And calling someone stupid is right and generally accepted way to lead a fruitful conversation, thank you.

Modi has been the great hero that India wanted and is deserving of every accolade he and his close advisors bring to bear.

I have been now convinced by your argument and steely demeanour. It is truly a joy to talk to someone so charismatic and I feel elevated just from reading these messages.

And you are absolutely correct in assuming that India’s current leadership has no problems, they sample all possible solutions that could be done and select only the best one for their entire people, pulling absolutely everyone from poverty and policing that no entrenched elites capture any of the wealth of the nation.

Of course there are NO protests in this model of a country where the young feel empowered in their future, and even if there were, they would be met with only joyous approval by the elites and all measure would be taken to incorporate any complaints raised by the people to make everybody prosperous.

And elections are absolutely fair and there is never even a hint of any fraud or corruption, because if there ever was that is for sure the cause of evil Chinese spies or British investigative journalist saboteurs.

It is courteous people like you who make me stay in the country and provide my totally undesired technical expertise to bring the living standards of everyone up and pay my incredible fair and not at all inflated taxes for doing so.

I will from now on shut my fuck up and praise the unerring elites at the top.

I do think this is an unrelated win of functional languages that hasn’t yet been “discovered” by the vibe coder crowd - FP’s whole premise was that it makes your code depend on much much less things so you can “fit it in your head and reason about”… that’s like the perfect sweet spot for agentic as well, we just haven’t seen tools utilize that in earnest.

But now that people seldom even look at the code, does it even matter? Our shared language now is English - across tests, frontend, backend, product briefs and design systems.

I have written a crap ton of node code before, because I liked it, but now I do everything in specialized stacks where each tech is chosen to best fit its environment. Backend - use Go, frontend - react/svelte/custom ,game simulation code - C#.

I just debate what would be best fit with an agent, do a few pilots to prove it and just go. Languages I’ve never coded in are super fast to execute - just insist on following best practice, modern conventions and do some spot checks against o(n) problems, architecture and parallelism - and it works, and vibe coded codebase with strict linting rules vastly outperforms fine tuned code in a shared language (node).

I honestly don’t see a bright future for them, and tbh I was surprised at Claude’s migration _to_ bun - why not just make the jump to something like ocamel that would let their agents have even more performance, context and linting tools, but I guess if they did it once the will do it again when they feel like it.

India is “growing” and it is “growing fast” nobody is denying that.

But if you go to the other places in Asia and see what they have accomplished, some after literally being bombed to the Stone Age by the Americans …

Bangkok is a bustling modern industrial clean and livable metropolis.

Delhi just recently “almost fixed its electricity blackout problems” … 2026…

Once you step out of the propaganda bubble, walk the streets and talk to the people on these streets it’s a very different picture.

I’ve overheard women talking to each other how one of them fell asleep in a cab at night, and the other one mentioned “OMG you are so lucky to live in Mumbai, you were safe” … like wtf place are you coming from. Turns out only in Mumbai women are safe in India…

You can _drink_ the tap water everywhere in Taipei. In Mumbai even the super mega ultra rich people need to buy filters for their water …

India is growing fast, it’s just that under Modi it has grown so much less than everybody around them, so you can start asking questions - where does all that generated wealth flowing into.

40 years ago Seoul was a shit hole, today it is just as virtually unaffordable for the locals as Mumbai, but it’s a city that makes the US and most of Europe jealous. No mineral wealth, no hydrocarbons, literal war at their border, and the people still built that marvel.

> Go back to Europe then

Great attitude dude, great attitude, slow clap.

In that case the general reason you are being dismissed now is you are doing a classic [whataboutism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism) - dismissing one wrong by pointing out another.

You should consider things in context, yes, but one wrong doesn’t make another wrong go away. If I kill your spouse, the fact that my spouse was killed (even by you) still makes it a murder. A country that doesn’t guard its sovereignty of violence famously stops being a country by definition - https://acoup.blog/2024/04/12/fireside-friday-april-12-2024/

As someone who moved to India for personal reasons from Europe, this whole defending of Modi and his party policies seems so bizarre - there _are_ examples of countries in the region that got worse in the last 30 years (Pakistan) in the region, but there are soo many examples of others that got much much better. If you look what’s happening to all the other countries in Asia - India seems to be falling behind so hard it’s not even funny. And all thanks to the great leader. It could have been worse - yes, but it could easily have been so so much better.

And I usually go back to the “why nations fail” book that outlined the reasons of countries success and failure - it’s not rocket science - build and strengthen institutions and your country prospers, waken institutions for personal gain to you and your allies - country goes to the dumpster eventually.

The US are going a similar road btw, and it would be a very interesting example to point to eventually for the next editions of that book.

Knowing that I can tune my level of enjoyment of whatever is happening.

Though there is an old saying from where I grew up - alcohol is stealing happiness from tomorrow to have it today.

And that has always stuck with me - whenever I drink I get a bit happier that instant and feel worse more tired the next day.

And that is ok if I am going to a social event and I want to get the most out of it, and I know next day will be chill anyway - who’ll can make the “chill” time even more chill.

Force people to go all in with “impossible” tasks and see how they do with the power of LLMs. Then spend some significant time teaching people _with_ that solution in place what was actually built and what would have been a better architecture? A … software archeology session if you will.

That’s what most of what people do would be anyway - building PoC fast and then figuring out how to scale them?

I think the cheapening of labour that AI is doing globally will be much more impactful on culture, economy and life in general.

Our whole world order was _built_ on the Black Death making labour expensive which lead to the Industrial Revolution (among other factors, but this was an important one).

If we get to cheap labour - then we go to where South Asia is today - low education (why invest when you have ai?) big stratification of society, populist politics, etc.

India is portraying to its people how it’s racing to overtake the west and China … I think the other way around is more likely, with AI you get everyone closer to India’s case.

Prepare for ultra-ultra-ultra rich - like you have in India - honestly the gap between the wealthy and the poor there is astronomically higher than anything you’ve seen in the west.

Silver lining is though - societies like this end up “high Kinship” and more “stable” - maybe even lower large scale conflict?

Even fable _regularly_ stumbles as big repos or custom configurations, even for projects that fable itself built with high dev quality standards and modern design direction.

It just can’t hold it all in its context and will be forced to do “software archeology” all the time to figure things out - yeah it will work _most_ of the time, but to truly be able to scale and have autonomous agents reliably work and mold your codebase you need a lot more structure - tests, lints, compilers, validators etc. Your “skills” or policy files are there so agents can resolve issues and heal things themselves without your explicit direction.

If I have several tabs, each holding an agent team, with each agent spawning subagents as it sees fit, all of that apparatus has to ground itself _somewhere_ and if you don’t make decisions yourself, it will make decisions for you, save them in its own skill files, but some of these you might not like.

When I was doing this myself I would read the docs and just implement them - claud is going about doing real software archeology to figure if what is said is actually the truth or it’s stale/inaccurate/buggy.

I’ve become 10 times more diligent because it is a lot easier to do. It’s no longer Urgh it’s good enough let’s ship it, now it’s “sure put a leg on it to figure it out and double check it”.

Backups are _tested regularly_ now because LLMs make it cheap to do so.

The only problem is when new engineers who haven’t learned these things Pre-ai now don’t really get why it is needed in the first place and will often lead the agent astray.

I think to address this we need to change or improve our training routines in general for humans. I think a lot of companies nowadays just skip that and deploy a company wide skill/policy for the agents, but don’t transfer the underlying skills to the devs themselves.

I would love to spend more time and talk to the people with their issues so we can come to a common understanding… but neither have the capacity for this, and now things are getting worse I think.

Maybe someday agents are good enough that we just discuss direction and implementation details, and every “developer” becomes more of an executive in a company, free to chat about more than just work, focusing on building human relationships and leaving “the tech stuff” to their agent teams…

And old geezers like us who actually know how to write ourself out of a for loop would be the premium - wizards holding forgotten knowledge, incomprehensible to mere uninitiated mortals. I wonder what distinctive dress and hair styles will we develop :-D

Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me.

Otherwise each of these coaxing sessions is something I have to keep in my head until resolved, which is a load in and off itself.

And even better - I can point Claude to that message and gives me a summary. You might say this is silly because we are paying the LLM tax, but knowing what to share, and then verifying against my situation are two different things.

Sometimes they have checked the wrong thing, sometimes they need guidance, sometimes I need to investigate before I can answer. A full LLM message with context is like “summary of their working context that I can resume on my end” so I don’t waste cycles asking or rechecking etc.

And it is still possible to be a learning experience for both of us since the initial message is the start, we can then talk to each other like humans, both much more in sync than before…

It is kinda ironic but I think it does push things in a better direction. Would I have loved it if the message was human, direct and to the point - obviously, but we are all busy, we got shit to do, and this is a useful “resume” mechanic

When I was playing around with remote work, (before the pandemic and before it was cool) - I figured most of this can be offset by just going to a coworking place - and even better - friendships you form from there seem stronger, because people are less anchored to the company and more to the “place” - more open to friendships. Plus you can pick and switch your “office” as desired for your mode of travel and preferences (or even switch cities, travel around)

Don’t think anyone is faulting people for that - it’s the other side of the coin that the whole world is kinda not really liking.

And it’s not like there aren’t examples of successful integrations - even with internal tensions some places do manage to just make people live together, it’s hard yes but not impossible… just have to have the will and smarts for it, wonder what the current Israeli government is lacking…

The question is how do you deal with it. Israel “dealing” with its “Palestinian problem” by taking a book out of nazis and Ottoman Empire is both ironic and incredibly sad.

Also kinda inevitable if you think about it just from a game theory point of view. Every act of violence, every war, won or lost, increases support for a radical party. Every act of terror Hamas / Hezbollah promote strengthens Netanyahu’s position, every act of terror Israeli government does strengthens Hamas / Hezbollah.

It’s just game theory - either respective positions are not to “solve the actual problem” it’s to perpetuate their own existence. If the terror stops, all three lose power, so which leader would ever do it?

There has to be either an outside enemy to drive people together, or an outside force of peace doing the same (EUs role in the Northern Ireland’s case). And this becomes even harder if you have external powers that are _driving_ the division (Iran for example in be middle eastern case).

It’s just humans being greedy and thinking of local political problems and not the bigger picture, a “premature optimisation” if your will…

Took her a lot of empathy and understanding on what the situation is like on the ground really, second / third order effects, etc - to get to solutions that _actually_ help people there.

For example how do you do fair lending to people (rural Indian women) who have no bank account, no credit history, almost no financial history at all, and they want to star an enterprise? How do you “bootstrap financial trust?” And with proper and inventive organising she managed to lend to women and proved with data that they are 5x better borrowers than the equivalent male population, but were starved of accessible credit cause banks would not lend to them.

I don’t trust it with code anyway - every feature needs comprehensive test, and then a live deploy on a real working test system before it is approved - I mostly measure success with - after deployment is it doing what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s like “helping another team managing their work stream” experience rather than coding yourself.

Funny enough models seem to have personalities and the dis on each other - when I had an opus orchestrator dispatching fable workers, they would comment on how “unreliable” it was and it had “evidence to prove it” and fable thinks opus is too rigid and needs more hand holding… it really starts to feel like managing team egos and verifying work. And I code scan mostly to just spot check if it’s not doing anything super stupid. But my goal is to make sure anything shipped is easy to change and fix, and every mistake has a test behind it so it doesn’t happen again.

I ship more problems, but they get discovered and fixed quicker. Before they reach prod of course. And from time to time you do reorganisation and refactoring passes where I brainstorm how things could have been better with the help of evidence- chat sessions, tests, bugs etc.

It feels less like rigorous engineering and more like gentle gardening. Or like “project management” not “coding”.

Honestly given my age now I’m fine with that. Have enough “hard” projects under my belt (ORMs, sql parsers, etc) that I don’t feel I need to prove anything to anybody, but I don’t think that’s even relevant- the velocity change is … I guess around 5-10x for me - with provable metrics, so I try not to lent the good old days but figure out how I can now live in this brave new world and be happy with my work.