Product @launchdarkly Writing at https://xitter.gq/t.co/GBwm0x9zRo Gardening in my yard.
Joined February 2026
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Process is a tool, not a requirement. To unthinkingly follow process is to constantly prioritize the wrong things by default.
Apple’s inability to capitalize on its incredible distribution advantage for personal agents may go down in history as the greatest commercial failure of the era.
Siri is still bad, like really really bad. I opened an email with my Uber Eats confirmation, there was a live activity on the screen with progress, and I pulled down and asked Siri "what did I order for lunch?" And it thought for like 2 minutes and then said it doesn't know. 🤦♂️
Okay so the harness and models are clearly bad. Well, then next I opened up the Siri GUI app on macOS and HOLY. It's the worst looking, beginner, basic bitch app I've ever seen. Did someone spend more than 5 minutes on this?
Whoever worked on this app along with the full chain of people who checked off on this needs to be terminated immediately. This is 0/10 terrible software, so embarrassed for Apple to ship this.
Organizations are also going through this narrative arc, except more chaotic
New blog post - Chasing the Karpathy Peak (and Falling Off Slop Cliff): Confessions from Slopaholics Anonymous
My story of becoming a slopaholic, who’s most at risk, and how to avoid it (or recover)
thomasjiralerspong.substack.…
Github conversations are now an absolute trash heap of bot traffic.
This is an existential threat to Github.
Timothy Cook retweeted
prediction: it’s going to be the teams moving slowest, not fastest, on AI that open themselves up to the most cyber risk
risk aversion is a risk itself
The new definition of first world problems:
Was using an agent to build my custom coding agent harness last night at soccer practice and accidentally ate my full month's data plan by downloading ollama local model via my hotspot.
At this point, the primary friction that limits agent output isn't a skill problem, it's the antagonistic environments where they're forced to operate. Authentication being the primary constraint.
Is the @IRSnews ready for agent slop season next April?
Agents standing in the gap between:
- Govt: Tell us what you owe us and pay up
- Govt: We know what you owe us
If we take the human out of the loop, the agents just output the government's definition of what we owe them and just send it right back to them.
The perfect ouroboros of bureaucracy.
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Timothy Cook retweeted
i love writing. i never let agents write for me. whether it's docs, or tweets, or shitposts, or even prompts (okay maybe that one's harder as agents manage other agents)
there's a simple reason for that: i still strongly believe that writing is thinking. it's a skill i hope to never give up. it's also important to me that whatever i say is always authentic, mistakes and all. my favorite posts are the ones that i just full send without any editing
i suspect it also helps with prompting. being able to clearly express what i want, and knowing the vocabulary i need to be able to direct my agents does seem to make for more effective usage of agents. in the same way that engineers have an advantage when we prompt agents to write code, because we are intimately familiar with the words that make up the discipline
knowing the right word incantations to get an agent to produce a desired goal almost feels like spellcasting. as models get more capable, and that input box looks more and more like a magic box that can output anything, words become the interface between you and the genie
there may come a time when we give up the keyboard in exchange for brain-computer interfaces. but until then, i'm writing every word.
I did a small thing to encourage both more and less slop.
Slop in all the right places. Slop liberty.
aialabels.com
It’s about volume because the tools allow you to do so much more. If you went from axes to chainsaws you would demand a huge increase in lumber volume.
volume does matter
look, i get it. if you were an engineer before agents came along, you're rightfully skeptical about lines of code and number of PRs being used as a metric for any kind of productivity. and i agree! or at least, i used to. for ease of explanation i will talk about this from the perspective as being an engineer on a large team of at least 50.
volume didn't matter before because we focused on impact. you could have high impact even with a few PRs: for example you could make a one line config change and save the company millions of dollars.
but before agents, the times where i saw volume come into the conversation were for the outliers. on the negative end you might have someone who is struggling to perform, on the other end you might have someone who was a "coding machine" archetype. a coding machine was someone who could just lock themselves in a room and emerge with a stack of PRs that solve a huge number of problems. so volume did matter, but only at the tail ends of the distribution, and combined with impact.
if you've ever worked at a large tech company before, you'll get what i mean. the thing about agents is that big tech co problems are now small-medium co problems as well.
how do agents change this calculus? well, everyone now has the ability to become a coding machine. you have incredibly capable frontier models that can write code better than any of us, at a rate much faster than we can. in this world, if you're still producing the same number of PRs as before, why wouldn't you pause to wonder why you're not being more productive? alien intelligence is here, and yet you can't outship a human coding machine?
this brings me back to why i keep talking about trust (xitter.gq/poteto/status/21020504…). if you haven't put in the work to trust your agent's output, it is very difficult to scale up your productivity.
and yes, this approach does require more tokens, but i think about this in terms of cost per intelligence. before agents, this cost was very high - you needed to hire many software engineers with high 6 figure salaries to do the work. tokens are still expensive today, but are likely to get cheaper over time (xitter.gq/theo/status/2107924138…) factoring in the cost of intelligence. what looks exorbitant today will likely be affordable in 6 moths to a year. a single engineer with agents can do the work of tens if not hundreds of engineers, at a fraction of the cost.
the reality that i don't think has hit yet is that job of the software engineer has truly changed. our job is not merely to produce software any longer (well tbh it was never only about the code, but bear with me for the sake of the explanation), but the machine that writes the software. this idea of a software factory, or a Michelin kitchen as i like to call it, is still a topic of research. and it's the type of stuff i like to share, not to flex, but to show you what's possible when you put a lot of rigor into using agents at scale
Timothy Cook retweeted
Our next Control Panel is Nov 5!
How engineering teams stay in control as agents take on more of the work. Leadership from LaunchDarkly, plus a special guest.
Save your spot: bit.ly/4iWBDT8