HackerLangs
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

apf6

no profile record

comments

apf6
·il y a 9 jours·discuss
Yeah I think this is a good approach. I’m pretty AI-optimistic when it comes to making code changes. But reading AI generated descriptions (including pull requests) is absolutely the worst. That content really needs to be human written. Not just for the benefit of the reader, but it also helps the writer exercise their understanding.
apf6
·le mois dernier·discuss
Slowing down development is the wrong goal. I see a desire for slowness come up a lot with developers. If you pursue that goal all the way to its logical conclusion then eventually you would stop all coding completely. Which would prevent new bugs but obviously we can't do that and keep our jobs.

By all means add tons of quality gates to your SDLC pipeline. But thinking about slowness purely for the sake of slowness will not solve your problems.
apf6
·le mois dernier·discuss
old and inaccurate knowledge..

- Skills do take up space in the context. The name and description of every skill goes into the system prompt. You can't add unlimited skills without context pressure.

- MCP context spam is less of a big deal now that there is deferred tool loading.

- If you work with the agents long enough you'll run into situations where using bash CLI tools suck and an MCP works better.

- MCP is not dead and has never been dead, it's the right solution in certain cases.
apf6
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
Good question but people are doing it anyway. It's a fact that right now tons of people are buying Mac Minis specifically for this use case, to treat them as their personal data center for agents. The concept of "power use for inference" is foreign. Those people are the ones that motivated this blog post I think.
apf6
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
That's a lot of assumptions. I think there are also people buying new hardware specifically for this purpose, and their motivation to do it is thinking it will be cheaper in the long run. Privacy is not necessarily the motivation.
apf6
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
The time difference does matter though. There were some recent worm attacks in NPM that spread very quickly because they used post-install. I don’t remember how long it took NPM to block the packages but it was probably around 30 minutes or so? If it wasn’t for post-install then that same attack would have a much slower spread and thus a smaller blast radius.
apf6
·il y a 2 mois·discuss
There’s a difference between:

1) the minimum number of employees it takes to maintain the core product

Vs 2) All the employees that it makes sense to hire for revenue and market expansion.

Internet comments usually assume that (1) is the goal. But think of say the sales department. If every salesperson you hire brings in new company revenue that’s greater than their salary + overhead, then why not hire 1000 of them?
apf6
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
Offshoring has been a common practice for decades, it works great for some functions and not great for others. Why would it suddenly have a massive uptick in 2027?
apf6
·il y a 4 mois·discuss
If you look at IOS app store submissions then there is a pretty obvious increase that lines up with recent AI tooling (especially the release of Claude Code): https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1qlpm2l/cha...
apf6
·il y a 4 mois·discuss
In a world of AI coding I think rule 5 is still as important than ever. I don’t validate everything Claude does but I do put attention on data structure design since it’s so important.
apf6
·il y a 4 mois·discuss
Hiring a human is gambling too.
apf6
·il y a 6 mois·discuss
Lol anyway, the point is that even in a scenario where all the major models disappeared tomorrow (including OpenAI, Anthropic, etc), we would still keep using the existing open source models (GLM, Deepseek, Qwen) for a long long time.

There's no scenario where AI goes away completely.

I don't think the "major AI services go away completely" scenario is realistic at all when you look at those companies' revenue and customer demand, but that's a different debate I guess.
apf6
·il y a 6 mois·discuss
> it's the running costs of these major AI services that are also astronomical

There's wildly different reports about whether the cost of just inference (not the training) is expensive or not...

Sam Altman has said “We’re profitable on inference. If we didn’t pay for training, we’d be a very profitable company.”

But a lot of folks are convinced that inference prices are currently being propped up by burning through investor capital?

I think if we look at open source model hosting then it's pretty convincing - Look at say https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.7 . There's about 10 different random API providers that are competing on price and they'll serve GLM 4.7 tokens at around $1.50 - $2.50 per output Mtokens. (which by the way is a tenth of the cost of Opus 4.5)

I seriously doubt that all these random services that no one has ever heard of are also being propped up by investor capital. It seems more likely that $1.50 - $2.50 is the "near cost" price.

If that's the actual cost, and considering that the open source models like GLM are still pretty useful when used correctly, then it's pretty clear that AI is here to stay.
apf6
·il y a 6 mois·discuss
Great analogy.

I've never worked at a company as large as Google but in my experience things can be a little more optimistic than the post. When earn enough trust with your leadership, such as at the staff/architect level, you'll be able to tell them they are wrong more often and they'll listen. It doesn't have to be a "$50,000 check" every time.

That leads to a very important question - Why doesn't leadership always trust their engineers? And there's a very important answer that isn't mentioned in the blog post - Sometimes the engineers are wrong.

Engineers are extremely good at finding flaws. But not so good at understanding the business perspective. Depending on the greater context there are times where it does make sense to move forward with a flawed idea.

So next time you hear an idea that sounds stupid, take a beat to understand more where the idea is coming from. If you get better at discerning the difference between ideas that are actually fine (despite their flaws), versus ideas that need to die, then you'll earn more trust with your org.
apf6
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
It was just a few months ago that the MCP spec added a concept called "prompts" which are really similar to skills.

And of course Claude Code has custom slash commands which are also very similar.

Getting a lot of whiplash from all these specifications that are hastily put together and then quickly forgotten.
apf6
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
to some degree this is a "market correction" on the inherent value of these papers. There's way too many low-value papers that are being published purely for career advancement and CV padding reasons. Hard to get peer reviewers to care about those.
apf6
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
> AI as a product isn’t viable

Yeah I don't know about that, the model providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, literally sell intelligence as a product. And their business model is looking a lot more stable in the long term than all the startups built on top.
apf6
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
Simplest version of Kubernetes is zero Kubernetes. You can instead run your service using a process manager like PM2 or similar. I think even using Docker is overkill for a lot of small teams.
apf6
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
That's a good concept but I don't think Markdown is expressive enough for all the layouts & formatting that people typically want in PDFs. More likely that the source format would be something like HTML or SVG or .docx.
apf6
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
Working on dev tools for MCP servers. As a building block I recently published a library to help write tests for MCPs - https://facetlayer.github.io/expect-mcp/