JK

Cloud DevOps GenAI

[JK @jayyvis]

GPT, ChatGPT, GPT-4 are all the buzz words now.

Do you know the T in GPT stands for Transformer?

Here is a short story of Transformer.

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

AI agents will retry. They will always retry. We have to be ready for it. Given how long-running agentic loops are, network drops, timeouts, and rate limits kicking in are super common.

When that happens, the agent often does not know if the original tool call succeeded. So it calls again. Thus, if that tool charges a card, sends an email, or creates a record, a retry means it happens twice.

The fix is to make every mutating tool call idempotent. The second run of the tool should be a no-op that returns the original result. The standard way to do this is an idempotency key.

The caller generates a unique key per logical operation (a UUID tied to the user's intent, not the HTTP request). We store the result keyed by that value. If a request with the same key arrives again, the server simply returns the stored response.

Idempotency key generation logic completely depends on what task you are doing, but a few patterns cover most cases.

In some cases, the client generates a stable operation ID. In others, a deterministic key can be derived from the business operation being performed.

For example, in a one-shot user action (place an order, send a payment), hash the meaningful inputs together: user ID, action type, and the request payload.

A common mistake is generating the key from something that changes on every attempt, like a timestamp or a fresh UUID with no link back to the original call. That defeats the purpose. The key has to be deterministic from the standpoint of "what is the agent trying to accomplish," not "when did this packet leave the machine."

The key has to live above the retry loop, not inside it. Generate it once, before the first attempt, and pass that same key into every retry of that operation. The network can fail ten times. The key does not change.

Idempotency is not a nice-to-have for agents; it is a must-have when it comes to building reliable agents.

Hope this helps.

[James Clear @JamesClear]

Darkness is preparation for light.

Sadness is preparation for joy.

Failure is preparation for success.

But only if you keep going and remain open to what comes next.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Mark Manson on how to win at life:

1. Commit to doing a hard thing.
2. Do the hard thing.
3. Feel good about doing the hard thing.
4. Become someone who enjoys doing hard things.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Kobe Bryant once said:

“Everyone wants to be a beast. Everyone wants to be the best. But very few people are willing to do what it actually takes. Because what it takes is boring. It is waking up at 4:00 AM. It is shooting the same shot a thousand times. It is watching the film when you are tired. People fall in love with the result, but they hate the process. You have to fall in love with the boredom. You have to fall in love with the repetition.

If you can find joy in the mundane work that no one else sees, the lights will eventually shine on you.”

[Martin Fowler @martinfowler]

NEW §

Birgitta Böckeler adds exploration of three sensors for static code analysis, with mixed results. Computational sensors alone cannot help us much, AI is needed to add semantic interpretation, and consider trade-offs.

https://t.co/GtZqpRawAs

[Jota @jota_snchez]

Richard Feynman ganó el Nobel de Física y dijo algo que dejó huella:

"La mayoría de personas saben muchas cosas. Pero no saben pensar."

Feynman dio una clase magistral de 1 hora sobre física e imaginación.

Sus 12 lecciones de vida:

1. La imaginación le gana al conocimiento

[Naval @naval]

We’re searching for permanent satisfaction with an impermanent mind in an impermanent world.

[Naval @naval]

What you really want is a challenge at the edge of your capability.

[pulkit mittal @pulkit_mittal_]

After working at HFT and complex Fintech systems for 7 years, I’ve noticed something:

Most engineers think databases become slow because of complex queries while problems lies somewhere else.

Interviewers now ask things like:

“How would your database survive 10M writes/minute without melting the disk?”

And candidates immediately jump to:
- sharding
- caching
- replicas

But the real bottleneck often starts much deeper: Database internals.

These 10 concepts are what actually allow modern databases to handle insane write throughput in production.

Bookmark this thread. Read till the end.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

When I built menugen ~1 year ago, I observed that the hardest part by far was not the code itself, it was the plethora of services you have to assemble like IKEA furniture to make it real, the DevOps: services, payments, auth, database, security, domain names, etc...

I am really looking forward to a day where I could simply tell my agent: "build menugen" (referencing the post) and it would just work. The whole thing up to the deployed web page. The agent would have to browse a number of services, read the docs, get all the api keys, make everything work, debug it in dev, and deploy to prod. This is the actually hard part, not the code itself. Or rather, the better way to think about it is that the entire DevOps lifecycle has to become code, in addition to the necessary sensors/actuators of the CLIs/APIs with agent-native ergonomics. And there should be no need to visit web pages, click buttons, or anything like that for the human.

It's easy to state, it's now just barely technically possible and expected to work maybe, but it definitely requires from-scratch re-design, work and thought. Very exciting direction!

[Jana V @jvembuna]

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something, anything, down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft. You just get it down. The second draft is the up draft. You fix it up.”

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

This is not just true for writing. It is true for almost everything.

[Naval @naval]

The enemy of truth is motivated reasoning.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Life advice nobody told you: Talent and intelligence are overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong. The truth is that talent and intelligence are abundant. Courage is not. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t. I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. It's taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Derek Sivers said it right:

“Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.”

[Vivek Galatage @vivekgalatage]

My go-to algorithm visualizer for explaining DSA to students.

https://t.co/1Z1Pztb94Y

[James Clear @JamesClear]

People can help you in many ways throughout life, but there are two things nobody can give you: curiosity and drive. They must be self-supplied.

If you are not interested and curious, all the information in the world can be at your fingertips, but it will be relatively useless. If you are not motivated and driven, whatever connections or opportunities are available to you will be rendered inert.

Now, you won't feel curious and driven about every area of life, and that's fine. But it really pays to find something that lights you up. This is one of the primary quests of life: to find the thing that ignites your curiosity and drive.

There are many recipes for success. There is no single way to win. But nearly all recipes include two ingredients: curiosity and drive.

[Navalism @NavalismHQ]

"All misery comes from rumination."

@naval

[Ivan Velichko @iximiuz]

This is your periodic reminder that you can curl localhost ports with a "curl 0" shortcut. Example:

curl 0:3000

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

My grandfather told me this: Do what’s necessary, not what’s comfortable. The gap between your goals and your reality is filled with painful, boring work. Most people avoid it, which is why it’s so valuable. Master the ordinary to create the extraordinary.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

How has the day-to-day workflow of Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh) changed, thanks to AI tools?

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
07:19 HashiCorp origins
18:22 The 2010s startup scene in SF
23:11 Funding HashiCorp
25:23 The "Hashi stack"
38:28 The open-core pivot
48:08 Taking HashiCorp public
51:58 The almost-VMware acquisition
59:10 Mitchell’s take on AWS, GCP and Azure
01:06:02 AI’s impact on open source
01:07:00 Ghostty
01:19:13 How Mitchell uses AI
01:28:36 Open source + AI
01:31:46 The problem of Git and monorepos
01:39:57 Mitchell’s hiring practices
01:47:52 Mitchell’s AI adoption journey
01:50:41 Advice to future founders
01:55:03 Closing

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