Andrew C. Oliver

Startup Marketing Exec
Professional Vibecoder
Infoworld column
Opinions = Mine.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

I asked @coderabbitai 's VP of AI, David Loker: "How to build an agent that actually works."

What he said is confirmed by research.

https://t.co/L4XZgiI6c8

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@jxnlco Writing. Gpt-5x voice is not good. Don't get me wrong anything is better than 4o. However opus/claude will follow a style guide and stylistically much better.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

Its also the octopus in Chinese room with a lot of vocabulary of self and metaphilosophy....it doesn't "know" what it is saying and has no memory aside from what you gave it.

[Grady Booch @Grady_Booch]

You and I have some common ground, Kevin: Claude is neither human nor conscious.

But as for Claude having a theory of self, I assert that is true if and only if one applies a particularly sparse meaning for self: Claude has no ability to understand; it possesses no agency, goals, or motivation; it has no sense as to the borders of its self.

Claude may have some degree of self-reflection in the sense that it can feed its dialog back to itself - sort of a simple Hofstadter strangle loop - but this also is more of a small ripple in the fabric if a true self.

In the end, I think the problem is that self is a suitcase word: it is full of historical and emotional baggage and thus is dangerous to apply all to this piece of software..

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

I never really doubted it. The SaaSkiller btw will be agentic services run as a SaaS without the data entry navigation bla.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Remember these predictions?

“Software engineering will be dead because of AI” —> we’re seeing more demand for sw engineering (good part thanks to AI)

“SaaS will be dead because of AI” —> SaaS businesses growing massively (in part thanks to AI)

Be careful what you believe

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@RogerAlsing I meant to add "and moments where you're like thats profoundly dumb"

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@RogerAlsing Same kinda thing. If their training set happened to be trained on your problem then genius. If not then dumbish. So moments where you're like "better than gpt or claude." Its no GLM but for its size and speed super impressive.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@RogerAlsing If you look at its architecture it is more advanced design-wise than glm or kimi but obviously they didn't have the same $ for training.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@brodotdev @artman @linear And so even before LLMs single developer projects would not likely have been part of their ICP. Your point is irrelevant.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@thdxr @thsottiaux Isn't it pronounced open cody?

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@TheAhmadOsman The desire to share your computer with the whole internet.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@peteralexbizjak @JamesWard @ahmetb (but you missed that the principal objective was to call my former colleague, who is about the same age as me, old...)

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@danveloper I've had a different experience. One provider or the next doesn't understand the others tool call format, various models require different tool call ids or formats, structures, different rules for reasoning blocks, etc.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@peteralexbizjak @JamesWard @ahmetb Decades of experience with it. Running around the world tuning the GC. I have a longer rant about the time and place has passed (multi-platform compilation is no longer primitive). The larger goals have/are been/being eclipsed by better tech.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@JamesWard @ahmetb Okay but Java and the JVM eww yucky. Its now as old as COBOL was when Java came out (roughly). Lets use Rust and be done with the GC voodoo. I'm too young to write Java.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@Grady_Booch @claudeai You're asking the wrong guy. The model doesnt control what is in its context. Its like putting toast in the toaster and telling it not to make toast when you push the thing down. you have to prevent the cli from loading the context...

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

Comon @OpenAI fess up you got /r/copypasta in your training data https://t.co/KCDUY2YcbA and thats where they came from. The other creatures are also copypasta obsessions...

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@Grady_Booch @notRichardRen @hendrycks ...and if your paper is on the well-being of a stateless algorithm.... you are definitely part of the technical marketing team...

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

@Grady_Booch @notRichardRen @hendrycks Writing an article about this, but I've begun to suspect everyone involved in "AI risks" or "safety" is actually part of the technical marketing team, even if they work at a university... Give a random string generator shell access, and it will eventually format your drive.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

So Grammarly (which, weirdly, now uses @Superhuman as its handle) flagged some of what I wrote as likely AI-generated. Is that a compliment or an insult? I'm not entirely sure.

[Andrew C. Oliver @acoliver]

Ready to put a verdict down on GPT 5.5. It is definitely better than 5.4 and way more agentic. They reduced its constant need for "if you want I can" ChatGPT engagement prompts. It still isn't very good at writing. It is a great researcher but a bad writer.