I used to spend hours debugging video card issues and other modifications I've liked to make over the years and being able to describe my ideal system admin setup I could get onto what I actually wanted to do.

Heh, thinking about it now, I broke a MBR on a Windows install as a kid and if I would have had these tools I would have been able to fix it immediately, but back then it took me using enough Linux booted off live cds to learn debugging techniques to fix the MBR. And debugging is one of my best skills.

I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness.

For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigger its internal state of certain phenomena, and that sent me down a rabbit hole that I'm still exploring.

This story resonated with a lot of questions that can come out of figuring a good solid answer to the what is consciousness question. The one I triggered for me is: Is our perception of time just a slow thread in the giant GPU we are running the universe on? Or more generally, what is time? That's a fun YouTube rabbit hole if you ever need one.

Another thing I have in the general sdlc process is having it add enough logging to verify features are turned on, configured as we expected, and that becomes enough feedback for most of my features.

I've been mostly focusing on being able to replicate this across stacks greater than 3 projects so far (with the eventual goal of having an agent be able to orchestrate our complete infra stack, and this being a large component of a DR plan to rebuild).

None of this is really new for us, I'm just the most knowledgeable in my group in how the different products across teams glue together so I've been creating these rube goldbergs as a prototype, and then having it iterate on codifying the parts that don't need a constant LLM. We were blessed to have an engineer a decade ago build out tooling for local container automation that matches 95% of the deployed infra stack. That last 5% sucks when you fall into it, but that's always been a truth. I've added and expanded the tool over the years with making it act more like the deployed environment networking wise, but a lot of things don't end up working well in docker containers on M series macs when most of our complicated virtualization in our private cloud can't run on them yet...

I've slowly been optimizing for token use through the stack and Claude ends up making very tight for loops for most of the process and keeping token count even lower. It's been nice. A lot of my toil at work is just gone.

I have also been finding the MCP auth story to be really lacking was excited to see OAuth 2 support until I tried to get it to work at work and realized our idp implementation didn't support 2.1, and went into the spec and started wondering if anyone had a good experience yet. Luckily most of our environment can settle on a OAuth token env var standard until that's all in order.

I'm more on team small tasks because of my love of unix piping, I keep telling folks, as a old Linux dude, seeing subagents work together for the first time felt like I was learning to pipe sed and awk for the first time. I realized how powerful these could be, and we still seem to be going that direction.

I would love to read about why that stuff is the way it is from the engineers, hmm that might be a good spelunking. I really must be missing something that makes it harder than I think it really should be.

The steam deck forced me to finally pay attention to the usb-c ecosystem and I can only imagine how some non tech people might get with mysteriously bad or slow charging.

I find it crazy that Apple went back to magsafe in the m4 (maybe earlier but that's the machine I have at work). But at least you can still charge over usb-c.

Fair that I didn't instruct it explicitly to make more pro-user choices, it just seemed to think slurping as much information into the backend was an default intention. Wasted a few more tokens to iterate on it to remove things, but it was IMO interesting enough that I finally submitted feedback around what I imagine is an interesting training problem.

Somewhat tempted to re-enable it as I only really comment on videos that are for very very niche communities and I'm usually answering or asking questions.

This is one of the first tech waves where I feel like I'm on the very very groundfloor for a lot of exploration and it only feels like people have been paying closer attention in the last year. I can't imagine too many 'standard' standards becoming a standard that quickly.

It's new enough that Google seems to be throwing pasta against the wall and seeing what products and protocols stick. Antigravity for example seems too early to me, I think they just came out with another type of orchestrator, but the whole field seems to be exploring at the same time.

Everyone and their uncle is making an orchestrator now! I take a very cautious approach lately where I haven't been loading up my tools like agents, ides, browsers, phones with too much extra stuff because as soon as I switch something or something new comes out that doesn't support something I built a workflow around the tool either becomes inaccessible to me, or now a bigger learning curve than I have the patience for.

I've been a big proponent of trying to get all these things working locally for myself (I need to bite the bullet on some beefy video cards finally), and even just getting tool calls to work with some qwen models to be so counterintuitive.

The reproduction has been one of the things I've been struggling with in regards to consistency of bringing up the right envs. At the moment I've been approaching it as a MCP server that holds a few tools to bring up specific versions or branches of my stack to then find where a bug was introduced, build that commit prove that it wasnt in the previous one, and then fix it and run the full stack again with the fix component, then run through our local integration tests.

This is the stuff that makes me feel like I'm on steroids now, my whole dev debug process can be run with a few instructions, game changing.