53 chunks · 35 episodes
...ion to some change in the external world, nothing updates it. This can create a Gilded Turd. Opex. The more data in your knowledge base, the more time it takes to make sure it's all up to date. Instead, have the data come alive. Data knows h...
...s are very different. If you just judge a system by how it looks, you can get a Gilded Turd. Looks pretty, but exponentially expensive to add features to or fix bugs in. A system with proper internal structure will be a Grubby Truffle.
...ompounded the more of it that was piled on top. That's the difference between a Gilded Turd architecture and a Grubby Truffle.
...affolding, each additional detail makes the whole more difficult to maintain. A Gilded Turd. The scaffolding stays even when you forget the details. The scaffolding is abstract, and so it can more easily be transferred to other domains.
A Gilded Turd gets more expensive as it accumulates things. A Grubby Truffle gets less expensive. It comes down to: does it have the right backbone? The right scaf...
...e, then it gets increasingly expensive to add anything new to it or improve it. Gilded Turd. If the system has strong bones, then spackle can be used to fill it in with leverage. Grubby Truffle.
...can vibecode doesn't mean you feel this in your bones. The difference between a Gilded Turd codebase and a Grubby Truffle codebase will be invisible to non-technical people (e.g. management).
...e. It also gets harder and harder to reason about what its internal state is. A Gilded Turd.
...sible to you is layering. Layering is how you get leverage, how you don't get a gilded turd that gets exponentially harder to modify.
...ping the whole thing decohere from the ground truth at superhuman speed. Making Gilded Turd software at ever-faster rates.
A product made by one company will be a Gilded Turd. In the limit, each feature must be designed to fit coherently with all other ones. That is a combinatorial cost with the size of the functionality. ...
If you polish a piece of junk to a sterling sheen, you get a Gilded Turd. Looks great, but based on a fundamentally rotted interior.
...tor assembled. Product thinking in the limit is about superficial optimization: Gilded Turd. Platform thinking is about deep systemization: Grubby Truffle.
...l trappings of quality to demand your attention. But it's unearned attention. A Gilded Turd. It forces work onto you, which is infuriating.
...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...