Andy Sterkowitz

Software developer.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

@0xexpt Damn I didn’t know I was the first. Congrats!

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

I wish I had the ability to feel a lack of meaning from having AI code for me.

[Mo @atmoio]

yesterday i signed up again for claude max $200 plan and had it change the whole visual metaphor of the productivity app i’ve been working on intermittently over the past year: instead of a traditional UI with tables, lists, tools, etc, i told Fable to use a desktop OS metaphor instead for displaying the various built-in mini apps (tasks, chat, notes, etc). all with a functioning dock and animated wallpaper and multiple window support etc.

fable was able to solve the problem but really i’m beyond the point of being impressed by an LLM doing some upfront task. everything worked, it “made no mistakes”, all tests passed (it even fixed old tests), but i was like ok whatever thanks. i blew past my $200 limit in 2 hours.

and now i’m sitting here like, ok, now what? do i ship this? hear me be a whiny bitch for a second: that it was too easy killed the whole part of the journey of making an app where you become a new person through the creation process, and you earn such pride in your work which in the past gave you the energy and courage to ship things.

and i’m like, i can ship this. i can try to make a buck. the app is done. but i just don’t feel a bond with the work. now if you were a somewhat savvy operator, the business type that would happily sell refrigerator coolant if you sensed an opportunity, AI will be a godsend for you. but i don’t wanna sell refrigerator coolant.

and now because everything is so easy, i hardly ever feel like i’m solving a real problem anymore. it’s like how deep of a problem am i really solving if someone can one shot my app in 2 hours?

i will say that in those 2 hours yesterday, i really enjoyed being back near the code. there’s nothing funner than making shit.

it’s just that the new way of doing things kills a lot of the creative and spiritual juices you used to get before, that many times lead to commercially beneficial outcomes.

now, i just don’t know what’s worth building anymore.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

I wish every company would do this but the risk of getting flamed on Reddit is too high.

It’s better to know what you need to improve than to get an opaque “We’re moving on with another candidate” or whatever gibberish they say now.

[Limestone Digital @LimestoneHQ]

Our rejection email went viral on Reddit yesterday.

People are shocked a company would tell a candidate exactly why they got rejected.

We're shocked that's shocking.

We asked for 3 sentences about a hard bug.

We got four paragraphs about "holistic approaches to software craftsmanship."

The take-home used temp1, temp2, temp3 as variable names.

Our company name was misspelled twice in the paragraph about attention to detail.

We told them all of that. Directly.

And we told them the door is open if they come back with work that shows they wrote it and read it before sending.

We review code the same way.
Direct. Specific. No hand-waving.

That's just how we build.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

Engineers suck at building product.

This could change but your average engineer tends to miss the boat on what makes a good app good.

Listing off a bunch of features is not what why people will download an app.

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

A lot of people see this and go “oh distribution is the problem.”

That presumes that these apps all don’t suck. Who is gonna tell ‘em.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

@staysaasy Everyone is finding out in real time that their product skills suck lol. And yes I’d include myself in that group.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

One of my favorite tech presentations ever. I remember watching this at my first job and had the aha moment about what git was.

[slash1s @slash1sol]

A DEVELOPER TAUGHT GIT WITH A BOX OF CHILDREN'S TOYS AND ENGINEERS WITH TEN YEARS IN SAY IT'S THE FIRST TIME THE THING EVER ACTUALLY MADE SENSE

90 minutes, one table, a pile of Tinkertoys. No wall of jargon -- he builds a real Git repo out of plastic rods right in front of you.

-> The moment he snaps the first pieces together, Git stops being scary command-line magic and becomes what it really is: a chain of tiny objects pointing at each other.

Branches, merges, rebase, the staging area -- every concept that's ever burned you at 2am -- he rebuilds with toys until a four year old could follow. He calls Git a two-trick pony. After this you'll see exactly why.

Memorizing commands was never the skill -> holding the graph in your head is. And with an AI agent now committing and rebasing on your machine all day, that mental model is the only thing between you and a history you can't read.

Scroll the comments and you'll see the same thing over and over: this is the talk that finally made Git click and made people the one their whole team comes to when it breaks.

Bookmark & watch it today. It's the 1.5 hours that pays you back for the rest of your career ↓

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

This is the definition of a false dialectic. You can be obsessed with “clean” code and still weigh the trade-offs of when and where it should be applied.

[Can Vardar @icanvardar]

your obsession with clean code is why your competitors shipped the ugly version that actually works while you’re still refactoring

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

Anthropic has been complete dogwater today

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

@VicVijayakumar Crying because I’m there right now. It’s so disorienting.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

Most of what passes for prompting is giving a pep talk to an LLM

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

New item in my SOUL md tonight

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

This is the exact problem I’m trying to solve at work.

The problem is multi-faceted but the easy thing to do is just start storing in markdown files in a folder called “knowledge-base” and tell your agents how to read from and update.

Beyond that I find the rabbit hole can go deep.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

This may be a dumb question but I’ll ask it here anyways:

I can’t find a good way for my various AI chats to automatically sync its conversation history into a structured knowledge base. So that as I update various chats from time to time and refine context, my knowledge base automatically grows with this new info.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

@VicVijayakumar yeah solid company

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

@VicVijayakumar Ah I phrased it poorly. The two front vertical bars aren’t fixed. You can collapse them against the wall/swivel for different angles. You can see the one on the left is angled out a bit.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

@atgarone Thanks…good luck to you Anthony.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

@atgarone Much appreciated. Here it is: https://t.co/dIQNwv7lIH

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

@atgarone Btw I realize my profile doesn't say it but I stopped YouTubing due to health a few years ago but had 300k subs and a side business. It was extremely challenging but I made a full-time income from it.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

100%.

The few people who've asked me advice on how to be a YouTuber is always: don't rely on ad revenue or even sponsorships...figure out how to provide real value to your audience and monetize it. You can be extremely successful and not have to worry about how many subs/likes you get.

It's really all about having those 10,000 committed fans who love your stuff.

[Andy Sterkowitz @andysterks]

It’s funny to see how many people think good prompting is giving your LLM a pep talk