Piotr

28. Sports + Tech. Podcast: laststrokecounts

My time is mostly spent in the world of software, business, sales, engineering, sports, podcasting + commentary.

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

Over the last 3 years I’ve recorded 100+ podcast episodes with coaches, athletes, Olympic medallists and other high performers.

They’ve given the real, unfiltered truth about what elite performance actually looks like when the stakes are highest.

Should I start sharing the best lessons on here?

Drop a 🔥 (or just follow) if you want more of this.

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@haydendevs Nice one. I’m on my way there too.

[蔡大叉 @XXXXFLARE]

As a kid, I always wished Pokémon battles in the games could play out like they do in the anime.

So I built a real-time Pokémon battle experience with @fal H3 Max.

choose a move, the game calculates the outcome, and AI generates the animation on the fly. Paralysis, fainting, and Pokémon is hurt are reflected on screen.
Project:https://t.co/wlsMg3tQEV

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@samueljmcd People aren’t print debugging enough.

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@Raphael1402X Chuck it on https://t.co/TlLZryp71a and I’ll receive it😉

[Max Blade @_MaxBlade]

Astra built a multiplayer lawn mow simulator with beers and cigars.

Made live on the internet and my chat joined.

this model is GOLD.

[shirish @shiri_shh]

most people still have NO clue how good AI music has gotten.

we are so cooked 😭

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

A lot of people are asking how I pulled off these super long-horizon builds with Astra.

Astra is extremely powerful, but by default it struggled with a task this difficult. I tested a bunch of approaches to get past this, and the one I landed on is something I'm calling the Manager Loop.

It's basically a couple of tricks we used to use with much less capable models a couple of years ago, with a few new ideas layered on top. Turns out that when you put those together and apply them to Astra, its ability to do extremely difficult long-horizon tasks goes up dramatically.

Here's how it works:

1. Launch an agent (I'm calling this one the "manager"). Chat with it about what you want to get done, and have it build a massive checklist of to-dos, then break that checklist into phases.

2. The manager then spawns a second Codex agent in a separate thread (the "implementer"). The two agents can message each other.

3. Put the manager in /goal mode, and tell it to run each phase on the implementer in /goal mode.

4. The manager messages the implementer: "/goal Complete phase one completely, extremely well." The implementer doesn't stop until that phase is done, then messages the manager back. The manager tells it to start phase two. They repeat until every phase is finished, completely autonomously.

Why I think this works: over a long-horizon task, Astra tends to asymptote. It gets way further than previous models, but at a certain point it kind of just stops improving against the goal as quickly as it did before. It gets stuck in the minutiae, focusing way too much on small details, and overall progress stalls. The Manager Loop forces it to work piecemeal, one phase at a time. It's essentially how a human would steer a model, except the model is doing the steering for me.

That's actually how this started. I was having the model write the checklist and break it into phases, and then I was doing the manager's job by hand. At some point I thought, "Wait, why can't I just get a separate AI to do this?" That's what unlocked full autonomy, which is super useful.

A wording detail that seemed to matter: I ask for each phase to be done "extremely well," not "perfectly." Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but asking for "perfect" sent the model right back into the minutiae. "Extremely well" implies it's allowed to move on once it's good enough, and that worked better in my testing.

One more trick that I think helps (this one is more of a hunch, but it was useful for me): have the implementer build a simple HTML page with the full checklist on it. The implementer checks boxes off as it goes and updates a counter, and the page has a chart of # of boxes ticked over time.

Obviously the boxes aren't all equal, but it forces the model to notice things like "I haven't made progress in a while, time to move on." You can even put this in the prompt directly, like: "if you haven't ticked a box in X amount of time, move on". That helps a lot.

I also ran 96 sub-agents at a time. You can change this in your Codex config (or just ask Codex to change it).

This got me far better long-horizon performance than anything else I tried. I'll be sharing more in the coming days!

[sam @SamuelBeek]

made this with ai btw - worked pretty well

[Jake Fitzgerald @earthtojake]

fable 5.1 one shotting a quad-turbo W16 engine

(this is a full CAD model + animation)

[Guy @Noumenon_ai]

I’m genuinely excited to see what people are going to build with Astra.

i know what im going to test it on...

what you going to do with it ??

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@jonathan_wilke Welcome to how @noahkagan validates projects

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

🥹🥹 welcome back @claudeai

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

Is Claude down for anyone else rn?

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

Omg it’s back!!

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

Is Claude down for anyone else rn?

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@dove_ski I remember having £150 odd in tokens. Didnt set my limit when using Fable. I had no idea they were even used😩 just gone lol

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

Is Claude down for anyone else rn?

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@samongaro_ They never fixed it since mine went cold 🥶😅

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@rexr35630 @AndrewDeJackson Also my first outage.

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@michaelvrlaku Maybe Anthropic should implement a waiting page with some quick online games whilst we wait for Claude..

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@michaelvrlaku What a great idea

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@dove_ski They should use the extra cash from the Fable ravaging tokens to upgrade the infra :)

[Piotr @FitHacker19]

@jonathan_wilke Time to make the money back for that tax bill from outbid!😂