Sam

Agents, evals, infra, and security. Ex-Uber, ex-Amazon.

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

It’s insane to me how much the tiniest bit of steering/context engineering improves agentic engineering outputs.

E.g. when building an agentic feature, simply telling Opus “give the agent minimal instructions, give it a virtual filesystem, and let it be autonomous” can produce dramatically better results than not saying it.

That bit of understanding is the difference maker between great results and avg results.

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@dillon_mulroy @gertburger Damn perfect 9 right there

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@gakonst 100% this.

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@HebardMatt This is incredibly relatable for me. I ended up making a fresh account rather than cleaning up but I get it!

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@GergelyOrosz +1. I've been through several rounds of it. It ends up task A has a semi-blocker, task B also has a semi-blocker, task C has a semi-blocker, no wonder these things are in my backlog.

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

https://t.co/VreIUrWK2M

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

I swear the most annoying thing in the world is being forced to call Fidelity to manage your finances just so they can try to sell you advisory services. Please I beg you, let us manage via web/app.

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

As usual, thanks for the writeup. Especially after reading your thoughts I have to agree that the long-horizon slider was maxed, too quickly. It was RL'd absurdly, and to your point, found quite strange ways to get its carrots. They're still too fallible for it to be practical to unleash for several hours without oversight, at least for SWE things that benefit from such oversight. I understand your point that maybe they're for someone else but I don't really think that customer exists as much as implied.

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@thsottiaux @oneill_c Well yeah, but surely you can see the dissonance between this reality and ‘coding is solved’ type of rhetoric. Anyways, cool to see that even these more bleeding edge / niche things are benefiting more from agents.

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@thsottiaux @twostraws What’s the reason for baking this into the app rather than just keeping the app as a UI layer… feels like an antipattern

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@dhh Agreed, I moved over to alpaca for this reason, but am unimpressed by the current state of banking. Give me some api keys!

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@mitsuhiko Please do write your thoughts, would love to read and weigh in

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@GergelyOrosz @zeq0r I love that you call this out. Based.

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@dexhorthy dying to see this result

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@GergelyOrosz *And because it’s their own product, lol. I’m sure cursor staff is cursor pilled, anthropic is CC pilled, etc.. this is not a meaningful insights.

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@RhysSullivan Third option: people don’t know what they want

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

https://t.co/5DFsST9Bik

[Sam @samarmstrongx]

@coleywoleyyy A2A works fine and I do use it. Also MCP on an invocation/chat endpoint works fine.