Kevin Bielawski

Software, cycling, mountains, etc... Eng at @poggio_labs previously TL @HubSpot

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@GergelyOrosz "load-bearing"

It seems natural, actually. I have noticed again and again that I start using the same words and phrasings as the people I spend the most time with and so do they. Now many share those interactions with chatbots.

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@matt_slotnick *160s

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@OpenAIDevs in the codex macos app, it seems like auto generated commit messages describe the _thread_ instead of the code change being committed - imo this is backwards and the message should describe the atomic code change, not by back/forth with the coding agent

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@AnnieLiao_2000 If you're quitting your startup after a YC rejection how bad did you really want it and why should they have funded you?

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@andrewchen 10 seems like too many but this could be directionally accurate. I think you’re still going to be gated by ability to run useful experiments and most orgs probably can’t make sense of the concurrent experiments 10 PM-types would want to run.

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

If you aren’t prompting your coding agents while doing zone 2 trainer sessions, you’re probably not in zone 2

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

In the time it takes to write an issue, you can write a prompt

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@TheSkiMonster Hike to four pines?

[Reggie James @HipCityReg]

They literally did.

They got all the phones on the market. And saw it was all junk by Apple standards.

They knew this for a while but had to get a few technical things in order first.

They had to get really good at miniaturization -> iPod helps them learn that

Then they had a cross learning moment, where the company they acquired for their touchscreen technology — which was working on computer displays — they took that and brought it over to “Project Purple” -> thus multitouch was born

So now that have multitouch and know how to make things small. ANDDDD they are still looking at junk ass phones in the market.

Once they see what’s wrong with them they ask themselves — “what’s the phone we’d make for ourselves?”

They “vibed” AFTER they knew the market, they had technical pieces in place, and this is where all the software love that made the iPhone the iPhone comes together

Pulling from springboard and all the macOS work -> that’s what made the iPhone feel so good with direct manipulation of multitouch

iPhone wasn’t some isolated “do what you want” event

It was built off of decades of HCI learnings. A key acquisition. And the success and learnings of the iPod.

Learn the real stories and don’t just take a cliche like “users don’t know what they want” as an excuse to build nonsense

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

Instead of debating the ROI of investments in training versus inference, isn't the answer more of both? Until we find that we can't scale training of base models, fine tunes of those base models will benefit from more underlying intelligence. R1 benefitted immensely from that

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@sh_reya I think this is the key point. LLMs crush when writing functions with clearly defined inputs and outputs. Even better when you can easily generate a test suite to lock in the contract. But that's already easy for experienced eng and only so much work looks like that.

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@DylSell classic innovator's dilemma? We'll see who has the risk appetite to not just fork their product into true AI-first (i.e. not copilots), but also the ability to migrate legacy usage to vAI. Duolingo's much closer than Asana/ZI imo, but apples to oranges.

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@pkedrosky To your point, I know very few people (can count on one hand) who exercise for purely longevity/health benefits and actively dislike exercising. It's too arduous a pill to take if there's not inherent enjoyment

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@pkedrosky If you're lucky, exercise is fun and becomes a hobby. Two birds with one stone. Though exercise as a hobby can easily turn into something that is no longer healthy? Thinking compulsive exercising, going harder, longer than that which yields a positive health impact

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@levelsio There's something about lifting weights in full ranges of motion that seems to heal joint issues. Surely can create them, too, if done poorly, but has benefits beyond just getting physically stronger

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@bhalligan At big companies that's probably directionally true. At small companies that get a decent amount done, not possible. You'd immediately sense if only 1 person out of 10 did any work. 10 out of 100, less easy to sense but possible. 100 out of 1000, probably hard to tell / measure

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

@Austen Show me a large, complex codebase written from scratch by an LLM, agent loop or otherwise

Or rather, what's your definition of the modifiers large and complex?

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

Good examples of what I'm talking about in this post: https://t.co/6QoTcd1twx

Instead of google searching for "pretty print JSON" which would lead you to some janky, ad-riddled site from 2010, you can create a custom version tailored to you with a tweet-length prompt

[Kevin Bielawski @blwsk]

ChatGPT canvas is slick, but Claude's ability to render html, css, and JS in-browser makes it more powerful for creating micro, personalized software. Not sure why canvas didn't launch with this capability as it makes that use case overly cumbersome