I was actually surprised when I finished UoW regarding how different it was from PoG, while maintaining the quality (If not better, but PoG IS THAT GOOD anyway).

For the record, the series was recommended to be by Claude of all things, and it told me that Phlebas was not up to quality but I gave it a shot just for the sake of completeness of the series. Nop, not worth it.

It was too repetitive.

Think you missed a word there.

That particular book bored me to death, but from the same author / series I recently read "Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons" and I can't recommend (both) enough.

Dungeon Crawler, I started the series recently but got bored mid 3rd book. It is quite more denser than the first 2, and it feels like never ending.

I started The Culture series a while ago. I read both "The Player of Games" (amazing book), and "Use of Weapons". Also amazing, with a Memento-like storytelling that was also incredible. I did enjoy both books a lot for different reasons, I can't vouch for any over the other really.

I then moved to "Consider Phlebas" and honestly, got bored to death. So my recommendation is to go for these two as well.

I recently (This month, bought a recent "deluxe edition" of sorts [1]) re read Neuromancer, and then jumped to "Count Zero" but at some point got bored mid way with Gibson's endless descriptions of non things.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GGGZSNXQ

I even hacked it for a company I was working for at the time: I installed it in a machine that had a lot of pdfs from some other client company of them.

I don't recall the exact details, but I did some sort of proxying between the Microsoft Web Server that came with NT? at the time and G Desktop, and then an entire team of first support agents had almost instant search across all those docs. Good times.

If anything, there are several _moats_ with Creativity (Big C) being one of them.

I don't know about Astra, and have used Fable 5.1 only slightly (And burned 85% of my 5 hour quota in 1 prompt).

In my experience, LLMs are completely devoid of "thinking outside the box" capabilities. And I'm not talking about 6 thinking hats type of stuff, but slight of to the right field lateral thinking. Something a 6 year old does for fun when playing with their mates.

If this weren't so, we wouldn't have been through so many " engineering" in such a short amount of time.

> I often hear people use the words agent and model interchangeably

_what_ people. Would I hear one of my colleagues do this, I'll slap them across the face. With a 4 pounds salmon. Alive.

> to help us have more precise conversations.

What problem are you trying to solve. _Why_ you need more precise conversations. I mean, I understand what you aiming at. But is it really worth it to go nitpicking at people's mental models, is the gain worth it?

I don't want Shakespeare, I want Bob the builder.

Half of my work is telling claude how to behave. I'm pretty certain they have enough _data_ to realize people do the same thing time and time again.

Check this comment of mine for a better explanation of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413353

Any recent work by William Gibson matches the description.

The way I managed to get claude to stop doing this is telling it "This document is for you for later use, no need to over explain things or extra verbosity"

The 2nd thing is, how do I measure that.

---

In my case, the details of my work (Kinda DevOps, kinda Senior Dev) makes it that having an LLM to do the heavy lifting allows me to do things not only faster, but better, and across domains I do not hold expertise on.

An example of the effect of LLMs in my daily work is that I'm in the middle of a PHP upgrade for a rather large legacy application, and the "heavy lifting" is really out of the scale, letting me concentrate on what really matters, while at the same time if I do keep "the harness" tight I'm certain the results are the correct ones. Also correcting course is just as cheap.

Not having to worry on the tooling on exchange has the incredible desirable result of my velocity being incomparable to what it was before.

Then we have the side effect of how easy to do transfer knowledge: Rather than telling the QA guy how to do the work specific for this task, I defined a set of files (.md documents, skills, an off-the-shelf customised MCP server) that assist QA into doing the work in a way that helps me do my job better and faster.

There's also a clear possibility that what I'm doing will expand to the rest of the team I am in, completely altering the way in which we approach development.

If we take 'x' as 'mileage', yours might vary. Mine has, and I'm baffled at the positive net results I AM getting.

Also, this what I do (coding?) is extremely fun again.

Being able to work close to the speed of thought is the best high.

    I don't know what machine they were raging against, but I'm pretty sure it was an LLM