“Oh god, what did he do?!”

“He was committing open source code without a license”

There are large portions of my codebases that are essentially extremely verbose grunt work. My UI stack, IaC YAML, thin CRUD routes, etc.

I know what the code is supposed to look like when it’s done being written, but it’s going to take me for freaking ever to type it all out.

I can just few shot it now in an hour. Plan -> feedback loop -> build -> review loop.

Does it try to do weird stuff? Yeah. And then I’m just like “that’s weird, no, the components should be broken up like XYZ” and then it’s not weird anymore. Occasionally (1% of the time) I just do a quick refactor myself instead of trying to tell the agent harness what to do.

I can get something fairly close to the ballpark of what I would have done but in like single digit percentage of the time.

And the result is that I can spit out a bunch of purpose built tools (personal tools, internal tools for teams, etc.) that I never would have been able to justify building otherwise.

Reminds me of Professor Chaos trying to flood the world by leaving the garden hose on.

I've never used breakpoint debugging, was always a printf debugger. And now an agent can do that loop for me.

Prompt is usually something along the lines of:

>I would expect the behavior of this to be [X] - instead I'm observing [Y]

And the agent will form hypothesis, place printf statements, compile, and scrape logs on loop - each loop ruling out hypothesis or narrowing down what portion of the code is responsible for the unexpected behavior.

It has been able to pin-point the exact line(s) of code responsible every time I've reached for it so far.

I’ve heard this refrain most of my career - and believed it at one point. But the bytes themselves are heavy and hard to move.

Multiple projects I’ve worked on in my career would have had to _physically move_ the data (plane, train, semi) if they wanted to migrate - there was no reasonable way to get the data out of the datacenter over network on any reasonable timeframe.

> This technology is fundamentally different from the “rivulet (shark skin) process,” which is known as a typical aerodynamic drag reduction technology. The rivulet process mimics the fine longitudinal grooves in shark skin, and by carving grooves approximately 0.1 mm wide along the direction of airflow, it aligns the vortices that occur near the wall surface of turbulent airflow areas. DMR, on the other hand, delays the switch from laminar to turbulent flow by means of random and minute irregularities. The flow zones it affects and the mechanisms it employs are based on completely different concepts.

The hinge jamming or becoming detached would make it inoperable.

Murder by ethernet cable: https://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/dead-woman-found-in-pa...

Murder by laptop: https://www.riverfronttimes.com/william-lynn-gunter-sentence...

Murder by cellphone charger: https://lawandcrime.com/crime/pennsylvania-man-admits-to-str...

Murder by desk lamp: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2009/01/08/man-beaten-to-death...

Stabbing by coffee mug: https://www.muscalaw.com/blog/north-port-two-women-attack-co...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026492

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

We’re building an AWS analogue catalogue of services (Databases, Compute, Auth, etc.) for distributed systems.

Want a job do Pollen-like dev full time?

william.blankenship@webai.com

Either way, would be great to compare notes!

Don’t have a rebuttal.

I’m long on last mile energy production. Solar/battery for domestic, nuclear for industrial, etc. It creates resilience through decentralization. It also is likely to happen organically (no central planning necessary, markets will likely naturally converge here as they drive down prices).

Haven’t spent much time reconciling that with my stance _against_ centralized wind/solar/battery in critical infrastructure in the U.S.

Will think about this for a while, thanks!

* I’m skeptical of the U.S. being able to develop domestic supply chains for this under current conditions

* “Kinetic action” does imply large swaths of U.S. infrastructure will in fact “suddenly stop working” and need to be rebuilt to maintain capacity

Help me understand.

Have any sources I can learn from?