Don't forget scuttling all the projects the staff has been working overtime to complete so that they can focus on "make it better!" waves hands frantically
For whatever reason, I can't get into Claude's approach. I like how Cursor handles this, with a directory of files (even subdirectories allowed) where you can define when it should use specific documents.
We are all "context engineering" now but Claude expects one big file to handle everything? Seems luke a deadend approach.
CLAUDE.md should only be for persistent reminders that are useful in 100% of your sessions
Otherwise, you should use skills, especially if CLAUDE.md gets too long.
Also just as a note, Claude already supports lazy loaded separate CLAUDE.md files that you place in subdirectories. It will read those if it dips into those dirs
I think their skills have the ability to dynamically pull in more data, but so far i've not tested it to much since it seems more tailored towards specific actions. Ie converting a PDF might translate nicely to the Agent pulling in the skill doc, but i'm not sure if it will translate well to it pulling in some rust_testing_patterns.md file when it writes rust tests.
Eg i toyed with the idea of thinning out various CLAUDE.md files in favor of my targeted skill.md files. In doing so my hope was to have less irrelevant data in context.
However the more i thought through this, the more i realized the Agent is doing "everything" i wanted to document each time. Eg i wasn't sure that creating skills/writing_documentation.md and skills/writing_tests.md would actually result in less context usage, since both of those would be in memory most of the time. My CLAUDE.md is already pretty hyper focused.
So yea, anyway my point was that skills might have potential to offload irrelevant context which seems useful. Though in my case i'm not sure it would help.
This is good for the company, chances are you will eat more tokens. I liked Aider approach, it wasn't trying to be too clever, it used files added to chat and asks if it figure out that something more is needed (like, say, settings in case of Django application).
What will become apparent is that when coding costs go to 0, support and robustness costs will be the new "engineering" disciple. Which is in reality how things work already. It is why you can have open source code and companies built on providing enterprise support for that code to companies.
If you want to build a successful AI company, assume the product part is easy. Build the support network: guarantee uptime, fast responses, direct human support. These are the shovels desperately needed during the AI gold rush.
My take is that AI adoption is a gear shift to a higher level abstraction, not a replacement. So we will have a lull, then a return to hiring for situations just like this. Maybe there is a lot more runway for AI to take jerbs, but I think it will hit an equilibrium of "creating different jobs" at some point.
Almost every startup is a wrapper of some sort, and has been for a while. The reason a startup can startup is because it has some baked in competency by using new and underutilized tools. In the dot com boom, that was the internet itself.
Now it's AI. Only after doing this for 20+ years do I really appreciate that the arduous process and product winnowing that happens over time is the bulk of the value (and the moat, when none other exists).
Cant help myself and compare to frameworks, libraries and oop... cant we built so fast because of them?
I think of wrapper more as a very thin layer around. Thin layer is easy to reproduce. I do not question that a smart collection of wrappers can do great product. Its all about idea :)
However its if ones idea is based purely on wrappers there's really no moat, nothing stopping somebody else to copy it within a moment
This has seemed to me to be the natural next step to turn LLMs into more deterministic tools. Pushing the frontier is nice, but I think LLMs have a whole different gear when they are able to self-decompose in a reliable way. Most of my success creating reusable LLM products came from determining where requirements/outputs need to be "hard" vs. "soft".
I don't think any of these companies are that reductive and short-sighted to try to game the system. However, Goodhart's Law comes into play. I am sure they have their own metrics that arr much more detailed than these benchmarks, but the fact remains LLMs will be tuned according to elements that are deterministically measurable.
An interesting side-note about this post: the use of "agentic" in the context of human behavior. It is an interesting shift in how we view ourselves. This happened with the advent of computers, viewing everything we do in the context of information processing and retrieval; with the advent of social media, viewing our social interactions as signals with pass/fail results.
It is reductive, but also a new perspective from which to see ourselves.
"Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.
There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic, but ask that guy who charges $100 and can hack something together so you can get to work this week. You know an old lady around the corner who will take your kids in for the night if you don't make it home for some reason. These aren't solutions, they are patches and stopgaps. But this is also the strength of community that to be more common in the U.S. before suburbs made every family an island.
I know it makes a nice clean narrative that's especially appealing to the kind of people who would be in these comments but it probably wasn't suburbs that did this. That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.
I'm not gonna speculate on what other things could have been more responsible but I have my suspicions.
>That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.
I think you misunderstand suburbanism... In those places where the population is not dense the number of people that move commonly is not that high. Again, neighborhoods tend to have longer and deeper roots.
You're getting at what I was hinting at. It's not the literal distance between houses (or lack thereof) that cause this. It's the people and what they think and how they act.
Suburbs have a self-selection bias for antisocial behavior and folks who lean that way.
It’s not a 100% thing, but I’ve noticed a strong correlation having lived in a number of suburbs and in city cores. I’ve also spent a decent amount of time in rural parts of America and I totally get what you’re saying. The average rural person likely has a much larger local support network (aka community) than the average suburbanite.
Yes, same. Online I hear people bemoan how things are these days and stuff like that and then my SOMA high rise works well in the form that I want civil interactions to be.
> "Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.
They’re selling the stolen merchandise to a fence who then resells it to stores with looser procurement requirements at a discount or they box it and ship it to an Amazon fulfillment center and flip the stolen merch on Amazon.
Poor people don’t have enough cash liquidity to make stealing and selling toiletries worth it, it’s loosely organized crime.
The same sort of marker exists for diabetic test strips, people on Medicare get them for free, sell them for a discount for cash to someone who resells them for a profit.
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