Alessandro Cuppari

Senior Software Engineer @ Toast | Striving to build robust and quality software | Always learning | AI Tinkerers Dublin

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

And this is exactly why “SaaS replaced by AI coded software” is not viable for any company that has a an ACTUAL business.

It’s a fun exercise to rebuild ticketing/o11y/feature flags etc… but do you really want to maintain it? Do you want updates, oncall etc to be YOUR problem??

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

and the reason this is still true is that we have apparently not yet found a way to teach models how to write maintainable software. whoever can create datasets/RL for that wins.

let them loose, and you will end up with slop neither you agent swarm nor you can keep running in prod.

[Dillon Mulroy @dillon_mulroy]

recommended reading by @cosmastech

https://t.co/fqPczq5Ocd

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

So let me get this straight: a car maker taking apart a rival's car to develop their new model is fine (Ford did this with Tesla and Chinese EVs)

But an AI company inspecting another AI company's model via prompting and inspecting outputs is a "distillation attack" and not fine?

[Alessandro Cuppari @alessandrojcm]

@bryantclarkk @GergelyOrosz I mean sure, what I'm saying here is that this rewrite didn't cost them 165 grand, which is surely a big part of what makes this feasible.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

While impressive, for 99% of companies, justifying a one-off $150K+ spend on a single migration is just not realistic.

Even tho they will justify 3 devs spending a year working on it… while also doing other work (incl product work, planning, support etc), as they always do.

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

Some thoughts of mine that nobody asked for on the EU's fight with Apple and my worries related to Mythos and Fable. https://t.co/6dT7FXoEVf

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

recommended reading. i too am very done with people anthropomorphizing a bunch of matrices on a GPU cluster, especially if the same people do not give two fucks about actual human beings.

[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.

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

have no allegiance. be ruthless in diversifying your tool providers.

[Niels Rogge @NielsRogge]

People may bash on @MistralAI...

...but it's also the only non-Chinese model in the top 25 (!) of open models on SWE-Bench Verified

[Alessandro Cuppari @alessandrojcm]

This exactly, the thing I dislike most about software engineers (myself included) is that we think we know better than everybody else. Spoiler alert: we don't, and you won't get that domain knowledge unless you talk to people in that domain.

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

funnily enough, software people also think they know how the rest of the world works, because they can make computers dance.

which explains all the abmysal software in education, health, or any other industry that has a human component.

that old meme of coders being anti-social neckbeards is wrong. such a caricature doesn't have any influence in the real world, precisely because that'd require interacting with squishy human parts.

reality is much worse. reality is full of people with little understanding of anything outside their narrow domain, paired with immense amounts of hubris and power, who get mics shoved into their faces on every fucking topic imaginable.

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

while product quality is definitely an issue with almost all Anthropic products, I think there's value in them going all in on 100% agent slop. It shows us the limits of what's currently possible.

It also shows us that a ton of people are happy to use buggy software.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Anthropic scrapes copyrighted materials online; creates a model that they charge $$ for; doesn’t compensate for use - apparently this is fair?

Now Anthropic complains about other companies paying for model access, to create free models anyone can use - and this is not fair??

[dax @thdxr]

everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code

here's what things actually look like

- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping

- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life

- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend

- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon

- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real

- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills

[Alessandro Cuppari @alessandrojcm]

@thdxr This is it, a lot of companies have so much process overhead that shipping more code faster is not only hard but discouraged.

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

There is a lot more happiness in engineering right now if you take the agents for what they can do, and work on your own time. The FOMO of shipping faster and faster gets unhealthy quickly.

[Alessandro Cuppari @alessandrojcm]

Finally 🥹

[EU–INC @euinc_petition]

President Ursula von der Leyen officially announced the EU–INC today at Davos!

A single legal entity for all European founders to grow massive companies in Europe. Online incorporation in 48 hours. No more bureaucratic mess across European borders.

All of you made this happen!

[dax @thdxr]

you really shouldn't take inspiration from claude code being 100% vibe coded

it's attached to the craziest subsidization effort i've ever seen - a single user can pull thousands of dollars

you probably don't have this advantage, your product probably needs to be good