1,690 mentions · 755 chunks · 125 episodes
Improving the software production cycle with LLMs is like trying to add a new room to a house that is on fire. The fundamentals of how software gets created are being reorganized as we watch.
...judgment call" then it's not a judgment call, it's straightforward and obvious. LLMs are great at tasks that nearly everyone (with enough time and motivation) would agree on. Humans often get bored, but LLMs have infinite patience. Th...
You can give agents a "personality hash"[ac] so they know how to work with you. LLMs are excellent at understanding the meaning of arcane jargon. One thing LLMs know well are enneagram types and Myer's Brigg personality types. "Alex i...
...o support long term" but "is this worth even spending the time to think about?" LLMs can help with the latter, not the former. If you can free up useless energy by automating it, you can spend that energy on higher-leverage things. "W...
...ee. If you can break a complicated problem down into merely-tedious components, LLMs can do it.
One way to get increasing leverage per token over time; have the LLMs extract useful tools. "Look at our Lessons Learned doc and our commit history then create the tools that would have made it easier, faster and cheape...
...lking to a consistent person when a contractor skims a casefile for 30 seconds. LLMs can skim 100000x more than a human in that time frame. The limit is the context window, but it allows LLMs to read effectively "instantly". So of cou...
An effective writing technique that LLMs have learned to imitate: "Connect nine of the ten dots." The last dot is obvious and trivial, but the reader connects it. Because the reader connects...
...icatively with more dimensions. This is one of the reasons gradient descent for LLMs and evolution is unreasonably effective. We're used to a puny three dimensions. An excellent video about how proteins can be discovered by evolution ...
LLMs are a distilled hologram of cultural experience. A hyper object that we can inspect and probe. We can see shimmers of deeper meaning; patterns presen...
Avoiding wrong is easier than orienting to right. LLMs are great at the former, bad at the latter.
You can use LLMs as research goblins to investigate problems that you'd be embarrassed to waste an intern on. The cost is so low that it's reasonable to task them eve...
The power of tools like Claude Code comes from the open-endedness of LLMs' reasoning being merged with the open-ended capability of the CLI. That explosive power is combinatorial. The CLI is intimidating. People say, "why d...
...ven disabled their own functionality when gaslit by humans." Say it again now, "LLMs shouldn't be trusted to make security decisions!" Zenity CTO demos 0-click AI agent exploits on stage at RSAC Seeking Alpha: OpenClaw is a Liability ...
A classic critique: "How can you trust LLMs? They can't count the r's in strawberry!" "Yes but they can write the code to do that task right every time." For everything that's not natural langu...
...ssage, append to the case log, and move on to the next one. Not entirely unlike LLMs, of course. The victim was entirely snookered by the most superficial continuity and the impression of a single suitor. It shows how easily we believ...
...xpensive is relative, and can change when a new general-purpose technology like LLMs becomes common.
...ne of X app" really means "I vibecoded something that looks like that app." The LLMs are great at making it look right, not work right. You never would have bothered to do it in the past, but also you would have had a better intuition...
LLMs do for cognitive labor what electricity did for manual labor. A lot of tasks don't make sense when they have to be done manually. But if you get abun...
...hey accumulate. Especially in a world where software is trivial to clone due to LLMs.