Alvin Stanescu

Computer Use Agents @ UiPath, builder at heart, hacker & father. Alternate histories & craft beers are my favorite rabbit holes.

Close the loop 🔁

[Alvin Stanescu @AlvinStanescu]

Gemini 3.5 Flash computer use just launched - we were given early access to it and had great results on the computer use harness behind UiPath Delegate. Check out the blog article for more insights and our experience with the model.

[Google AI Studio @GoogleAIStudio]

https://t.co/oFKtt2LToj

[martin_casado @martin_casado]

I really think we're entering the golden age of software and computer science.

Sooo much software is going to be written going forward. And that's going to introduce a host of new challenges. And it really feels like the way to deal with those is not frameworks and platforms, but computer science fundamentals.

The challenges are already very apparent. For example, managing the syntax semantic gap, enforcing security at the language systems level (is it finally time for trusted computing?), full system level error handling and recovery, evolving architecture based on runtime learnings, higher level formalization of intent, rethinking state management and guarantees etc. etc.

The needed innovation is across the entire stack. From silicon to software engineering practices. We're already seeing the disruption everywhere chips, networking, operating systems, languages, language runtimes, distributed systems, platform support, security etc. etc. etc.

What a time.

[Ryan Dahl @rough__sea]

This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

Weekend thoughts on Gas Town, Beads, slop AI browsers, and AI-generated PRs flooding overwhelmed maintainers. I don't think we're ready for our new powers we're wielding. https://t.co/J9UeF8Zfyr

[Alvin Stanescu @AlvinStanescu]

Exactly this!

[geoff @GeoffreyHuntley]

i am fortunate to be surrounded by folks who listen. this below post will go down as a seminal reading for people interested in AI context engineering. a simple convo between mates - well Moss translated it into words and i’ve been waiting for it to come out so I didn’t front run him.

enjoy.

this is what engineering now looks like in the post loom/gastown era or even when doing ralph loops.

if you aren’t capturing your backpressure then you are failing as a software engineer.

[Michael Truell @mntruell]

We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week.

It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.

It *kind of* works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly.

[Alvin Stanescu @AlvinStanescu]

Untangling Christmas lights is solid AGI benchmark material

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Intelligence is on tap now so agency is even more important

[@levelsio @levelsio]

The most concerning part about this is that most Europeans don't realize how stagnant Europe has now become

Europeans are literally blue-pilled and are mostly concerned with climate change, immigration and the Ukraine war

Nobody in Europe is thinking why increasingly everything they use is made in China running on American software

The knee jerk reaction is to proudly pass regulation against American tech

The chad reaction would be to reduce regulation so that European entrepreneurs would actually stay in Europe to build European startups increasing Europe's GDP and making Europeans richer!

I am European and I have regular conversations about this with people here, it's just not on top of mind AT ALL! While it should be because Europe's GDP is stagnant and the real innovation now happens in US and China and elsewhere, not in Europe

People in Europe do love to complain about rising cost of living and the increasing unaffordability of living, but they don't realize why. They point at foreigners/immigrants as the problem, which can't be the whole story

Other Europeans I talk to get visibly upset if I ask them about stagnant GDP numbers: "why should everything be about money?" they say in a thick German accent

The whole story is that Europe has made it very difficult for people to start a business, raise capital, innovate and get the reward for taking that risk, so why would anybody?

And for the Europeans that do, it's way easier to open a US Delaware company, raise capital in US, sell your stock or IPO in the US, because why even do that in EU, where it's too hard? The proof is in the pudding, if it was so easy in EU then why is startup funding in US $270B AUM with 330 million people vs $44B AUM with 746 million people? That's almost 14x bigger startup funding market per capita

Why doesn't EU have ANY trillion dollar companies? While US has six? Why isn't there any European company in the top 10 of largest companies? While 80% is American?

Why is Stripe, a company founded by two Irish brothers, an American company and not a European one? It could have been

Very few Europeans will agree with this post because they can't see it, if they would've seen it, we wouldn't be here in the first place!

What's the role left for Europe in the future?

Signed,
- A techno-optimist European who'd love to see Europe become wealthy again

[@goth @goth600]

54 year old CEOs with 10s of millions of dollars worth of people on payroll a month are about to start getting absolutely demolished by actual minors churning out 10 startups an hour with the help of chatGPT/GPT-4

[Alvin Stanescu @AlvinStanescu]

Now, given these I can ask it to generate a test case in say C#. Some tweaking was required - had to tell it that there is an interface to get a selector for an option, but it mostly figured things out on its own.

[Alvin Stanescu @AlvinStanescu]

#ChatGPT is simply mind-blowing and revolutionary for almost each and every industry.

Building an automation workflow with testable expectations given a description of the UI of an app means integration testing may soon get much easier.

[Luke Sophinos @lukesophinos]

A former Facebook manager just launched an app that overtook giants like TikTok & Instagram to be #1 on the App Store.

He made $1M in 10 days with a team of 4 people.

Gas App 🧵

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

A few "corporate" phrases commonly used in larger tech companies, what they usually mean, and what they might sometimes mean.

What other phrases have you learned to translate - things that were unusual when working at e.g. smaller companies?

[Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, ACCA Esq. @ParikPatelCFA]

Robinhood: "let the people trade!"

People: *trade*

Robinhood: "no not like that"

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC]

This is unacceptable.

We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.

As a member of the Financial Services Cmte, I’d support a hearing if necessary.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

If someone, a year ago, described January 6, 2021 (and events attending it) & asked you to guess the stock market behavior, admit you would have gotten it wrong.

Just so you understand that news do not help you understand markets.

Now, work on having a good 2021.

[Alvin Stanescu @AlvinStanescu]

I have probably taken around 1000 photos of documents this year, and always had to wait for OneDrive to slowly upload them, so this new feature in #macOS #BigSur is going to be a tremendous time-saver. ⬇️ Just wish there was a bulk mode!

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

Common causes of bad decisions:

1. Assumptions from small sample sizes
2. Wanting the world to work the way we want
3. Conforming to expectations/authority/group
4. Blindness to large trends
5. Inability to determine "and then what"
6. Using incorrect maps

What am I missing?