Email: ian t butler 0 1 @ gmail.com
- There are plenty of musicians here saying this is useful for them or would be useful while learning.
As meta commentary, those not in a subgroup sometime fail to see utility of a thing built for that subgroup and it's easy to feel a sense of superiority "oh how dumb and trivial this thing is", but it may be better to first have curiosity and see how the intended audience responds. Often it's not dumb or trivial, you're missing context and experience to see the value.
- In my experience, at least in circles I've been around, I have found other developers who are a little too high on their own supply so to speak use "hurr durr web dev" as the "easy not real dev" insult.
So I both wanted to shame that in case they were and also categorically show otherwise.
- To some people this is a gain, to some people this is a loss. Objectively it is changing things, and I can agree on having empathy for those who it changes something for negatively.
I feel like we are in a period of low empathy, understanding and caring for others as an aside from just this piece.
- Ah yeah, definitely a much different equation when introducing this across many apps as a shared component library. Mixing different DOM abstractions together could get tricky for sure.
And yes attempting to add a new paradigm for that many people is I am sure quite the task. More political than technical in many ways as well.
Thanks for sharing!
- https://lit.dev/
That's the premise behind Lit (using the custom elements api)! I've been using it to build out a project recently and it's quite good, simpler to reason about than the current state of React imo.
It started at google and now is part of OpenJS.
- I have never once said "Go build feature x" and let it run off. Not saying you do, but I feel like this is how a lot of people interact with these tools. I have a very conversational style of building with these tools, and I'm very blunt with them when I think they're wrong, since I'm fairly experienced and I can smell when something is seemingly wrong with the model's thinking.
I typically have a discussion about how I want the architecture to be and my exact desired end state. I make the model repeat back to me what I want and have it produce the plan to the degree I am happy with. I typically do not have it work in building large amorphous systems, I work with and have it plan subsystems of the overall system I'm building.
A lot of my discussion with the model is tradeoffs on the structure I'm imagining and methods it might know. My favorite sentence to send Claude right now "Is go google this." because I almost never take its first suggested response at face value.
I also watch every change and cancel and redirect ones I do not like. I read code very fast and like the oversight, because even small stupidities stack up.
The workflow is highly iterative and I make changes frequently, my non AI workflow was like this too. Write, compile, test, tweak and repeat.
I like this workflow a lot because I feel I am able to express my designs succinctly and get to a place I'm happy with with much less writing than a lot of the actual code itself which in many cases is not an interesting problem, but work that needs to happen for a working system at all.
I do wind up taking over, but feel less than I used to, in edges where its clear there is not a lot of training data or I'm working on something fairly novel or lower level.
I work in Python, Rust and Typescript (Rust by far most often) and the majority of my work is technically challenging but at the systems design level maybe not low level systems programming challenging. Think high concurrency systems and data processing, training models, and some web dev.
- It's not particularly hard for current models to wire up a http client based on the docs and every major company has well documented APIs for how to do so either with their SDKs or curl.
I don't know that I really agree its as annoying for agents since they don't have the concept of annoyance and can trundle along infinitely fine.
While I appreciate the standardization I've often felt MCPs are a poor solution to a real problem that coincided with a need for good marketing and a desire to own mindspace here from Anthropic.
I've written a lot of agents now and when I've used MCP it has only made them more complicated for not an apparent benefit.
MCP's value lies in the social alignment of people agreeing to use it, it's technical merits seem dubious to me while its community merits seem high.
I can accept the latter and use it because of that while thinking there were other paths we probably should have chosen that make better use of 35 years of existing standards.
- https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use#:~:t...
Anthropic themselves support this style of tool calling with code first party now too.
- Possible legit alternative:
Have the agents write code to use APIs? Code based tool calling has literally become a first party way to do tool calling.
We have a bunch of code accessible endpoints and tools with years of authentication handling etc built in.
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use#:~:t...
Feels like this obviates the need for MCP if this is becoming common.
- Okay and if they had said Google we wouldn't be doing this dance, people just hate AI and its obnoxious to see comments about it on HN all the time. On a crypto post no less.
We get it you guys don't like AI, next!
It is equally obnoxious to people who talk about AI for everything as if it is a savior, it's a tool use it or don't.
- I think we can agree on a version of bad code, specifically extremely bad code.
Just as we might agree on universally panned bad movies, but disagree on cult followings or one of us for a particular reason can't stand a popular movie.
That is to say we can all agree on extremes, but just because something isn't extremely bad doesn't make it good in everyone's eyes and that's where the contention is.
- I feel like its just a reflection of people's minds. People organize their thoughts very different from one another and people often don't organize their thoughts at all when under certain constraints such as needing to ship NOW.
Especially with enterprise code you're hammering your thoughts into a shape roughly compatible with someone else's so its no wonder overtime with the constant revolving door of people that without careful shaping things can get nuts.
- I don't think there's an objective assessment of good code. I've been writing code for over 20 years at this point and most times I've seen what people describe as their own good code I disagree with various decisions.
Experience CAN remove pitfalls, though developers even disagree about those sometimes.
Organization, chosen abstractions, naming etc are basically personal thinking and have differed on every team I've ever been on.
When it's been good is when it's been consistent and that's taken a strong personality the team trusted to have authority.
- I think this means we need to rely on web technologies more. PWAs are looking pretty good on mobile devices these days and you can publish any web app you want with no reviewing authority. The web has a bunch of crazy APIs now that let you build crazy things and for everything else you're a hosted server away somewhere that can run more complex jobs.
I believe devices I own should let me do whatever I want with them and I agree that the verification is BS, but I'll work around it in the ways I can which means building more for the web.
If that ever drops the open pretense (since both traffic and trust authority are largely centralized and thus easily controllable) then I'll only write for self hosted linux boxes.
We as individuals can only do so much. We'd need actual organization and some measure of political power to do anything more since normal people do not care about this.
- Yeah I would be willing to bet serious money that this is a few kids and that the number is not even greater than a fractional fraction of a percent.
You're seeing point wise incidents, chosen to generate outrage, and trying to apply them like all kids are doing these things, which per all trends they are not.
Sorry some fraction of people will always be stupid, we shouldn't apply constraints on the many to save the few stupid ones.
- Others are saying the end of leaded gasoline, I’ll add that around 2008 when the trend accelerates schools started becoming more locked down and consequences for being a kid can now follow you into adulthood much easier due to social media.
I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.
You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.
Other commentary is you're not owed courtesy you yourself didn't give.