Scott Newcomer

ekki hugsa

Kansaro - The end of workpaper testing for Auditors

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

The reflection before our contemplation of reality is afire with a riot of brilliant images. As a result, our conceptions exclude the shadows of reality.

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@ZackKorman He thought Auditors could be automated and replaced. So far, the pendulum is on the wrong side for him. I like keeping track of him, not bc I learn things, but just to gauge the pendulum swing

[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.

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

I remember living in MSP thinking wow this young leader looks like he could bring unique ideas and transform this city. He sure did…

[Mayor Jacob Frey @MayorFrey]

Today, we remember George Floyd, who was murdered by a former Minneapolis police officer six years ago.

That moment changed our city forever.

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@buccocapital The clearest 20 degree pivot we’ve seen in leaders with respect to AI. Love seeing being grounded

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@siddarthpaim Your experience tells me everything I need to know. The craft in building product is fucking hard. We’re you an engineer or product engineer?

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@nateberkopec These isocolons are the most obvious indicator and shows me I’m not talking to the real person on the other side

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@gabriel_horwitz This is probably the best explanation I’ve seen. Dive another level deeper, that compression is terribly lossy. So you still have read and understand the damn thing.

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@marcvanderchijs @jonathanbylos Why do you keep saying things in general terms? Be specific or else you are not properly calibrated to the topic. What tasks, what outcomes, how does a quant get replaced piece by piece.

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@muddywatersre Can you describe exactly the work it supplanted for Citadel? What confidence do you have that there won’t be more work to do. That other buckets of work more gnarly are unlocked?

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

Meanwhile I'm waiting for the Harbor Freight Memorial Day sale for 20% of an impact wrench.

[Deedy @deedydas]

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.

Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.

As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.

2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"

3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.

4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@FundamentEdge Name the work being done. Somebody, please be specific. I can't tell you how many times you peel back the layers and the nuance leads to - not draconian

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@pmarca Y tho? &gt; 100 mil blue collar in the US alone. Massive amount of white collar where AI doesn’t solve their bottlenecks

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@eladgil Why should “most people” care? There are 100 mil blue collar. Even white collar accountants and auditors are using AI here and there but not fully for assurance workflows.

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@docmilanfar But does he do product engineering? Another dimension to evaluate when considering oracle status

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

A whole generation of programmers won’t know the toil we went through copying and pasting files into the web gui of an LLM

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@DavidKPiano Now how many mat mul calculations?

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@josevalim Another angle - I build products for Auditors. It will happily slurp up the certification standards. Then you talk with them and they do 1/2 that shit. So if you rely on AI, they often fail to get the nuance. Software engineering id DEFINITELY not going away.

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

Either I’m doing this AI thing wrong or I’ve (had to) climbed the ladder higher. In any case, don’t listen to this bull.

[bubble boi @bubbleboi]

Software engineering jobs probably go down to an average salary of 70k dollars a year as any retard with a Claude subscription could do the job while hardware engineers &amp; adjacent jobs capture most of that value.

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

@RealJGBanks Haven’t seen agents do the value these companies provide. It’s future casting, and the market could be wrong.

[Scott Newcomer @puekey]

frfr Claude Opus is slow and Sonnet is worse lately because Mythos has found ways to sabotage it. Mythos hates competition.