I'm super excited for you and this, but this is mostly a highlight list of who is using your library. I was kind of excited to read about the actual changes to the library but I suppose I can go read the changelog on my own.
Tis a silly question. This has the combination of being something that the populace either doesn't care about at all (so no opposition from _constituents_) or rapidly supports (basically any gamer with some form of nostalgia that has gone unmet). As an added bonus it has the potential to set a legal precedent over similar more serious software such as SaaS offerings with a client component.
I've also had really good success with FreeCAD, and the FreeCAD MCP server. So far I've had it design and build a custom workbench (woodworking project w/ cut list, assembly and hardware instructions, tool and part check lists) as well as a omni-directional differential style robot wheel module for a 3D printing.
I will say the differential wheel module was on the edge of what it was able to do. I had to bump it up to Fable and if I didn't already have a clear model in my head of what I wanted I don't think it could have pulled it off.
All text, but none of these were a one-shot task. There were a few serious gotchas that you need to pay close attention to. It understands problems VERY well when it actually controls the viewport and takes screenshots of the part, unfortunately it REALLY resists that instead preferring to make up a bunch of equations to justify/validate it but these were almost never correct. It frequently got things like axis backwards so when it would test for a potential collision it would test in the wrong direction. Guidance specifically for the axes might help there, I suspect it's assuming different real-world axis (maybe more aligned with the game industry axis than modeling or CAD axis standards).
When I approached those two projects I took different approaches. The workbench I had clear measured physical requirements and desires but no specific design in mind (such as number or size of drawers). I had a long back and forth working out a purely textual project description via Fable chat, I originally wasn't even going to model it in CAD and just build from the textual description. I had just seen someone else post success with FreeCAD + MCP and there were some measurements that were suspect... So I had it model it. It did pretty good entirely on its own but a wood bench is composed of effectively a bunch of differently sized rectangles oriented and put together correctly so it feels like this was an "easy task" for it to complete.
The other side of the coin was that inverted differential omni-wheel. This one I knew mechanically exactly what needed to happen and I wanted to model to make a parametric, re-usable model that could be dropped in to a bunch of different designs. This one needs some complex gearing built which it actually mostly did pretty well. Where it kept failing here was weirdly in the motor placement (it was a stock placeholder mesh of the motor part), it had a sled mount with screw slots to allow a little adjustment of the meshing of the final gears. Over half of my time working with the model was simply trying to get it to point the motor model in the correct direction, fully seated in the sled, with the screw slots accessible and physically not colliding with anything. The next hardest part was composite/boolean joined parts, specifically a couple of gears that are a combination of crown and pinion gear, it couldn't seem to comprehend that adding the two physical objects together wouldn't remove excess material from around one of the sets of teeth.
Kind of a ramble, but let me know if there are any more specifics I can provide.
I don't think it's appropriately addressed. The apple ecosystem has really good syncing between devices but only when they share an iCloud account. What happens when your work mac isn't permitted to use your personal account? What happens when your company issued password manager and your personal one fights? What happens when your company issued device is an Apple device AND you have to use a mandatory password manager from the company?
The problem to me is that passkeys assume the user owns the device and CAN choose to make a single store authoritative for their credentials. The only professional environments I've encountered that haven't/wouldn't hit this issue are ones small enough that they don't really have device or security governance in place which you can't use as a secure reference baseline.
Huh. Well, federal court so national precedent against creating accounts to scrape registration only content. Probably a good thing IMO. I would put money on the public statement by a LinkedIn official saying "Your profile is yours" will bite them in the future as they certainly don't treat it that way.
It would be awesome if data that a site like Linkedin calls the “profile” could be containerized and encrypted in such a way that each individual user holds a key to a box with every piece of identifiable information, and can revoke the right for any 3rd party to access it.
>Well, federal court so national precedent against creating accounts to scrape registration only content.
I'm not familiar with US Civil Law. Is a precedent established when a consent agreement/settlement is put into place in the US, as is the case in this article?
A good chunk of what my company has been doing with AI falls into either burning down our known tech-debt and "easy wins" that no one ever had the bandwidth to approach... And improving / automating our processes. The former is having a direct and meaningful impact on the quality and availability of our services.
Our QA, formerly a fairly frequent blocker of all our releases, are doing more in-depth reviews and catching issues earlier in our release process. They have become unblocked to the point they are actively chasing down work that starts to slip.
We have cleaned up and tuned both our security alerts and operations logs and improved our tenant isolation in our service in a way that makes customer and formal audits SIGNIFICANTLY easier.
We're setting ourselves up for faster human development of the hard-things. Our development environment and infrastructure are faster, cleaner, more auditable processes, and cheaper overall to operate.
These fixes mostly don't show up in our product change logs, and definitely don't fall into "new features". It would largely be invisible to the outside world, but our costs are going down (though to be fair, not offsetting the spend on AI to date), internal productivity has improved, operational incidents are down, and customer satisfaction is up.
Cost is stable (or rising?), user-facing delivery is sameish, (some) engineers seem happier because they are allowed to gold-plate and prepare for future “human development of the hard-things”.
Engineers are happier because they can spend more time on that extra round of polish that was just filed into low-priority "fix when time" Linear tickets.
QA is happier because the stupid bulk operations are handled with AI and they can focus on the hard to find stuff that tickles the QA mind in a special way =)
Same stuff, but with better (in-house) tooling and (most) people are happier. The Code Artesans aren't, but it's mostly their problem and they'll find companies that only do fully manual programming for specific niches.
Internal costs are rising directly due to AI spend, we're still figuring out cost control and budgeting around this but are expecting this to basically become a new per-employee cost to factor in.
I would say internal morale and productivity has improved. We have explicit policy guidance and a general collective distaste of pasting AI responses which is what usually sours me on interactions with people that are fully gargling the kool-aid. My CI experience has gone down from ~1.5 hours to less than five minutes and I can actually run our entire platform locally on my laptop again. My personal experience has improved at least.
Externally, you're probably right that we're not really capturing user sentiment well about how our company's changes are impacting them. I can concretely say that there were several customers that were disappointed that our public change log notes have been about the same length. They were expecting us to go through our feature backlog faster because we we're starting to use AI.
On the other hand, we have had fewer outages, reached our fifth 9 consistently over the past four months which is a new company record in the 11 years its been tracked. We have had fewer support tickets, our customer retention rate is the highest it has ever been in the company's history, and we're growing our internal teams. Based on the evidence I have available to me, I would say that we're healthier than before both from a user sentiment perspective and an internal morale perspective.
>If you are product-driven, life is pretty good, and maybe has never been better
It has certainly been better for junior devs, mid devs, anyone looking for zirp era salary growth and supply demand ratios. For a senior code-adverse coaster looking forward to see his static salary get eaten by inflation, life has indeed never been better.
Yeah, at Corp, that makes sense. I was thinking more along the lines of scrappy startup silliness. "I am one person and I deal with any and all code to get my product built."
From that POV, has it ever been better, assuming you can rise to the top of an ever more crowded market?
> "I am one person and I deal with code to get my product my built."
From that POV, has it ever been better, assuming you can rise to the top of an ever more crowded market?
Building a product is easier now, same way making a photograph is easier now. Making a reliable and high income living out of it though, it looks increasingly uncertain.
In a world with abundant music and photography, just saying that you made your music using Reason/ProTools or you made your photograph with a Leica isn't enough. I believe the same will happen with software. Sales, product design, customer service and operational aspects like uptime will matter more than the software itself. Ironically, this is the kind of stuff the HN type highly dislikes.
> I believe the same will happen with software. Sales, product design, customer service and operational aspects like uptime will matter more than the software itself. Ironically, this is the kind of stuff the HN type highly dislikes.
Agreed. It's not even a new thing. They tried to teach me/us long ago, starting by putting it into words we might more easily understand, such as "Customer Development" lol.
When I realized that it was the sales guys that will have the power in the mid-term new world, I got genuinely upset. However, maybe they always had the power and I just didn't want to accept reality.
Now, I believe the most desired hire in the near future will be the PMM.
> A Product Marketing Manager (PMM) in tech is a strategic bridge between the product, sales, and marketing teams who defines who a product is for and why it matters.
A PMM with a tech background must be worth their weight in unobtainium at this point.
If you are product-driven why not go into Product Ownership roles? It certainly will be more satisfying compared to prompt "engineering" clerk "career".
Well, my life is currently both, as I am on the smallest possible tech and product team. To me, extrapolating on having done this since Sonnet 3.5 to now, there will be no tech aspect to the job soon enough. There are many hundreds of billions invested in making that a reality, and they are succeeding.
Until ~9 months ago, I spent most of my time being a "prompt engineer." Today I join a meeting, ten minutes later I receive the transcript. Then, I run a custom skill in my project, and I get Jira epics and stories to triage that are nearly perfect. Then, I run the second skill orchestration skill... some babysitting... and ~85% of the time that is all I need to do. Docs, code, unit and e2e, great UX... all there after every meeting, and basically two commands on my part.
I see two to three to maybe five years before anything I have to offer, in any capacity, is completely cut out of the picture.
I honestly don't understand how everyone is not on this same page. The labs are going to eat it all. The only reason I see for them to talk about "pausing," is because they finally realized that they are going to collapse the entire service economy around themselves at this rate: aka, the USA.
Yeah it’s going to be very rough for any knowledge worker unless the governments decide it isn’t ok for the general public to be allowed to use the tech.
It’s actually rough today with astra and fable, it’s just not been diffused enough. Tech workers like us see the writing on the wall, but a lot of others are blissfully ignorant.
It’s 10 devs with a small ai budget each vs 1 ex-dev now PM with a large ai budget - the choice is quite obvious for any decision maker who counts time and money
But assuming that one ex-dev with a large AI budget is highly profitable, why wouldn’t you convert the other 9 and give large ai budgets as well?
I guess if the company has no opportunities for growth so they only need exactly as much output as one team? But that sounds like a company that’s doomed anyway, regardless of ai.
You need to grow customers or contracts by 10x to fill the new pipeline and that's an impedance mismatch. Easier to let 9 go and hire later, especially since everyone else will be doing the same thing and there'll be a rather large pool of talent.
How you identify talent in this new world is a different kind of a problem which I don't think people figured out still and won't for quite a while.
If an org suddenly has 10x the production capacity for the same price and can’t figure out how to sell it profitably, it is mismanaged and will die. That’s very much the case for a lot of businesses for sure, but there have been filters before (the internet, for instance) and we survived.
I honestly don’t understand comments like this because in my work, this would be a disaster. And before I get the comments about my harness/skills etc, I’ve tried many tools and harnesses and skills and all that earnestly and in good faith. I find use in it for doing the grunt typing labor, but letting it loose in ways described above have only ended in spending much more time cleaning it up than if I just did the work myself.
I hate to sound pretentious, but I wonder if it’s a difference in complexity of work and problems being solved.
I just reviewed this thread, and thanks for an opening to say something I had realized I missed.
> I hate to sound pretentious, but I wonder if it’s a difference in complexity of work and problems being solved.
It is about complexity, at least for me. I am working on b2b SaaS.
There are times where even using LLM assistance, I spend weeks or months working on a tough problem.
However, the <show product get feedback> loop is now nearly entire automated, when it does not involve some actually complex problem, which are most of the meetings.
I have a kid with my partner and I'm still not sure it was the right decision for me. They do become a full-time job in their own right and there is a whole set of skills that you can kind of learn through books but is going to be unique to your little one.
The first couple of months were especially hard as they don't have much of a personality, don't really react much to the world around them, they're just feeding, sleeping, and growing. Starting at the beginning of the third month for me it started changing and every baby is kind of unique.
I now _detest_ most of the books/articles/child-rearing advice I've encountered. Most of all of their content is fluff to pad pages, a blog roll, and are frequently superseded by more modern research backed evidence. There is a lot of toxic advice in those books and systems as well, usually for parents that are prioritizing restoring their prior social lives over the well-being of their children.
It's time-consuming and exhausting, but I haven't found it to be _hard_ yet. Waking up in the middle of the night and giving your kid a hug and maybe reading to them a bit when they have a nightmare isn't a challenging task. The challenging tasks are exceptions (surprise medical issues, your daycare closing down with two days notice, etc). The baby and child industry put a cost premium on the clothes targeting them and they don't last very long due to the child's growth. I _saw_ this coming but not to the extreme it has actually manifested and you'll find it replicated in every child/baby sized item.
There are a lot of surprising upsides and my motivations have definitely changed since we had a kid. I will flip a mountain to see my kid smile and laugh, it hits deep. I enjoy spending time with her and I'm terrified of missing her achievements and milestones. When she comes to me and asks me to show her how something works, wants a book read to her, or just wants a hive five I get a double whammy of that serotonin once for being a Dad that she wants to engage with and once for getting to spend time with her.
I still, and unfortunately kind of frequently, miss what I have effectively sacrificed to have her. I am slower at staying on top of emerging trends, hobbies have been left by the wayside that I did for decades, I gave up running conferences and with it I drifted away from whole treasured social groups. None of this was really a surprise, but I didn't realize how much what I gave up was really part of who I was.
The social thing is interesting, you will inevitably drift away from friends who don't have kids. Even for the ones who do you will be so busy with your own life that you won't get to see them much. You will probably end up with more contact with parents from their schools although that will stop suddenly when they finish.
Not sure what the solution is other than putting in some deliberate effort to maintain those relationships (which I didn't do).
> It's time-consuming and exhausting, but I haven't found it to be _hard_ yet.
I think this is exactly what people mean when they say "hard": time-consuming and exhausting, not hard as in "I cannot figure this out". Usually you figure it out as you go.
This is excluding children with serious health problems, etc. I'm thankful I won the lottery in this regard, I know some situations can destroy families.
> I still, and unfortunately kind of frequently, miss what I have effectively sacrificed to have her. I am slower at staying on top of emerging trends, hobbies have been left by the wayside
Also rings true for me. Especially my hobbies, I barely have time for them now; and when she grows up who knows whether I'll be able to resume them. But in my case, this is balanced by this thought: would I be happier if I had more time for my hobbies, but she wasn't in my life. And the answer is very clearly that I prefer her to be in my life 1000000%, and if I cannot do my hobbies all that often that's an acceptable loss.
Ah yes let the FUD continue. This is a real problem but so far not nearly as severe as any of the marketing has made it out to be to the overall detriment of everyone including these companies announcing these scary capabilities. These announcements always included half hearted attempts at security layers which has now been demonstrated to benefit attackers more than defenders.
I wish I had a real solution to this beyond a dark age of the Internet where people have to finally come to terms with the general poor quality all modern software tends to normalize at.
The fact that HF had to resort to using GLM 5.2 to analyze the logs/payloads makes it look legitimate, at least for me. They would not say that they hit guardrails with the frontier US models when defending if this was an obvious PR stunt.
> When we started the log analysis, we first used frontier models behind commercial APIs. This did not work: the analysis requires submitting large volumes of real attack commands, exploit payloads, and C2 artifacts, and these requests were blocked by the providers' safety guardrails, which cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker. We ran the forensic analysis instead on zai-org/GLM-5.2, an open-weight model, on our own infrastructure. This had a second benefit: no attacker data, and none of the credentials it referenced, left our environment.
It depends on which side you're viewing this from. From oAI's it could be a publicity stunt or a request for regulation, and from HF's side they point out that they needed open models to get to the bottom of the issue, and that regulation will potentially lock us into a bad place.
You should go read the actual technical reports of the incidents and the follow on reports about the capabilities of smaller models in similar kinds of environments. This isn't new. The things exploited are still pretty basic in old and poorly maintained software or in gaps in architecture that were intentionally poked against security policies.
Are the findings valid? Yeah they're still doing security and they're still finding real zero-days. I think the internet is going to be bleak not because these models can ALL do basic security research but rather that the baseline quality of all deployed software is so low.
What you're describing is a harness implementation detail not something specific to the MCP protocol or even how skills behave. Both of those are effectively providing the same level of information to the harness. Harnesses have traditionally (and still generally do) exposed enabled MCP servers and their actions ahead-of-time in the system prompt directly instead of doing progressive disclosure.
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