With the speed of vibe coding.. I'd expect the "Reverse Engineer Anything" folks to come out with a "Man in the Middle Anything" app by lunch

A lot of us here are VC minded hackers *because* we spent years of our lives working minimum wage jobs in academia and then eventually realized we preferred to build!

Or preferred to eat. I love teaching, and I'm good at it. If it were more valued by society then I'd do more of it. As it stands, I'm in adtech, and I teach a little piano and math on the weekends.

I am one of those. I'll also say I never felt the kind of emotion in software building that I did when working on PhD problems.

> A lot of us here are VC minded hackers because we spent years of our lives working minimum wage jobs in academia and then eventually realized we preferred to build!

This is a disingenuous framing. I've "built" more in academia than in some jobs I had, and some VC-backed startups are renowned not for building but for their lack of ethics.

"Building" is not the discriminating factor.

Building things which you couldn't convince people to pay you for could be might as well building dubious crap

Man, majority of Sillicon Valley production is dubious crap with not much other utility or even actively harmful. And someone pays that.

Earning money is not curelated with usefullness these days. It is somewhat correlated with lack of ethics.

I think it's a very skewed form of ethics to make people pay without convincing them.And fwiw Making money is correlated with productivity which is negatively correlated with a lot of bad things so I think on pure technical point you are wrong, there are subtleties.

Reward alignment is the differentiator. Obviously it's very far from clear-cut what is worth funding in research. But i've seen a lot of crap research, that would have died off far sooner if it had some VC/free market equivelant.

Or maybe to earn proper money?

Rest in peace Bob. One of the great early tech writers. The feeling of his writing -- the blend of fact and opinion and sense of humor, and more than anything the sense the really cared -- always felt to me like one of the seeds that developed into the blogosphere.

Simon I hope from this day hence, your bio always includes:

"Simon Willison, among other things, is an advocate for the inclusion of pelican geometry in LLM training datasets."

“Today, the NASDAQ fell by 18% moments after Simon Willison published his latest blog evaluating the Legend 7.4 model that rendered an animated SVG of a pelican on a bicycle and the pelican fell off”

When asked for comment an anthropic spokesperson said "it's very unusual for the pelican to fall off. They are built to very rigorous SVG engineering standards"

I think because you don't know /which/ developer you're going to get.

One interesting aspect of LLMs is that each one, weights frozen, can be thought of as a single developer whose work you have already evaluated.

The cost of finding, evaluating, and negotiating with a new human is tremenous.

These comments are so filled with cool projects and visualizations I’ll throw my own out there:

Trying to generate non-slop, print-worthy recipe books for different diaspora communities.

www.robotbookclub.com

I’m pretty sure the recipes have surpassed slop. The photos are pretty close. The layouts, intros, and “chef photos” need a lot of work though.

It is good enough to have much fun reading it. About chef photos, in Cook French in America, page 11: no eggs on a breakfast tartine.

As a French, I would like the French version.

This is how I write down recipes for myself! There’s got to be some cognitive archetype that works better with this style encoding.

Do you have any suspicion about what is different between the backends?

That's an absolutely bonkers statistic: it would mean spurious differences in hosting container overwhelm the performance differences between models.

I genuinely don't, sadly. I'm a mathematician originally, evolved organically into ML then AI - but I never really was a SWE.

I feel like there's some backend decoding or chat template thing going on at a much lower level than what I'm best at. Maybe it's injecting headers or something that eventually compounds to model confusion? I really have no idea.

I really hope folks better than me at backend stuff take a look and dive into it though because it's definitely under-reported and super consistent across model families and backends ranging from ollama, lama.cpp native, prompt, llamafile, and even vLLM that I didn't formally benchmark in the repo.

Hey, this is most probably related to the chat template or the reasoning parser or the tool call parser or also things like kv cache quantization and possibly other params that affect results like the regular top k top p and all of that, the backend often sets its own defaults or the lack of them. It’s best to have all these under control if possible. I wonder regarding this project have you been testing it on real world projects? I’m working on an agentic loop as well also using a local model.

Yes I've now used it "in the wild" for a handful of use-cases. I still run into the backend thing even when declaring params though, which is odd to me. But there might be params not typically passed in with the model that backends are setting. Again, really not my area of expertise.

As for consumers, I've done a home assistant, an agentic coding harness, and an autonomous engineering project (still in flight).

My guess it's just the emergent behavior that results when a company doesn't provide developers time to fix bugs.

If their week is already booked full just trying to keep up with the roadmap deadlines, a bug ticket feels like being tossed a 25lb weight when you're drowning.

You could say: "but have pride in your work!"

But if your company only values shipping, not fixing, that attitude doesn't make it through the first performance review.

What I've found to be most effective for program management is to set aside a maintenance team separate from the feature teams. The roadmap is then planned without counting anything for the maintenance team and they deal with bug tickets as they come in. Rotate the assignment periodically so that every developer has to occasionally spend a few months on the maintenance team.

Doesn’t this lead to problems like the feature team pushing buggy code and having no accountability or responsibility to deal with it?

My preference is to treat the defects like feature work, size and plan. Yes you might not get all the feature work done but the team is accountable for everything they make

There's a lot more to effective program quality management than I can explain in a comment here. Forcing all developers to rotate through the maintenance team is one incentive not to ship crap because they might end up having to deal with it anyway. But more importantly you have to shift left the quality assurance and control activities to minimize the risk of defect leakage in the first place. And set up a closed-loop system where any leaked defect triggers a rigorous root-cause analysis that results in further process improvement.

You’ve just described AGILE development, a way for product owners to backlog code rot while empowering developers to feel like they have a say in things.