glitchassassin

✝️Husband, father, software architect, deacon. I love human-centric automation.

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

Looking for cool people to build exciting things with!

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@thsottiaux When driving remotely, I really wish I could connect directly and securely to the agent's local dev server to test the thing it's building

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@kentcdodds Someone said that if you want to win by being better than the competition, it's not enough to be 2x better; you have to be 10x better.

Is Kody 10x better than skills?

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@emollick caveat being that this studies what models are best at helping other models, not necessarily what models are best at augmenting humans. We probably need better benchmarks for this still

[Richard Ngo @RichardMCNgo]

The AI safety community constructed a memeplex in which “taking AGI seriously” was a prerequisite for being a serious and good person. When inside this memeplex (as many at Anthropic, some at OpenAI, and a few at DeepMind are) your vision narrows until the world feels extremely constrained. The whole future seems to flow through the “one ring” of controlling recursive self-improvement. And so even when you worry about AI itself seizing that one ring, you can’t generate better strategies than trying to control it yourself (directly via an AGI company, or indirectly via AGI governance).

I’m not saying this is a pure hyperstition. There’s a core truth underlying this perspective: AI will become extremely intelligent and capable, much more than it is today. But the current world is much more spacious and human-empowering than the future which Eliezer originally envisioned (a “brain in a box in a basement” taking over the world by surprise). And it would be even more spacious if this memeplex weren’t active. For example, Satya and Mark and Sundar only started taking AGI seriously because OpenAI forced them to—and even now they don’t really believe in superintelligence—and even if they did they couldn’t get most of their employees on board. Imagine how chill a “race” between Microsoft and Meta and Google would have been, compared with what we have today: Dario and Sam deep in the “one ring” memeplex while also personally loathing each other.

So the one ring memeplex has an escalating life-cycle. It infects people by letting them harness the narrative that they’re good people for taking AGI seriously, and that making other people take AGI seriously is a boon for the world (despite how terribly that’s gone so far). Then it shuts off their imagination—any sparks of creativity or plans that don’t steer towards the one ring are quickly shut down. Instead they make ChatGPT or the METR graph or other recruiting tools for the memeplex. And yes, they’ll acknowledge that previous versions of the memeplex were too extreme, and led to overly constricted action. But we don’t have time to worry about that, they’ll say, because AGI is coming by 2027/2028, and that’s the end of history. Somehow, though, almost everyone with that view has only a vibes-based definition of AGI. They don’t believe in Dyson spheres by 2028, or self-replicating nanotech by 2028, or brain emulations by 2028. They mostly can’t make concrete predictions, except that it’ll be enough AI that it puts all their plans on a deadline. (Shout-out to @DKokotajlo and @paulfchristiano though, who do make concrete predictions about things going crazy soon.)

It seems very hard to break out of this memeplex without just giving up. David Holz is maybe the world champion of that—the only person who was in a position to race for AGI and consciously turned away. Various agent foundations researchers have carved out space to think real thoughts, not the kind of panicky stabbing in the dark that usually passes for safety research. A few others (e.g. Salamon, Hoffman, Vassar, Andre, Sahil, Davidad) are pursuing more unusual paths. And of the people who burned out, I expect some will reorient to doing creative thinking.

For others, the main takeaway: yes, the future of AI will be wild. But so far it’s increased peak human agency, and openness to this trend continuing over the next decade will allow you to start creating something worth creating.

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@Shpigford @MetzinAround Markdown just canonized the way we already wrote things

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@_xjdr @AndrewCurran_ It's only true if intelligence is fungible and the only distinction between models is their capabilities on benchmarks

Otherwise, labs have the opportunity to differentiate their models on personality, style, etc. to appeal to different segments

[jacob paris ▲ @jacobmparis]

AI makes me feel like a magician

But using magic comes with a cost (expensive ai tokens) and so I bind it into items (deterministic software) and the enchanted items allow me to wield magic at no cost to myself

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@kentcdodds agents are good at things that can be evaluated objectively (tests) and bad at things that are evaluated subjectively (taste).

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@karpathy @maxbittker sounds like Claude Code's stop hooks would be useful here

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@kentcdodds @ryanflorence @threepointone awesome. looking forward to your take on an AI-first starter kit. I've been experimenting with documenting cross-cutting features/standards with a brief markdown description & key points across the codebase to hopefully improve consistency

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@kentcdodds @ryanflorence @threepointone Epic Stack 2.0? 👀

[Simon Willison @simonw]

I've published the first two chapters of a new guide to Agentic Engineering Patterns - coding practices and patterns to help get the best results out of coding agents like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex https://t.co/XIskcgeBFE

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@simonw just in time - giving a talk at work about using coding agents effectively next week! Thank you!

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

Augmentation over automation

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

AI is a great human-machine interface but a poor human-human interface

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@kentcdodds @VicVijayakumar @cursor_ai @coderabbitai The cloud agents experience is still too flow-disrupting for me

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@kentcdodds @VicVijayakumar @cursor_ai @coderabbitai This is what I like about Claude Code's hooks: I can automatically trigger a review agent as soon as the coding agent is done, and it shortens the feedback cycle for the local agent. Local CI is faster CI!

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@mjackson isn't that just Response.text()?

[glitchassassin @JonWinsley]

@thdxr Just ran across a leaderboard for this: https://t.co/36XyAMaKey

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

cooking @cursor_ai on mobile
what do you want it to do?