39 chunks · 26 episodes
...ted. YOLOing codeslop and workslop into the team's commons. When you accumulate Gilded Turds you're left with a pile of shit. Hoping to sling shiny slop faster than the others so you can get promoted and move on before the pile of shit becom...
...rn era is vibes without fundamentals. Fundamentally hollow. An infinite feed of Gilded Turds.
...ser they got to the endpoint. LLMs are basically producing Goodhart's law code. Gilded turds, that the closer you look, and the more you try to pin down the details, the more you realize they aren't ready to ship. A Xeno's paradox of infinit...
...n are to be correct. A thing that looked great might turn out to be terrible. A gilded turd.
...oesn't happen until much later. This is the reason modern society optimizes for Gilded Turds over Grubby Truffles.
Gilded Turd and Grubby Truffle aren't the only two combinations. You also can have Gilded Truffle: best of both worlds. You also can have Grubby Turd: worst of b...
...ve Strassmann has a frame, Delicious Poison and Disgusting Cleanup. Rhymes with Gilded Turd / Grubby Truffle. These are two situations where the short-term and the long-term are disjoint. But we tend to pick based on the short-term, even whe...
...s. Goodhart's law. So vibecoding and other agentic production processes produce gilded turds by default. This mean that the more shiny things are, the more suspicious people are of the underlying quality. Superficial quality is now extremely...
...n to "how long is the tail?" If the tail is short and stubby, a linear, heroic, Gilded Turd approach might be viable. If there's no tail, just muscle through as quickly as possible. If the tail is long, then no amount of muscling through wil...
Short time horizons structurally select for Gilded Turds. If you have a long-enough time horizon, the benefit of the compounding curve becomes way more common, and the Grubby Truffle becomes a no-brainer.
...ng for great pull you in two different directions. The former pulls you towards Gilded Turds. The latter pulls you towards Grubby Truffles. This creates the process of canalization: when robustness of a good enough outcome is more important ...
Everyone can tell a Gilded Turd has value at the beginning. Only someone with differentiated insight can see the value of the Grubby Truffle at the beginning.
...ocumentation for a piece of shit that doesn't work. Vibecoded software produces Gilded Turds.
Vibecoding to create clones of useful software produces Gilded Turds by default. "I vibecoded a clone of X app" really means "I vibecoded something that looks like that app." The LLMs are great at making it look right...
...uth flows. Something only a massive, sprawling bureaucracy could be proud of. A Gilded Turd.
...lation that is even more in need of hand-holding for support. Classic MBA-style gilded turd logarithmic-benefit-for-exponential-cost.
...er software business model is ultimately about holding users' data hostage. The Gilded Turd model of software. Looks great, but the longer you use it the more you realize the deal stinks.
...iated by having really polished UIs. That matters less than it ever has before. Gilded Turds.[bo]
If you over-polish for the level of underlying momentum, it looks like a Gilded Turd. The closer people look, the less compelling it looks. This means that it looks like you're "pushing" it further than it would go on its own naturall...
...mell. People who can tell the value of Grubby Truffles can't stand the smell of Gilded Turds. Sight is obvious, remote, fast. Smell is subtle, close, slow. If all you're doing is sight, then you can go very fast. You have to go slower to do ...