Alex Barnes

Infra, Product engineering. Formerly @datadoghq @Rackspace @calendly

Organizer @k8satl

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

@lossybrain Any method that allows an objective measurement of correctness is beneficial for agents. It is, after all, how many of them are trained in the first place.

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

@ibuildthecloud Are you just reliving your HTMX phase again?

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

Yeah, bike shedding is one of engineers' favorite pastime for whatever reason. I've never really understood it and in a lot of technical discussions throughout my career I would end up saying "I don't think this really matters" while other people seem to want to spend hours debating some minute detail.

I think the people obsessed with those unimportant details are often the ones most upset about AI generated code. I think the positive interpretation is that they see it as craftsmanship, but I mostly saw it is gilding the lily.

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

This is pretty broad and not universally true. The tech market is pretty bad for high quality jobs. There have been consistent waves of layoffs across big tech (and many in smaller as well).

There is hiring at the bottom of the market, but those only look like the same jobs when you make very broad buckets.

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

@tetranow @garrytan @ycombinator @garrytan and @RickRubin is a hell of a combination. Two great thinkers from two different worlds that I enjoy. Excited to hear this one.

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

@yacineMTB So what's the approach? Everyone is expected to read and understand their own code before pushing? Self-review basically

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

@ibuildthecloud What do you use? Built in chat interface of desktop apps, or something like wispr flow?

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

I'm not sure we should be encouraging people to generate code they don't read and understand, but I am absolutely confident that the industry will. Even that aside, do you feel like you learn concepts as well when reading their implementation in other peoples' code? I don't think I do, personally.

I totally agree with you on the ramp up approach, I just don't know that it's enough to really cement so many core concepts. I doubt most companies will tolerate an engineer switching to manual coding every time they come across e.g. a new data structure.

I don't really have an answer here. It's a difficult question. I don't think just reading implementations is enough to get a deep understanding though, and I totally expect the industry to "eat the seed corn", so to speak when it comes to being willing to invest in allowing junior engineers to really learn on the job.

[Claude @claudeai]

Effective today, we are:

1) Doubling Claude Code’s 5-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, and Team plans;

2) Removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max plans; and

3) Substantially raising our API rate limits for Opus models.

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

A combination of significantly lowering usage limits, changing defaults in such a way that the user experience was much worse but they saved on computed (caching changes and default thinking levels), and a lot of FUD around suggesting these changes were bugs instead of deliberate changes in order to reduce compute usage on their side.

It's all totally understandable, they are subsidizing usage and are compute constrained. They had to pull back on it because they got overwhelmed by new users after the DoD controversy and could not meet the demand. The way they went about it could be very easily read as a "rug pull" though, and the end result is their users get less for the same money.

[Anthony Pompliano 🌪 @APompliano]

I have changed my mind on how AI will impact jobs in America.

Previously, I believed AI would replace many entry level roles typically filled by young employees. The technology would then work its way up the organization and eventually reduce the total number of jobs in a company.

The data is saying something different, so when I get new information I am willing to change my mind.

The number of software engineers being hired has been increasing. The number of open software engineer roles is growing.

The number of new college grads who get hired has increased 5.6% over the last 12 months. The unemployment level for people aged 20-24 years old who have a college degree has fallen from nearly 9% to almost 5% as well.

The Wall Street Journal recently wrote “AI created 640,000 jobs between 2023 and 2025 in the U.S., according to an analysis by LinkedIn of job posting data, including new white-collar positions such as Head of AI and AI engineer.”

And I am starting to see companies throughout our portfolio aggressively hiring to keep up with the demand for their products and services.

If AI can make employees more productive, which is widely accepted as fact, then companies are going to want as many productive units of labor as possible. This is a key reason why I am changing my mind.

AI appears to be a magical technology that will make companies more productive and more profitable. The net result will be more corporations, more startups, and more jobs.

All three are big, positive wins for the American economy.

[Bitwarden @Bitwarden]

Bitwarden identified and contained a malicious package briefly distributed through the npm delivery path for the Bitwarden CLI in connection with the broader Checkmarx supply chain incident. No user vault data or production systems were compromised or at-risk. Additional details and updates are available here: https://t.co/9xRzNxmCOS

[Zain Shah @zan2434]

Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.

@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

The arguments behind every landmark Supreme Court ruling have never been freely available to the public… until now.

Thanks to a gift from the Wolf Law Library at William & Mary Law School, more than 125,000 #SCOTUS records & briefs are now freely freely available on the Internet Archive, spanning 1830 through 2019. The arguments that shaped America, including Brown v. Board of Education. Loving v. Virginia.

Read the full announcement ⤵️
https://t.co/yhjqSBVDOa

@WMLawSchool #SupremeCourt #DemocracysLibrary

[George Pu @TheGeorgePu]

Anthropic just pulled Claude Code from the Pro plan.

Pro users wanting it need Max now.

$100/month minimum. 5x jump.

I'm on Max 20x so I'm fine.

Flagging for anyone on Pro who's about to find out.

No announcement. Just a pricing page edit.

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

It's a leadership problem, but indirectly, I think. Leaders should not, and can not, tell engineers how to incorporate AI into their workflow in meaningful detail.

It has to be bottom up, since engineers are the ones that understand their devex the best, and only they can validate what is real acceleration. Leaders should know that though, and work with expert users to codify and proliferate the effective patterns.

It's can be an ivory tower mandate, but it also can't be wild-west with no standardization.

[Alex Barnes @AlexB138]

@nrehiew_ How are you getting access to the tokenizer in transformers? Or am I misreading this and you're using count_tokens?