> Bill Gates compared measuring programming progress by lines of code to measuring aircraft building progress by weight

Aircraft weight is also a very useful metric - aircraft weight is also bad. But we do measure this!

This is the opinion of someone who has not tried to use Claude Code, in a brand new project with full permissions enabled, and with a model from the last 3 months.

It's funny what details about our designs are similar through accident. And what other things are completely different. I can show you my design potentially.

Representing websites in a virtual filesystem is creative and definitely makes it easier for the agent to collect information about the page. But I'm confused between the `Bash` and the `Edit` tools. It seems like one uses the chrome executeScript API, and the other updates the file system. But if it's just doing file writes, are those edits visible in the browser, and persistent across sessions?

So there a pre-defined list of rules - is it choosing which checks to care about from the set, or is there also a predefined binding between the task and the test?

If it's the former, then you have to ensure that the checks are sufficiently generic that there's a useful test for the given situation. Is an AI doing the choosing, over which of the checks to run?

If it's the ladder, I would assume that writing the tests would be the bottleneck, writing a test can be as flaky/time-consuming as implementing the actions by hand.

* When you "run a WASM pass", how is that generated? Do you use an agent to do the pruning step, or is it deterministic?

* Where do the "deterministic overrides" come from? I assume they are generated by the verifier agent?

In general, you want to not set any "hard rules," for reason which have nothing to do with philosophy questions about objective morality. (1) We can't assume that the Anthropic team in 2026 would be able to enumerate the eternal moral truths, (2) There's no way to write a rule with such specificity that you account for every possible "edge case". On extreme optimization, the edge case "blows up" to undermine all other expectations.

Replaying commits one-by-one is like a history quiz. It forces me to remember what was going on a week ago when I did commit #23 out of 45. I'm grateful that git stores that history for me when I need it, but I don't want it to force me to interact with the history. I've long since expelled it from my brain, so that I can focus on the current state of the codebase. "5 commits ago, did you mean to do that, or can we take this other change?" I don't care, I don't want to think about it.

Of course, this issue can be reduced by the "squash first, then rebase" approach. Or judicious use of "git commit --amend --no-edit" to reduce the number of commits in my branch, therefore making the rebase less of a hassle. That's fine. But what if I didn't do that? I don't want my tools to judge me for my workflow. A user-friendly tool should non-judgmentally accommodate whatever convenient workflow I adopted in the past.

Git says, "oops, you screwed up by creating 50 lazy commits, now you need to put in 20 minutes figuring out how to cleverly combine them into 3 commits, before you can pull from main!" then I'm going to respond, "screw you, I will do the next-best easier alternative". I don't have time for the judgement.

Labor protections are indeed less, but this is actually a good thing. Like with many free-market topics, "labor protections" are a very dangerous thing, because they are a policy that sounds extremely good to the voting public, but many economists can tell you it's actually bad. US just got lucky, that it tricked the public to vote against it.

If you have measures in non-financial terms, I'm happy to consider those, as long as they have to do with labor market regulations.

> most jobs I had in Europe had a 1-3 months notice period which was easily negotiated if you really wanted to quit on the spot, no company wants to keep a disgruntled worker around

I could quibble that 1-3 months sounds like a shockingly long time from a US perspective, but the bigger problem is the "ease of finding a new job" part of the equation.

> making precarious conditions the default is not great for the less skilled people who prefer stability to keep their families afloat and secure.

The industries which don't experience as much instability are less likely to lay off people anyway. So workers who want stability can self-select into government jobs or something, which offer that stability.

> Not working in "innovation" still has the same precariousness, with no upside

Some industries are less precarious, I would say getting paid nearly twice as much is an upside.

> leave enough people behind and you get MAGA.

I don't think there's any strong evidence that income inequality caused maga. I couldn't find any evidence that poorer people are more likely to support Trump. But let me know if I'm wrong here.

I said the American worker is better off in general. The only question I don't consider is good is, "which types of workers?" Unless your point is that some kinds of workers are better off than others? In which case, make that argument.

> “it doesn’t matter that you could be wrongfully imprisoned and separated from your children without recourse for committing no crime, but that’s OK because if it doesn’t happen you’ll make a bit more money” is detached from the reality of what matters.

You put that in quotes, but my comments have nothing whatsoever to do with that. Can you clarify what this has to do with whether a country should enact regulations which make it difficult for firms to lay off employees?

> Most individuals aren’t money-hungry ghouls who care for wealth above all, including their own personal safety and liberty.

Great. Again, what does this have to do with labor market regulations? I am not interested in debating "what matters" generally, in a "meaning of life" sort of way, unless you can connect it to labor market regulations, the discussion you entered.

I've said this before, but every "US vs Europe work" debate ends with the European patronizingly scolding the American for thinking money is the most important thing in life. I'm also not interested in that.

I am only interested in the labor market.

You can say the numbers don't matter, but then you've adopted essentially an unfalsifiable position.

Another factor to consider is the ease of quitting your job. In the US (at least, I have found), it is quite easy to quite your job and find a new one.

This matches the logic under which it's easy to fire in the US. Every cost of a regulation has a side-effect. If it's easy to fire, it's easy to hire. The article explains how American companies are more willing to hire for positions which wouldn't otherwise exist.

If you are not interested in that, then quit your job and don't work in a position which involves innovation. Which in America, is easy to do.

I don't consider "who is better off" to be a very good question. The answer is, the average worker is better off. My answer is therefore going to be vague. Of course, there are differences by industry, but do you have a point about that? Also, I am really arguing that with the current state of the USA, immigrants make higher incomes than immigrants to other countries. Saying that immigrants are treated poorly in other ways is just bringing up a political issue unrelated to labor economics.

Median wages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income?useskin=vector Average work hours

Purchasing power parity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

Despite average work hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Better youth unemployment than Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym...

> And which types of workers?

High-skill professionals, entrepreneurs, specialized trades, creative workers, young people, immigrants... and most other professions.

> Can we skip the transparent rage bait and personal jabs, though?

If you make nebulous complaints about "shitting on workers" without considering tradeoffs, you've made a feelings-based argument, so expect that kind of rebuttal.