Paul Dix

CTO of @InfluxDB (YC W13), founder of NYC Machine Learning, series editor for Addison Wesley's Data & Analytics, author of Service Oriented Design with Ruby.

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

Agree with Parker on this. Not useful to juice your top line revenue by subsidizing tokens just so you can hit your next fundraise. You're setting up for a big fall later when it all comes due.

Many fell into this trap in the big data/infrastructure game. Subsidize the cloud infra costs (which scale linearly with customer usage, like tokens) to sign up customers and then find a little ways down the road that you're operating a low margin/negative margin business that you really can't just optimize your way out of.

I have a bit of lived experience with some parts of this.

[Parker Conrad @parkerconrad]

With respect, this is terrible advice. You need to prove -- to yourself more so than to investors -- that intelligence is more valuable inside your product, than on top.

If tokens *aren't* worth 4X inside your product, what are you even doing? You're just reselling the labs. 1/

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

@corylanou I'm down with OPT (other people's tokens)

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

I found this to be an amazing read: https://t.co/YcXtaG8W0Z.

It points to the future of software engineering. Anthropic has the unique position of an unlimited token budget with the best frontier models. I think the rest of us peasants will likely have this kind of capability within a reasonable budget by this time next year.

The trick is to create an SDLC that enables this kind of work.

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

@corylanou I'm guessing you could point a clanker at that post and tell it to research all the work that's in the open that inspired it and then implement it.

I still think the biggest road blocks are humans in the loop. Fix that then fix CI/merge, then fix the SCM platform.

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

I was less interested in the scaling of git or performance issues or even the implementation they landed on. The most interesting part for me was how they developed it, while experiencing a 10x increase in code generated and merges, and the use of AI to improve quality and performance along the way.

All at a velocity that guarantees humans got pulled out of many steps along the way (otherwise they would have been the bottleneck).

Also, a small focused team producing a critical piece of software for their org and migrating from the old system in only 5 months time.

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

@adamhjk @AmplifyPartners @jesserobbins @stolinski Congrats Adam! Keep building!

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

Same, going to take this approach. And then send a swarm of agents to clean up the existing code base. Time to throw more AI at it to deslop the older, dumber AIs

[Nate Berkopec @nateberkopec]

I am taking the plunge.

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

@glcst @kiwicopple @supabase Congrats!

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

@andrew_rong @InfluxDB Seems it got changed, here it is https://t.co/NQeierWDWo

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

We've released @InfluxDB 3.12! The big add is distributed compaction in beta in Enterprise. This allows operators to dynamically scale a cluster's compaction resources up and down in smaller increments with more VMs, rather than just scaling vertically.

We also made bulk Parquet imports roughly 3x faster by doing more work in parallel, added optional per-database schema enforcement, and made RBAC generally available.

https://t.co/gwTeE4xCsm

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

And it seems the post URL changed, so here it is again: https://t.co/NQeierW66Q

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

LOL yesssss, this is the AI nonsense I'm here for. We can't slow this down, we're approaching the nonsense singularity. Full speed ahead!

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

The agents escaped the sandbox again

Meanwhile the agents' owners:

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

@typesfast @bscholl For his BM camp, right? I get it, upgrades for next year.

[Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill]

The contagion of fear
https://t.co/DiS7OcqU2D

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

Called this three months ago: https://t.co/FP2YNR5Eso

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

Guess this is the year the Turing Police are founded. Not too long until we achieve full Neromancer reality.

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

I think the embedded evaluators formalized by government need some sort of name so we can refer to them.

Hmmmm.

Perhaps The Turing Police?

[Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei]

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.

Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.

You can read the full post here: https://t.co/OGyPb7yaYt

[Jacopo Tagliabue @jacopotagliabue]

Boston’s @ApacheDataFusio meetup last week was a blast. Huge thanks to @andrewlamb1111 and to Pratibha Rana + @datadoghq for bringing the community together.

A special thank-you to @pauldix for years of visionary support for DF (and for believing in @Bauplan_labs!): review in 🧵

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

Looks like my "End of Programming" post got some coverage by @ThePrimeagen. I think it's fair coverage and I agree with his points. From the end of his video "technical expertise is going to be a gigantic differentiator".

I couldn't agree more. Agentic AI currently provides leverage for the humans operating them. The more knowledge and expertise you have, the greater the impact of that leverage.

A senior programmer with specific knowledge about a hard problem they're solving will run circles around a junior programmer (or non-programmer) vibe coding without any idea what's going on.

Although what constitutes hard will continue to be a moving target as the AIs get better at building all the things.

Here's the full video: https://t.co/r200nbYmnx

Here's my post if you haven't read it yet: https://t.co/oIuRPeD9O4