Off By One

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@SemiAnalysis_ Lol, why single out AMD? : )

This is one of the reasons big companies suck at competing with small teams.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

Okay, we are clearly past "watching the agent" work and make sure they are not doing dangerous stuff. The ones running on SRAM and fuckin crazy.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@thsottiaux @argofowl Right after shipping Astra. At least that is what we tell ourselves all the time. But "Astra" gets replaced with the next thing right after it ships. And we love it.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@signulll No worries. People talking to people will be replaced with people's agents talking to other agents anyway.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@rakyll Or fire the ones producing the bad code

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@housecor Just ask the lead to do it all. Fire the ones who you cannot trust without combing through their code.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@viticci Sounds like an mcp you can one-shot

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@thezacharyyu Ask Elon

[Off By One @of_by_one]

Everyone who has hired and worked with a good (human) personal assistant disagrees.

[Ashpreet Bedi @ashpreetbedi]

There is a popular twitterpinion going around that companies should stop building agents and only expose MCPs/CLIs. I agree the old way of clicking through a UI is going away but this take is short sighted and misses nuance.

It is almost impossible to expose the full strength of a product through a flat list of tool calls. The API calls behind a real workflow need careful orchestration. And authz is incredibly hard in a headless interface.

Companies that want to take advantage of this shift need all three:

1. An MCP their users can plug into any agent

2. An in-product agent: a carefully curated experience the company controls, owns, and learns from. It becomes a new way of using the product.

3. The product agent exposed through the MCP. Users get the company's agent through their agent of choice.

Simple requests like "pull up my subscriptions on stripe" go through the MCP tools. Complex, curated experiences go through the company's agent (accessed via MCP as well).

Everything should be reachable through MCP, so your agent can talk to my agent. But expecting a general-purpose agent to orchestrate a complex chain of tool calls in the right order every time, is laughable.

The orchestration is the product. The problem is that most companies haven't cracked that yet... so its easy to say: give me all the tools. That's like saying let me use your REST API directly. We just haven't seen the good agentic experiences yet and making this take the standard means we never will.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

Code constrained by an agent constrained by code constrained by agent constrained by human is where I am now.

[Uncle Bob Martin @unclebobmartin]

What a fascinating reversal. We are now using code to constrain reasoning agents. We used to be reasoning agents that constrained code.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@unclebobmartin Code constrained by an agent constrained by code constrained by agent constrained by human is where I am now.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@ImSh4yy @ikuznetsov_com Broadly agree. Have you considered a corner case where compute gets incredibly costly because it is used for some purpose that someone else is willing to pay a lot for and you simply can't afford it anymore. Science fiction, sure. But don't know how to rule it out.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

If your job involves interacting with people more than interacting with machine, you don't have the best intuition for what is possible with today's models.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

Sam saying he got the timeline wrong is to calm down anxious people. It has nothing to do with model capabilities.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

The reason you want to read code is you are afraid your model is not doing what you want it to do. That is an alignment problem. Solution is to align; not keep checking.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@kai_brokering Chat is perfect actually. What is not perfect today is the action that follows. But that is getting better.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

It is tempting when a direction looks promising to just sprint in that direction. It is easy to forget all the other invariants that still needs to hold. Then the laws of nature remind you you still live in their world.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@emilkowalski where are the competitions on "who can still program with punched cards" running?

[Off By One @of_by_one]

@Govindtwtt Their chrome integration is good.

[Off By One @of_by_one]

I'm curious when is the earliest anybody in github realized they are going to be hammered by agents. After or before claude code? There were signs even before.