I really liked this talk about how the premise of "software is eating the world" is incorrect. I think AI coding tools proves the point that software part is easy, its the hardware that is the important part. We can't really be more ambitious with software when ultimate pure software is limited in what is possible.

Bryan Cantrill: Andreessen’s Folly - The False Dichotomy of Software and Hardware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0JjG0Qfwi8

If only you invested a tiny fraction of the effort it took to write this to make it easier for us to read. It's a serious discourtesy.

```

.reading-container {

  /\* Automatically caps the container at 65 characters on desktop, 

     but scales to 100% minus a 2rem padding buffer on mobile devices \*/

  width: min(65ch, 100% - 2rem);

  margin-inline: auto;

} ```

Would love to see the author actually go deeper into details: what did they eval with models implementing zstd?

Many such cases are benign in the sense they in practice are simply the model basically "git clone"-ing the code they need to complete the implementation.

The amount of recall and synthetic data slop makes it imho very hard to actually get the models to really do something more novel (where they fall apart more often)

You know what would be really ambitious? Software that exists in a stable form without breaking for more than 15 years. Truly ambitious would be a stable, non-changing common linux base (like how Nintendo NES emulation target is stable) of packages that just gets supported for decades.

Perhaps that's too ambitious. But it would be of incredible utility not having to re-make the same things over and over in pepertuity with ever more abstraction layers. So much work on computer is just the constant churn and future shock of libraries adding new features which require updates which break other things. I'm tired of building castles on sand.

Behind the link "slow software that the creator is claiming is fast" is the following text:

"funnily enough, I have some faith in some of the projects that people are the most skeptical of, e.g., every time I see pgrust somewhere, there are a lot of skeptical comments. But, without having looked into the details of what he's optimizing, I would trust that they're not doing something shady with their benchmarks because Michael Malis started the project (and is still involved)"

This aged like milk. pgrust was caught cheating on all benchmarks this week.

I’ve been using the latest agentic frameworks and have come to realize that the discourse around vibe coding and slop really needs more nuance.

There is a gulf of difference between someone who doesn’t understand how to program “vibe coding” software and an experienced software developer using ai to write code with heavy direction, review, and best practices.

Today both would be said to be “vibe coded” but we really need to differentiate them. Also, if everything I’m hearing from people is true, it sounds like most corporate code is now completely ai written in the latter way I described. It’s interesting we don’t hear commercial software being called slop yet. Maybe it’s coming.

In any case, ai is far more capable than I realized. Not sure what to make of it.

I think we should be more ambitious with the font size we use…

I'm building an open-source Shopify for every vertical and built a software factory to do it. I envisioned this before LLMs, but LLMs are finally making it possible!