I'm really trying to do this too. The problem is it's *so easy* to let your standards slip, even for just a moment, and that piece of code suddenly becomes foreign.

I find more mental energy is spent on restraint than execution these days.

Ultimately when I think deeper, none of this would worry me if these changes occurred over 20 years - societies and cultures change and are constantly in flux, and that includes jobs and what people value. It's the rate of change and inability to adapt quick enough which overwhelms me.

This was a solid letter to the fans. I get why it’s disappointing to some, but it sounds like it was the right move for them personally. For people who’ve earned that kind of credibility, I say congrats on the move.

Btw I'm sure Simon doesn't need defending, but I have seen a lot of people dump on everything he posts about LLMs recently so I am choosing this moment to defend him. I find Simon quite level headed in a sea of noise, personally.

Maybe we were just 6 months too early to start?

Best of luck finishing it up. You can do it.

The fascinating thing was how easy it was to lose control. I would set up the project with strict rules, md files and tell myself to stay fully engaged, but out of nowhere I slid into compulsive accept mode, or worse told the model to blatantly ignore my own rules I set out. I knew better, but yet it happened over and over. Ironically, it was as if my context window was so full of "successes" I forgot my own rules; I reward-hacked myself.

Maybe it just takes practice and better tooling and guardrails. And maybe this is the growing pains of a new programmers mindset. But left me a little shy to try full delegation any time soon, certainly not without a complete reset on how to approach it.

This resonates so much with me. To a point where I don't write/contribute in public forums out of fear for this misinterpretation.

Strangely, your post has made me push through that exact fear to write this, so any perceived misinterpretation has positively impacted at least one stranger. This is a good reminder for me that focusing only on negative consequences misses the unintended positive ones of still putting something out there, even if its not a perfect representation of the "uncompressed format".

Thank you for sharing, and I wish you a speedy recovery.

I increasingly find that I need these quick hits to refocus and prioritise...

Can't say for sure yet if the project will work, but this workflow seems OK because DSPy abstracts away the CoT optimization with still giving me full control of the inputs/outputs in a python multi-agent script