I run a small lab that does large data analytics and web products for a couple large clients. I have 5 developers who I manage directly, I write a lot of code myself and I interact directly with my clients. I have been a web developer for long enough to have written code in coldfusion, php, asp, asp.net, rails, node and javascript through microsoft frontpage exports, to jquery,to backbone, angular and react and in a lot of different frameworks. I feel this breadth of watching the internet develop in stages has given me a decent if imperfect understanding of many of the tradeoffs that can be made in developing for the web.

My work lately is on an analytics / cms / data management / gis platform that is used by a couple of our clients and we've been developing for a couple of years before any ai was used on it all. Its a react front end built on react-router-7 that can be SPA or SSR and a node api server.

I had tried AI coding a couple times over the past few years both for small toy projects and on my work and it felt to me less productive than writing code by hand until this January when I tried Claude Code with Opus 4.5. Since then I have written very few features by hand although I am often actively writing parts of them, or debugging by hand.

I am maybe in a slightly unique place in that part of my job is coming up with tasks for other developers and making sure their code integrates back, I've been doing this for 10 years plus, and personally my sucess rate with getting someone to write a new feature that will get use is maybe a bit over 50%, that is maybe generous? Figuring out what to do next in a project that will create value for users is the hard part of my job whether I am delegating to developers or to an AI and that hasn't changed.

That being said I can move through things significantly faster and more consistently using AI, and get them out to clients for testing to see if they are going to work. Its also been great for tasks which I know my developers will groan if I assign to them. In the last couple months I've been able to

- create a new version of our server that is free from years of cruft of the monorepo api we use across all our projects. - implement sqlite compatablity for the server (in addition to original postgres support) - Implement local first sync from scratch for the project - Test out a large number of optimization strategies, not all of which worked out but which would have taken me so much longer and been so much more onerous the cost benefit ratio of engaging them would have been not worth it - Tons of small features I would have assigned to someone else but are now less effort to just have the AI implement.

  I think the biggest plus though is the amount of documentation that has accrued in our repo since using starting to use these tools. I find AI is pretty great at summarizing different sections of the code and with a little bit of conversation I can get it more or less exactly how I want it. This has been hugely useful to me on a number of occasions and something I would have always liked to have been doing but on a small team that is always under pressure to create results for our clients its something that didn't cross the immediate threshold of the cost benefit ratio. 

I have encouraged my team to use these tools but I am not forcing it down anyone's throat, although its interesting to give people tasks that I am confident I could finish much quicker and much more to my personal taste than assigning it. The reactions from my team are pretty mixed, one of the strongest contributors doesn't find a lot of gains from it. One has found similar productivity gains to myself, others are very against it and hate it.

I think one of the things it will change for me is, I can no longer just create the stories for everyone, learning how to choose on what to work on is going to be the most important skill in my opinion so over the next couple months I am going to be shifting so everyone on my team has direct client interactions and I am going to try to shift away from writing stories to having meetings where I help them decide on their own what to work on. Still part of the reason that I can afford to do this is because I can now get as much or more work done than I was able to with my whole team at this time last year.

That's a big difference in one way, and I am optimistic that the platform I am working on will be a lot better and able to compete with large legacy platforms that it wouldn't have been able to compete with in the past, but still it just tightens the loop of trying new things and getting feedback and the hardest part of the business is still communication with clients and building relationships that create value.

I guess it's possible that just being "smarter" might in some cases get a better solution from a seeies of text prompts but that seems too vague an argument to hold much water for me.

That being said, I think this peice is a bit of an overreaction and there seem to be many earnest actors in the EA community really thinking about how they can do good in the world. SBF is very unfortunate for EA, but to jump from him example to saying all EA practitioners care exclusively about the ends over the means is a bit of a leap, imo.

Just use your freewill.

Delightful.

In my work we are looking at switching from mbtiles hosted with tilserver-gl(https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl) to pmtiles to remove a server process. But we were self hosting already and we are already using maplibre-gl 2.

I can see why the implementation in the blog post would be better for high traffic deployments (ours isn't). It also points out to me I don't understand how a CDN would handle range request for hosting the pmtiles file directly, it probably doesn't?

As far as the mapbox stuff,in my mind, pmtiles is a direct competitor (successor) to the mbtiles format, which was a revolution in comparison to everything that came before it. A successor I welcome because it makes it even easier for me as a developer to self host and not be dependent on a SaaS to run my maps.

The modern opensource map stack wouldn't exist without mapbox and I'm personally grateful to them for that. Most people who use pmtiles will use mapbox's opensource style spec to style them, and descendants of their open source code to render them. But as a developer now its an obvious choice to not use their services after years of using them.

However I'm not doing high traffic stuff and they never made much money off me anyway.

If you are going to to set up that infrastructure you could just use an mbtiles file which has been around for years.

The interesting thing to me is that this stuff is all built on the open source technology of mapbox, and it seems like a real threat to large parts of their business model. Interested to see how it plays out.

I'll take a fast deep clone for my case over one that handles all cases.

In the end I have switched to hosting on Netlify, which is easier to set up, not that I particularly care about that, but when I deploy my live site updates immediately.

Assessing if attending on the shoulders of the new Giants who stand up every few years is a difficult problem that I'm interested in and I appreciate the amount of context given here considering different use cases.

I don't think it would be my go to choice for projects currently, but its an option I would happily consider and I give Microsoft a lot of credit for moving in this direction.

That being said so far the reasons I've had to look at it were modernizing older .NET projects and last I looked there were so many incompatibilities be between .NET core and .NET standard that the projects would have been almost complete re-writes, somewhat of nullifying its advantages against other choices, but that was a while ago.

The quality of an end product doesn't have as much to do with tools as people would like to believe.

Its specifically geared towards visual recognition, but it starts with the basics of machine learning and moves on to feed forward nets and covnets and covers RNNs and attention towards the end.

The assignments are a great set of jupyter notebooks that really get your hands on the material and you can find a number of peoples complete assignments on github just by searching.

The lectures are available online as well https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3FW7Lu3i5JvHM8ljYj-z...

I've done hinton's and Ngs courses and as someone who already has a non-ai development background I found this to be the best introduction. Its really an extension of Andrej Karpathy's Neural Nets for Hackers (http://karpathy.github.io/neuralnets/)