This is an interesting read, and while I support being nice to every_thing_ in principle. Most of the research into this actually shows that being mean yeilds better results
I've read the blurb from previous years about doing one-shots with threats of death, or etc - but I've never seen that for long many prompt sessions.
I wonder - if you hired a programmer for a day, trapped them in a cage, and then threatened them, maybe it would be more productive for a while. I mean, if I were writing that book, I could see how they would do great work for a bit.
This looks pretty cool. I keep seeing people (an am myself) using claude code for more an more _non-dev_ work. Managing different aspects of life, work, etc. Anthropic has built the best harness right now. Building out the UI makes sense to get genpop adoption
Yeah, the harness quality matters a lot. We're seeing the same pattern at Gobii - started building browser-native agents and quickly realized most of the interesting workflows aren't "code this feature" but "navigate this nightmare enterprise SaaS and do the thing I actually need done." The gap between what devs use Claude Code for vs. what everyone else needs is mostly just the interface.
I read it. i agree this is out of touch. Not because the things its saying are wrong, but because the things its saying have been true for almost a year now. They are not "getting worse" they "have been bad". I am staggered to find this article qualifies as "news".
If you're going to write about something that's been true and discussed widely online for a year+, at least have the awareness/integrity to not brand it as "this new thing is happening".
The models are gotten very good, but I rather have an obviously broken pile of crap that I can spot immediately, than something that is deep fried with RL to always succeed, but has subtle problems that someone will lgtm :( I guess its not much different with human written code, but the models seem to have weirdly inhuman failures - like, you would just skim some code, cause you just cant believe that anyone can do it wrong, and it turns out to be.
Well, for some reason it doesnt let me respond to the child comments :(
The problem (which should be obvious) is that with a/b real you cant construct an exhaustive input/output set. The test case can just prove the presence of a bug, but not its absence.
Another category of problems that you cant just test and have to prove is concurrency problems.
Of course you can. You can write test cases for anything.
Even an add_numbers function can have bugs, e.g. you have to ensure the inputs are numbers. Most coding agents would catch this in loosely-typed languages.
Yes, RDS seems to really hold PG back on AWS, with all the interesting pg extensions getting released now (pg_lake). It is a share I can't move to other PG vendors because it is a pain in the ass to get all privacy, legal docs in order.
Technically, is there a reason AWS can't support allowing sophisticated users to run arbitrary extensions in RDS? The control-plane/data-plane boundaries should be robust enough that it's not going to allow an RDS extension to "hack AWS". Worst case is that AWS would have to account for the possibility of a crash backoff loop in RDS.
I understand that practically you can b0rk an install with a bunch of poorly configured extensions, and you can easily install something that hoovers up all your data and sends it to North Korea. But if I understand those risks and can mitigate them, why not allow RDS to load up extension binaries from an S3 bucket and call it a day?
If AWS wanted to broaden the available market, this would be an opportunity to leverage partners and the AWS marketplace mechanisms: Instead of AWS vouching for the extensions, allow partners to sell support in a marketplace. AWS has clean hands for the "My RDS instance crashed and wiped out my market cap" risk, but they can still wet their beak on the money flowing through to vendors. Meanwhile, vendors don't have to take full responsibility for the entire stack and mess with PrivateLink etc. Top tier vendors would also perform all the SOC attestation so that RDS doesn't lose out.
P.S. Andy, if you're reading this you should call me.
I'm considering hosting a separate pg db just to be able to access certain extensions. I am interested in this extension as well as https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Incremental_View_Maintenanc... (also not available on RDS). Then use logical replication for specific data source tables (guess it would need to be DMS).
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