Ben Piroman 🇦🇺

civil engineer and some kind of web dev 💻 🇦🇺

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

New Project I've been working on, sign up up to receive updates and special offers ✨
https://t.co/QigvjXaIR0

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@htmx_org Ahead of its time

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@jessethanley Oh man 🤤

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@AussieBotStudio You missed a spot

[Amazon Web Services @awscloud]

More AI-generated code doesn't make your team faster. It might actually slow you down.

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

vintage 32 bit OS... this is based af
https://t.co/WAHuJcyZWR

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@TopherField @joerogan Thats awesome ! @juliandorey @TopherField would be the perfect guest on your show to talk about the political shit show in Australia

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@elonmusk SpaceX rocket engineers can play the guitar !

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@AussieBotStudio No

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@juliandorey @AmyDangerfield What on earth is she talking about 🤣

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@yacineMTB Nah doubt it

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

"The code got easier. The questions got harder. That's the job now" https://t.co/gU93tFe1Cz

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@htmx_org As CEO of Htmx, we will go all in and buy at the dip

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@elonmusk @elonmusk

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

Amazon was initially written in C and Lisp !

https://t.co/YZLMm8ecll

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@matt_barrie 😲

[DHH @dhh]

You can’t outwork the whole world. There’s always going to be someone somewhere willing to work as hard as you. Someone just as hungry. Or hungrier.

Assuming you can work harder and longer than someone else is giving yourself too much credit for your effort and not enough for theirs. Putting in 1,001 hours to someone else’s 1,000 isn’t going to tip the scale in your favor.

What’s worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great “work ethic” because they’re always around, always available, always working. That’s a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who’s overworked.

A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.

So how do people get ahead if it’s not about outworking everyone else?

People make it because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many other reasons.

So get the outwork myth out of your head. Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours. Neither is going to get you ahead or help you find calm.

[The Outwork Myth — It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work, 2018]

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@mitchellh 🎯

[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.

[Ben Piroman 🇦🇺 @benpiroman]

@htmx_org That was the first programming language introduced to me. I didnt learn how to code for another 15 years after that 😔