world is subject to US sanctions, such that a EU citizen sanctioned by the US is effectively cut off from civilization.

Well said, these talking points pushed by EU politicians for decades need to stop. US white collar workers have access to pretty much the same benefits than EU ones, but have a much higher after tax compensation, even taking health care into account.

And nowadays, with the erosion of the social safety net pushed by the French government, the gap is even more narrow. There definitely are huge inequalities there, US are far from being the heartless place EU politicians like to depict.

If you end your water fasts at 48h circa, you're missing out on most of the benefits as the body fully enters fasting mode past 36h-48h. So in a sense you're ending the fast when it is just getting started.

Can't give you medical advice, just a benchmark tip: a short water fast is 3-5 days, the first 2 days being the most difficult ones.

My personal experience is that mind/spirit plays a major role. If i'm down mentally, i'll break my fast prematurely. If you think about it, the only difference between fasting and starving are your motives and mindset. So this is a major item, that people approching fasting from a purely medical angle often fail to appreciate.

Make sure you are at peace, and embracing a mindset of healing, spiritual renewal. Have something to do. For example, as a Christian, this is a time where I'll read the Bible, sing/workship more frequently throughout the day, and of course rest. You can do something equivalent independently from your religion.

I don't know if this mental angle can help with your headaches, but consider giving it some though in case this can help. That's all i can think of i'm afraid. Just my 2 cents.

Thanks for sharing, I agree with what he says.

I've reached a point in my career where i can essentially call the shots as far as engineering and even product direction is concerned.

But recently had to do some consulting as an IC due to circumstances (worst case scenario deal closing delay), and i can tell you that there are places where non-technical people make tech decisions without consulting anyone. Also in my already quite distant qconsultant past (wow, time flies) while it has always been common for me to sort out requirements, and help with business analysis to align them with engineering, even when you dismiss flying unicorns, the class of core requirement evolutions that can make you regret choosing a tech stack is still very large. I've seen a couple of folks fired literally due to this.

Even now that i call the shots and sell products rather than time, the roadmap uncertainty is still high (largely driven by the need to make products user-friendly enough based on feedback), so i default to .NET + angular as it keeps my game open.

B2B2C at the cross-roads of ecommerce, fintech, blockchains. So you need to deal with vendor integration requirements while making the integration user-friendly from a UX perspective + and keeping your own core UX premium, especially for the B2C segment, and being competitive. Requirements change fast, especially at the beginning, so you don't want your engineering to constrain you or make things more difficult than necessary.

> Here’s the thing: there’s still a place for HTMX. Lots of places. But “building an SPA but not actually and SPA” is not a lane for HTMX. Nor do they promote HTMX for that purpose. Really quite the opposite.

> Different tools for different jobs. (Me? I honestly love React, just a more minimal stack. Zustand and TanStack and Vite. No Redux or Next.JS)

My concern with is that i build line of business applications for a living, and literally, every project i work on ends up growing in scope such that even the simplest ones, reach a point where the customer asks for items that are just much simpler to do with a front-end framework. And these are often cross cutting concerns, such that it is not as easy as simply adding some js to one page.

Example: "i want to be able to reorder all the columns of all the tables of the website, and hide some columns, with my preferences remembered for each table". Customers pull that kind of thing off their hat every time, such that even "basic websites" can move out of the trivial territory any time. And this is just the most trivial example i can think of.

I want the tech stacks i use to be future proof, as in not having to rewrite everything when requirements become more complex (as it is also typically a time where we aren't given much time budget, as they need it for yesterday).

For something for which i fully control the roadmap, i may consider htmx (but even then, even my own products grow in ambition rapidly) however for customer projects i find this choice way too risky.

I need to be able to capitalize on the tech infrastructure i've built as requirements get complex, both due to customer time constraints and because this is where we get some of the highest profit margin from our work. Having to rework most of what i've done every time a complex requirement comes up, would be inefficient with this regard.

To me it's a case of knowing your tools in depth, to make meet most requirements (including from a performance perspective). Maybe erlang or go would have been more suited for a project from a philosophical perspective but since i specialize in .NET + angular, unless there is hard blocker, i'll use this tech stack, and everything is fine from the perspective of the customer. But i gain that the project is future proof and i won't need to reengineer it when it moves of its initial sweetpot.

Maybe a contrarian view, but as someone very knowledgeable about .NET API backends + angular on the frontend, I've found that HTMX made things more difficult as it required me to move back to mixing presentation concerns with business-logic and data concerns (basically have the backend produce the UI, which is whole point of HTMX).

This is not a criticism but I suspect that the people enjoying HTMX are either people preferring old-school server-side rendering or react users.

Just sharing my experience, because HTMX is the absolute darling of hacker news.

Since i mainly develop real SPA, i found that is more complex than just using typscrpit if you build something non-trivial as managing state on the server is not fun at all.

In my opinion if you are happy using angular, you'll find that HTMX is a step backward in terms for dev experience. Can't speak about react, but since it is not a battery included stack unlike Angular, i can understand why many people find they'd be better off moving things server-side instead of messing around with 15 third-party libraries. My 2 cents

I am growing tired of these pelicans posts every time a new model is published. Feels to me like low effort personal brand promotion. Just sharing my 2 cents.

Thanks for sharing that, very insightful. I definitely agree with your point of view.

Honestly, i've received a formal MSc education in the hardware aspects, including for designing embedded electronics products. Spent the most part ofy career in the software industry designing enterprise software and feel like i never needed to use them, except maybe early in my career when i was reviewing tech stacks and determined that .NET would be among the winning horses, precisely because it'd take care of that for me almost all the time.

What i see today is the opposite of what you see : product owners not knowing a thing about software engineering but being able to vibe code prototypes handed over to the dev team are rock stars.

They are closely followed by senior software developers having more of an architecture & design background than a low-level computer science background. Most businesses are looking for builders these days.

Where what you say may converge with my observation is that to be able to do to things such as proper database query optimization, even using AI assistance, you need to be able to understand the concepts of working memory set, cache misses etc...

I've found huge problems, like database servers being grossly underprovisioned (like, 60% cache hit, 4gb RAM server for a 700gb dataset with an 50gb circa hot data set). SSD were used and only latency was measured, so no one realized how problematic the situation was (including a consulting shop they hired to help them manage their DBs - backup, maintenance etc...).

However, having a high affinity with hardware is not a driver / computer science of hiring decisions from what i can see in the enterprise software world. But it would make sense for it to become the case within 10 years. I suspect that you work in a niche where performance optimization matters a lot.

Likely because they are a Java shop. All the IDEs they develop use Java, so they have quite an expertise in low level optimization for this language.

> the ability to quickly and safely change significant parts of the code and product.

Hum, this reminds me something... "O: open to extension, closed to modifications". Old things are new again.

From context efficiency with approaches such ad DDD and clean architectures, all the way to items such as this one, AI is not creating new tradeoff, it just acts as a multiplier, multiplying productivity for teams doing things right, and multiplying debt for teams having a low quality bar as far as design and architecture are concerned.

Exactly, it's funny how most Americans have no self-awareness on this topic.

And beyond VCs, which are like massive subsidies funded by printed dollars to which no other country has access, even in industries like electric vehicles, Chinese total direct subsidies to their EV companies are like $5bn per year, while the the ones provided by the US to their auto manufacturers are in the range of $50bn per year.

I don't think the US are cheaters or are doing something bad. But i do think that this propaganda about China flooding the market through "overcapacity" and subsidies is very dishonest and needs to stop.

Your hostile tone is unfortunate, especially since my post was actually friendly. I was just trying to point why it is very likely the OP won't give you what you're asking so you're not left confused if he ends up ghosting you.

Many people use the term harness to refer to the agent coding software (eg. Opencode, Claude Code...), i use this term more broadly to refer to the environment (set of skills, system prompts, constraints, memory, hooks etc...). What the OP is referring to is not just one giant skill. It's usually a comprehensive ecosystem of skills, bespoke tools to make certain agent tasks deterministic (eg localization), and so on.

I've seen someone post Github repos in this thread, these can be very useful especially if you use the same tech stack, but you won't reach the level of productivity reported by successful teams unless you invest substantial time to build your own harness. But the way to do so is to do it progressively : start with something simple to address the need you have on day 1 . And then, turn recurring prompts into skills, turn recurring coding patterns and coding style recommendations into guidelines, turn repetivive tasks for which the LLM tends to build a python script that it occasionally gets wrong into a deterministic tool documented in a skill etc...

And after a couple of days, weeks, and months, you'll have a very dependable harness giving you optimal productivity, without needing to invest weeks of work upfront or take the fun out of agent-assisted coding.

Hope this helps.

That's a big ask. This kind of harness usually contains plenty of proprietary insights about their business. And also, nowadays, a good harness is a major competitive advantage.