Alex Kesling

softmaxxing -- he/him

[tweet davidson @andyreed]

when the whole team is on claude code

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

Overhead "No one is losing their jobs to AI at [this company]", but they may lose them to cyborg engineers using LLMs to outstrip capacity for slinging PRs.

LOC metrics are a worse signal than ever now....

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

E.g. why is Claude's active context not phrased in terms of memories, history, etc. _and_ vice-versa, why are knowledge bases not phrased in terms of contextual value?

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

Is it odd that we keep talking about memory and context as separate things?

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

I'm thinking more and more that the graduated graph of context should have better layers of abstraction that reduce the representational discrepancy across domains of consideration.

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

And what about keeping track of all the paths not taken?

When I backtrack and go down a different road, how can our "tracing" format let us keep our whole journey for later reflection? I think talking about how we got here should be the goal.

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

More open formats for tool interop is a great idea.

To move toward general support and away from being too conversational IDE centric, we'll want to iterate.

[Cursor @cursor_ai]

We're proposing an open standard for tracing agent conversations to the code they generate. It's interoperable with any coding agent or interface.

https://t.co/jO4DIoIl6A

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

Next I'd love this to play nice with non-AI tooling that doesn't speak in "conversations".

When Claude Code writes, formatter squishes, and I refine it for PR, I want _all_ those steps preserved in full fidelity.

How can this let me "ignore" the formatter squishing at blame?

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

First thing I'd love to see is to move to representing diffs instead of just flat spans.

Right now, Agent Trace describes code as generated, not as updated/changed/transformed. Code isn't static.

If I'm generating a "trace" from my git repo, I want to know how things evolved.

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

@jeffreyhuber RL _itself_ has been being RL'd since time immemorial.

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

LLM case of the Mandela effect? https://t.co/ALNxn4AMfR

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

"Thinkware Engineering"

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

There needs to be a name for the prompt and context that "runs" an Agent/LLM -- Promptware, Thoughtware, Vibeware?

We now have many different "applications" running on the same models; different Vibeware running on Claude or Llama = different behavior = a different application.

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

@jeffreyhuber Wouldn't that would imply you can't stand up a PaaS with cloud credits?

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

Billion dollar idea: stand up a marketplace on top of Replicated or something which lets people set up a "virtual cloud" that runs other people's jobs in their own env to leverage non-transferable cloud credits.

"Aggregated cloud as a service as a service"

ACaaSaaS

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

Software engineering is building with sand. Nothing is permanent. Code is change.

Like buddhist mandalas, there's an ephemerality to the art that must be acknowledged to be accepted.

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

As AI codegen gets better, code review is becoming an even _more_ important "basic" skill for engineers still mucking in code-land.

If you can't immediately find what's wrong in generated code, you're going to struggle to keep up.

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

Ever wanted to make a database out of something or query a DB with your own custom language? In SF March 19th?

I'm hosting a hackathon just for you.

Come get weird with DataFusion!

https://t.co/3ybvw9HiWx

[Jeff Huber @jeffreyhuber]

calling all SF systems & Rust people

Come get weird with Datafusion (Hackathon)

March 19 - SF in the Mission

[Alex Kesling @AlexKesling]

The Kesling Criteria (informally) --

A system is a database if:
1) You can ask questions of it
2) It returns data

As presented in my @papers_we_love talk last week https://t.co/NfekC4Aj4Z