My biggest question skimming over the docs is what a workflow for reviewing and applying overlay changes to the out-of-cwd dirs would be.

Also, bit tangential but if anyone has slightly more in-depth resources for grasping the security trade-offs between these kind of Linux-leveraging sandboxes, containers, and remote VMs I'd appreciate it. The author here implies containers are still more secure in principle, and my intuition is that there's simply less unknowns from my perspective, but I don't have a firm understanding.

Anyhow, kudos to the author again, looks useful.

Maybe I should have said "obvious to me," but I guess I just struggle to see how a serious crack at using modern opus in claude code doesn't make it obvious at this point.

I'd really recommend trying the "spike out a self-contained minimal version of this rearchitecture/migration and troubleshoot it iteratively until it works, then make a report on findings" use-case for anyone that hasn't had luck with them thus far and is serious about trying to reach conclusions based on direct experience.

IE, using agents to iterate through many possible approaches, spike out migrations, etc might save a project a year of misadventures, re-designs, etc, but that productivity gain _subtracts_ the intermediate versions that _didn't_ end up being shipped.

As others have mentioned, I think yak-shaving is now way more automated. IE, If I want to take a new terminal for a spin, throw together a devtool to help me think about a specific problem better, etc, I can do it with very low friction. So "personal" productivity is way higher.

The models are increasingly capable in impressive ways. Maybe the next gen will enable the "sales critter" to slop out commercially viable software with no tech know-how. If not, I'm sure we'll assume the next can, and if not that, the next.

But feigning confidence about the shape and nature of this unfurling sea-change is absurd when the high-profile examples we have are like, what, moltbook? And denigrate _all_ potential ingenuity and insight unilaterally into the bargain? What a careless way of looking at the world

I ran their tool with an otherwise empty CLAUDE.md, and ran `claude /context`, which showed 3.1k tokens used by this approach (1.6% of the opus context window, bit more than the default system prompt. 8.3% is system tools).

Otherwise it's an interesting finding. The nudge seems like the real winner here, but potential further lines of inquiry that would be really illuminating: 1. How do these approaches scale with model size? 2. How are they impacted by multiple such clauses/blocks? Ie maybe 10 `IMPORTANT` rules dilute their efficacy 3. Can we get best of both worlds with specialist agents / how effective are hierarchical routing approaches really? (idk if it'd make sense for vercel specifically to focus on this though)

My comment on the cursor post for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625491

Product is still fairly beta, but in Sculptor[^1] we have an MCP that provides agent & human with suggestions along the lines of "the agent didn't actually integrate the new module" or "the agent didn't actually run the tests after writing them." It leads to some interesting observations & challenges - the agents still really like ignoring tool calls compared to human messages b/c they "know better" (and sometimes they do).

[^]: https://imbue.com/sculptor/

> Another experiment was doing an in-place migration of Solid to React in the Cursor codebase. It took over 3 weeks with +266K/-193K edits. As we've started to test the changes, we do believe it's possible to merge this change.

In my view, this post does not go into sufficient detail or nuance to warrant any serious discussion, and the sparseness of info mostly implies failure, especially in the browser case.

It _is_ impressive that the browser repo can do _anything at all_, but if there was anything more noteworthy than that, I feel they'd go into more detail than volume metrics like 30K commits, 1M LoC. For instance, the entire capability on display could be constrained to a handful of lines that delegate to other libs.

And, it "is possible" to merge any change that avoids regressions, but the majority of our craft asks the question "Is it possible to merge _the next_ change? And the next, and the 100th?"

If they merge the MR they're walking the walk.

If they present more analysis of the browser it's worth the talk (not that useful a test if they didn't scrutinize it beyond "it renders")

Until then, it's a mountain of inscrutable agent output that manages to compile, and that contains an execution pathway which can screenshot apple.com by some undiscovered mechanism.

Also the collective capability of our IT is inhibited in some ways by the silo-ing of particular content and domain knowledge+tech, no question

Personally, I believe it would be better if we had more technological self-direction and sovereignty, but this kind of essay, which downplays and denigrates the progress and value of our modern systems, is a perspective from which the insights necessary for such a transformation cannot possibly take root.

When asking such questions seriously, we must look at youtube, not twitter. Mountains of innovations in media publishing, delivery, curation, navigation, supplementation via auto-generated captions and dubbing, all accreted over 20 years, enabling a density and breadth of open-ended human communication that is to me truly staggering.

I'm not saying we should view centralized control over human comms infra as positive, or that we'll be "stuck" with it (I don't think we will be), just that we need to appreciate the nature and scale of the "internet" properly if we're to stand a chance of seeing some way through to a future of decentralized information technology

It is a result of the models selecting the policy "random acts of kindness" which resulted in a slew of these emails/messages. They received mostly negative responses from well-known OS figures and adapted the policy to ban the thank-you emails.

All platforms with any moderation system can be subverted by bad actors - IDK that much about SO's mechanisms but it strikes me as leaving the "community" far more leverage for getting around entrenched bad actors than discord, reddit, etc.

And what's more... it's software purpose-built for technical Q&A. Some of my SO answers have been updated by others as they became outdated. Not that I have some particular fondness for SO, but what a cool collective intelligence feature.

I have a feeling this was written for an in-group and broke containment, but the straight forward answer here seems to me to be "SO should have a report system for dealing with bad actors," not "boycott the forum I don't like so people use the one I do"

Also maybe bias, but there are still ennough obvious agent artifacts/byproducts in the code base that it makes me doubt that the details were thoroughly attended to, and that's where the devils are.

Though especially now with the potential of LLM-based retrieval I personally worry about keeping things well organized even less than it used to.