Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social

Principal Software Engineer/iOS Infrastructure @JustEatTakeaway. Ex-Intelligence agent. Wannabe Crusty.

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

🤩 Very proud of this article. It's not every day that I write something like this.

🤖 Here I describe how at @JustEatTakeaway we have created a scalable CI of macOS runners.

🔄 Please share this with your DevOps, Platform Engineering, and iOS teams!

https://t.co/pcKo9tKSpl

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem.

As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)!

I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work.

It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results?

88ms => 1.5ms
150K allocs => ~500 allocs

Incredible right? Nope.

My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path.

This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput.

The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity.

Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

Mo really gets it.

[Mo @atmoio]

I found the actual reason AGI isn't real

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

@atmoio Now I love you even more

[andrea-scuderi bsky social 🦋 @AndreaScuderiSE]

I got curious: what if iOS UI 🛠️tests were just… a sentence?

So I built UIXCute 📦a Swift Package where you describe what you want to test in plain English, and an AI agent drives your app through XCUIAutomation until it's done.

https://t.co/Hb1EXj8rkV

#Swift #iOS #AI #XCTest

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

not all heroes wear capes

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

Every word

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

it's official.
humans have gone bonkers.
you should be ashamed of yourself Chris.

https://t.co/W3qyTMYbbj

[Chris Tate @ctatedev]

Introducing Zero

The programming language for agents.

I wanted a systems language that was faster, smaller, and easier for agents to use and repair.

Explicit capabilities. JSON diagnostics. Typed safe fixes.

Made for agents on day zero.

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

@ctatedev it's official.
humans have gone bonkers.
you should be ashamed of yourself Chris.

https://t.co/W3qyTMYbbj

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

As I've been saying for a long time

[antirez @antirez]

I must admit that nothing about computers, since I'm in love with the field, was so uninteresting as the Javascript different fashions, waves, frameworks, rewrites, hypes. And I'm one that loves almost every shit programming related.

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

@atmoio I just got a promotion to Forward Deployed Engineer 🙌 🐢

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

https://t.co/yV7x6cJSUD

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

https://t.co/Jo4F7PE0j0

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

Time to go to bed

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

Sautéed for 125 days

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

Very interesting analysis on the impact of AI

https://t.co/OXfUvMzZ2T

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

Loved the ref to John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" in the AI context.
https://t.co/EGlOEOqljd

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

I'll just post this here.
https://t.co/393cPcBeOs

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

https://t.co/4yvMNxqnDr

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

#AWSSummit26 positively overwhelming as planned!

[Alberto De Bortoli albertodebo.bsky.social @albertodebo]

That’s exactly the gist I’ve been giving to non-tech people