Ali Alavi

Founder. AI, Search, Property Based Testing. Sometimes literature.
Codito, ergo sum.

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

OpenAI Ads is the moment AEO/GEO becomes a real category line item.

SEO and SEM split into separate budgets twenty years ago. The same split is happening now for AI answers: organic presence (AEO) and paid placement (ChatGPT Ads) are two different problems, two different teams, two different measurement stacks.

Most of the "AEO" advice out there is still just SEO with new keywords. The actual shift is in measurement: probability of presence and quality of mention across engines and personas, not rank on a single engine.

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

@peterczepiga Happy to chat. SEO and AEO are related but not the same problem: different retrieval mechanisms (non-deterministic vs deterministic), different measurement (probability of presence vs rank). Background: ML engineer building https://t.co/O9xfr22i5L, an explainable AEO platform.

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

Chat is the laziest UI pattern. It shifts all the cognitive work to the user: know what to ask, phrase it right, parse an unstructured response. A well-designed UI encodes the workflow for you. Chat is infinite flexibility. But flexibility isn't always desirable.

[Morad Vaisi @RezaVaisi]

@elonmusk
Dear Elon,
In these critical days, the people of Iran need internet access. Please help them stay connected as they struggle to reclaim their country from the rule of the mullahs. Stand with the Iranian people. Iran will not forget its friends.

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

Am I the only one frustrated with Claude’s voice mode? It’s sooo bad, and the only reason I still need ChatGPT on the side at all times.

[Robbie "the ice 🧊🥶" Goodwin @robbiegoodwin]

Shia Labouef implies the existence of a Sunni Labouef

[David Keyes @DavidMKeyes]

🚨Khamenei's funeral postponsed till tomorrow so he can be buried with his son

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

Emigration is a noisy proxy for dissatisfaction. It’s like assuming the most dissatisfied couples are the ones who divorced, when in reality it may be those who cannot leave an abusive relationship.

Many anti-regime people cannot leave, while many pro-regime people do (for economic or professional reasons). Daily exposure to corruption and repression can radicalize those who remain, while distance can dull memory. I’ve seen diaspora soften toward the regime while formerly apolitical friends inside have become ardently anti-regime.

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

All is fair in love and war. And this is a time for both.

These days are tough for us Iranians. While many, me included, cheer on the demise of the brutal dictator, all worry about what comes next: next hour, next day, next year. There isn’t a second that passes without me thinking about my loved ones back there. Every moment carries the lingering fear of not having them the next. And we need to live with that lingering fear. We need to work with that, we need to party with that, we need to sit in exams with that.

And, for those of us living outside the country, especially the younger, more recent immigrants, the pain of all that is intensified by a sense of survivor's guilt. And by the shortage of people to talk to, of shoulders to cry on.

As someone who left the country 16 years ago, and lived through many similar experiences (uprisings, massacres, wars, tragic loss of young loved ones), I’ve learned a lesson or two on how to live in times such as this. Some, I hope, might be useful for them.

I've learned not to try to problem-solve the situation: it’s not a tractable problem. Not to engage too much with social media (the algorithm, after all, is designed to trigger you), and not to lose friends over what they do (or don’t) on social media: People are more complicated, and often better, than their Instagram feed. Talk to them over a phone call instead, or a coffee if you can.

And I’ve learned people are kinder, much kinder, than they seem. That manager, that professor, that immigration officer, they are all more compassionate than you give them credit for. Speak up, reach out, ask for help. Let them know the trauma you’re dealing with. Don’t expect others to reach out and ask how you are (even though that happens too, and it’s nice when it does).

And I’ve learned the unexpectedly profound cathartic power of the otherwise mundane daily chore: decluttering that closet, taking out the trash, vacuuming that room.

And the power of focus on the task at hand.

So, work even harder to ship that product. Go even crazier on the dance floor. Ace that exam. Vacuum that room like your life depends on it.

After all, it’s the only hope we might have for the future. A country reduced to rubble needs hard-working engineers, studious academics, and wilder dancers to build it better, brighter, and happier.

May love save us all.

عشقت رسد به فریاد

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

What does Mamdani want to keep Iranian-Americans safe from? Euphoria?

[Renna @RennaW]

Please, everyone, the gender neutral term is Ayatollx

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

This is one of the most important historic events of the last 200 years. Not only for Iran, but for the whole world.
No one can understand how Iranians feel. We are overwhelmed with feelings of joy, confusion, and, yes, worry. But for sure, a glimmer of hope for a better future, at last, is in sight.
Today is a good day.

[Vahid Online @Vahid]

ابراز شادی مردم #ایران در پی انتشار گزارش‌ها از مرگ علی #خامنه‌ای
شنبه ۹ اسفند #Iran

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

@david_parker AI content is a smoothed distribution of its training data. Creative content is an outlier. Outliers by definition stand out.

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

@championswimmer @steipete That’s literally why I quitted and started my own thing. Let’s hope the token pay for themselves… eventually.

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

Ephemerialization is the advancement of technology so that we can do more and more with less and less, until eventually we can do everything with nothing (the term was coined by R. Buckminster Fuller).

Think about the iPhone. Prior to its release, people had multiple electronic gadgets: an mp3 player, a camera, a cell phone, a PDA, a watch, a GPS, etc. All of that, and much more, shrunk into what you're probably reading this text on.

What enabled that technology more than anything else, in my opinion, was reliable capacitive touchscreens. Yes, they existed in the past, and yes, Apple didn't invent them, but iPhone was the first consumer-grade device that provided a smooth, seamless user experience.

I still remember the gasps and applause when Jobs first demoed pinch-to-zoom on the iPhone.
I feel AI agents are the capacitive touchscreen of today: they are still early, and not as reliable and user-friendly as capacitive touchscreens were back in 2007. And we don't have the App Store equivalent to allow for rapid innovation and distribution.

But, it seems to me, they are the enabling technology for some level of ephemerialization for software engineers (and more generally knowledge work): they allow us to do more and more with less and less, until eventually we can do everything with nothing.

Maybe then I can leave my monitors and the obligatory dangling cables behind, and, as Kramer put it, TCB (Taking Care of Business) on a beach in Hawaii with just an iPhone. Or not even that.

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

@paulg Yes. Specifically since Opus 4.6, with good setup and test harness, 1000+ LOC / hour of quality code is totally achievable.

[Ali Alavi @alialavia]

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

That's how I've felt since late 2022, when I first started building software with LLMs at my side.

As a builder, I was excited. The productivity gains were undeniable.
But I was also nostalgic, and a bit worried: The craft I had spent decades honing, the thing that made 16-year-old me economically valuable, was suddenly becoming commoditized.

In the last 6 months alone, I've written over 200,000 lines of code. Cursor and I consumed over 2.5 billion tokens. I wrote specs, corrected architecture, made product decisions, provided context. Cursor did all the coding.

As a builder, that's thrilling. As a coder? Unsettling.

There's no way to sugarcoat this: The craft of code is no longer the moat it was, even two years ago.

We now live in a world where almost anyone can build almost anything, at least as far as software is concerned.

And in this world, the "ability" to build becomes less valuable than the "will" to build.

So go build something. Before agency is commoditized