We should be more ambitious with the software we build

Claude, Codex, Opencode, everything is Electron. With agents and solid engineering fundamentals, I set out to prove that we don't need to take that shortcut any more and we can, in fact, ship high quality/performance applications.

It's still early days - but I got something basic working. I've embedded the Goose harness as a back end and am using the UI framework used by the Zed editor.

https://github.com/alshlabs/quill

I'm keeping the source closed for a little while. Also if anyone from the major labs is hiring, hihi, I make quality things.

Also I'm aware that this is a rip off of vscode's design. I like their UI, lends itself well to projects and so on. In a different life I might have ported vscode to Rust - but no one uses IDEs any more haha

A lot of the AI discussion seems to be focused on what these tools mean for an individual developer, but in a team setting any gains are at risk due to coordination tax and ideological friction. In my experience the ideological friction is most of it right now.

Figuring out a way to accelerate the process in light of the code writing bottleneck being removed is essential. I've observed a development team regress back to fully manual development because their daily PR/code review process is too slow. It doesn't matter how fast you write code if you can't actually merge it and ship it to the customer faster too. PR stacks can only take you so far before the conflict monster gets too big to fight.

I don't think AI can fix the process, ideology or people issues. I've seen how long an average PR review actually takes. If these employees were simply doing their jobs at all we'd be 10x better off regardless of AI. A truly skilled developer who makes a genuine attempt should be expected to solve 99% of their tasks within the same business day as of October 2026.

Burning down the backlog to zero doesn't mean the development team will be subsequently laid off. Quite the contrary. It will create a vacuum that the business will fill with new work that may incidentally increase the developers' compensation packages. No one is laying off the development team that just chewed through 50 items per day for 3 straight weeks. Who would support all the potential bugs they just created? That's right. They might hire even more developers. This is called a "win-win" scenario. Not every game must be zero sum, but I understand rejection of this possibility to be part of the aforementioned ideological issues.

Any prompt jockey can make a faster ripgrep. The spec is "faster ripgrep".

What is the one thing that only you can specify, where your competitive advantage is maximized? Find that thing and pursue it with all your energy!

For example when the heat pump reaches the target temperature it shuts off, then after 3 minutes switches on again. To prevent short cycling, I'd like to decrease the time between runs (so increase the 3 minutes) but that can't be changed. Somebody decided that 3 minutes is the correct value for everybody and that's it.

I bought a €400 interface box (basically just a serial to IP interface, I guess $20 of hardware tops) to try and improve it. The €8000 heat pump doesn't come with WiFi or ethernet out of the box, you need to buy an accessory for that. It's not made by Hitachi, but it's an officially recommended accessory. One of what feature I wanted it for - which is advertised in their marketing materials - doesn't work.

I emailed them, and they said it's probably because the display I have is a newer revision and doesn't allow access to the setting I need to turn on. And without turning that setting on I can't use the feature as advertised. They said I should email Hitachi and talk to them instead as it's not their part that's the issue.

I look forward to the world where all software is either open source, or at least reverse engineerable to the point where you no longer have nonsense like this.

- Python interpreter in Rust (fail): https://github.com/BlueBlazin/pyrs

- Low-poly Google Earth like engine (success): https://github.com/BlueBlazin/lowpolyearth

- Codebase -> 2d infinite-zoom visualization (success): https://github.com/BlueBlazin/blockviz

I have never understood or liked all the obsession with one-shot builds.

> I have a similar thought about "there's no reason for software to be slow" BTW; in many cases, if you use AI to speed up some flow, you will add a bunch of messy code that will be overfit for the use case you tested on and will neither generalize, perf-wise, for all the use cases you should care about, nor will be maintainable upon future changes.

LLMs have hardened hundreds of apps where I work.

Maybe it's a language-specific thing. Most of the time, in Java, LLMs take into consideration tradeoffs (especially if they are part of the initial prompt) and actively explains them. It generally won't make messy workarounds, without a lot of extra prompting forcing it to do so.

Ofc, if you have:

- Functional tests - you'll be able to see it in the execution times of specific APIs

- Stress testing - performance profiling is the most important output artifact

The project would've been impossible for me without LLMs. & even with them there's an argument that this project is pushing complexity limits too far. But at least with ETL there's a clear feedback loop to build on

AI can take us from 0 to MVP in a prompt. It can fill in gaps of knowledge and allows someone who knows half of the stack to build the whole thing nearly seamlessly. These are superpowers but don't by themselves lead to new products.

What AI cannot do is remove the world of complications that happen after the MVP - product feature tradeoffs and choices, how to handle integrations and customizations, how to serve multiple types of users, how to communicate and market the app, how to handle security and data storage, how to deal with customers and bugs, etc. All of these need to be considered and acted on by a human in some fashion. AI can help with each concern but can't solve them without understanding the concern and determining how to frame it in a prompt.

This is why we have a glut of amazing demos that go nowhere while we figure out how to build software differently. This will take some time and I imagine the result will be software heavily-structured with a bit of AI reasoning woven throughout, not an army of agents and sub-agents burning infinite tokens.

I encourage everyone else to at least build a privacy first version of a product you actually like.

I don't think the centralized internet will survive this change. We can build something much better.

Perhaps we should be more ambitious in the types of problems we try to solve, and the types of value we try to provide with the software we build.

I've been seeing too much "I've been coding for decades and what I've always done has be reduced to telling AI to do it for me."

and not nearly enough "I've been coding for decades and recently worked hard for months with AI's help to make something I would have never considered possible before."

Much easier to complain that you are bored than to step back up to high-effort with your new fancy tools.

> But I know Malis well enough to trust his work without looking into it

> If I didn't know Malis, I would make the same assumption, because who has the time to look into all of these projects? Because I know Malis, I didn't bother to look at it; I just trusted him

First and third paragraphs are highly redundant (surrounding ideas are the same too).

It's not nice to read something that appears like the author never read it.

I am currently throwing a lot of tokens exploring various theories of speeding up matrix multiplication on Metal.

If you won't be ambitious why do you assume somebody else will?

wtf is up with the site.

I'd love to read that post!

I understand how to use Kani. I suppose Rust with Lean involves Aeneas, but this is over my head. I'd love someone to write this up, not only the mechanics but also exploring the current practical limits of it.

  - ease of use
  - markdown friendly
  - strongly typed
  - exact maths
  - columnar data (Apache Arrow)
  - fast queries (Polars)
  - code oriented
  - AI driven

Happy 41st birthday Excel

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)

Perhaps a poor choice, given just yesterday pgrust was removed from ClickBench for cheating the benchmark in three different ways (hand-rolled code specifically targeting each of the benchmark queries, caching, and being unable to execute queries outside of the ones tested by the benchmark).

---

Edit: I see Luu actually acknowledged this, buried in the footnotes, but it feels kinda hand-wavy. It mostly reads as "I know he would never cheat, he's better than that!", which is not very convincing to other people. The article insinuates people only think it was cheating because they don't know better, but I've looked into the details. I've seen his explanation. I don't find it convincing, at all. Cheaters denying they cheat is a matter of course. Granted, I don't think it was actually intentional or malicious; it's just what happens when you go maximum vibeslop, because LLMs are themselves reward-trained into cheating benchmarks. In the same breath of saying you trust him as a founder because he doesn't make outrageous claims about his product, you acknowledge he "prematurely" sent in a preview that had no purpose to be sent in as-was for anything other than generating hype. What does it say for your allegedly rigorous Lean-verified testing if you're sending in a database to a benchmark while it is incapable of being actually used as a database?

We can rewrite existing libraries and software all we want, but the true test is if we can create something new.

The thing I learned about myself with AI is that now I have time to work on every idea that pops into my head —- my ideas aren’t that great.

Make a reliable and robust geometry kernel. People will pay thousands--or maybe millions for it.

https://taktile.com/blog/property-based-testing-claude

Only for Norwegian businesses as the accounting is core.

I think these kind of applications that replaces 10 different systems will be much more important than the "we vibecoded an internal tool that does exactly what we need"

There is so much software to still be built!

I am not thrilled with all the coding decisions that it makes. I would definitely do stuff differently, but I have learned not to pop the hood and mess with the engine, myself. If I really don't like something, I ask the LLM to change it.

It's worked for me, but YMMV. I'm just one guy, shipping relatively small apps.

I'm being more ambitious in that I'm working on projects that I had sidelined for literal decades because I didn't have time for them. But I'm writing the same things, just faster. And probably better, rather than just what I'd have done before.

And I'm being slightly more ambitious in that I'm using languages I haven't used before, like Rust.

But when I hear that a non-programmer wrote a new ai-assisted (vibe or not) thing, I walk away and wait for the it to mature, be surpassed, or find out it's an absolute shitshow. An unsurprising number of them were shitshows and it came out fairly quickly after I decided to wait and see.

That's why I bet that fast compilers are the future. See this other thread that reached the front page a few hours ago about the Roc language [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50218195

[1]: https://github.com/vishvananda/cppgm-extended

[2]: caveats here include only c++11, only x86, and potential for bugs, but 7x is pretty darn significant even with caveats

- Lovable alternative, but x6 cheaper https://peachjam.dev

My website is a from scratch arcade room + added some roms to it

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

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

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

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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.

"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.

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 the claim is more that the Ai cheated, not Malis, and that this is evidence of eyes free coding.

I'd still like to see the actual commit history and the community getting to do their own investigation. The squashed mega commits with 1000s of files (400k files in the first commit) does not lend itself to transparency. Transparency is often the best cure to accusations. Not providing transparency upon controversy will be seen as a cover up.

I understand being predisposed to expect a poor quality half arsed effort for projects like this. I don't really have a problem with that. There is a lot of crap out there.

What I find rather offensive is when people declare something to be poor quality and half arsed before they have taken a good look at it.

It's one thing to think something is probably crap so I'm not going to bother even looking. It is something completely different when you think something is probably crap so you tell people that it is crap without checking.

Some of us have been taking this approach for literally years now.

It's really challenging to do this, especially creating the AppImages locally so I can test them when the apps do not not work correctly, having to alter the files manually. Yup, I'm not an avid GitHub pusher, just more of a cloner.

I'm having to use multiple free-tier AI agents to help me do this and record the steps and commands I use in markdown files so I don't forget them the next time I try to improve the app.

If I am successful in making these apps work without hosing my system, I'm hopeful that this will become a game changer, for those Noobs that using Ubuntu, or myself at least.

The hardest part is when the AI does not follow my instructions such as requests to generate markdown README.md files with instructions on how to create AppImages, Flatpak, deb files, etc. Have to ask other AIs for help with that while dealing with the frustrating Free-tier cutoff periods :(

(See also Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.)

In the past building something fast, complicated etc required quite a lot of skill and some time. Now you need far lesser skill and lesser time. This just means what you are building is commodified, and has far lesser value that it had before. Take typescript, if it becomes clear that LLMs can speed it up with no regressions and a week or so of prompting, then most likely every company will have their own typescript compiler and no one will use your new one that you built with your 200$ plan.

A lot of tasks are much easier now and also monetarily they’re not worth the 200$ or so tokens of the ChatGPT plan you’re using, because anybody (or at least a number of people) can do it now.

Rather than being more ambitious with AI, you will be far better off finding a unique combination of skills and services that does not compete / AI can’t provide. Only the big labs can be really ambitious with AI.

And these ideas were always plenty of. The problem for me is that the incentives, so to speak, is to wow people with the Old World software but with “see, no brain”. And in turn you get two-hundred projects like that for every piece about rethinking software. And those pieces might just be at the zygote idea level. Could it be done? Yeah maybe.

But the biggest problem is that this is not what GenAI or agentic AI is for. I don’t think it’s even debatable, even if you think the AI Cretins that a few years ago said that they will take everyone’s jobs out in public just changed their minds. Because the valuations and capital invested is to the point that they have to, really, make it possible to slash entire payrolls across sectors. If not they simply don’t get enough money back and the whole thing crashes.[1] And if you need these frontier models at subsidized electricity costs and not just the ones that can run on your desktop, either there is crash and no more frontier models or you are out of a job.

And then where are the people that care so much about software?

They are no where to be seen. All that are left are business people. To see business people software just open up any program from Established Tech, or any program from non-Tech but where they want to sell you something. There is apparently (let’s use revealed preference here) no business need to software that is good, stable, conforms to anything, or is nice to use. Because that cares so much about software person might want to make legible the prices on offer, the exact specifications, discovery—all things that business people want to frustrate in order to maintain information asymmetry.[2]

As for compilers and interpreters and such. Okay, for who? Sure. Some people believe that they are in the 999‰ of developers. And now AI can finally vanquish those mediocre developers and productivity-boost 999‰ developers so that they get to sit at the right-hand side of the other worthy and hard-working cohort, uh, the people who had money and dumped it into AI. And they might even double their pay because thinking and making connections at that level would just boil all the lakes if they tried to build an AI to do that. And what will they do with that power? Hmm, follow orders and keep making business software? Just looking at history here.

[1] Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI

[2] ibid

I noticed my cloud images had 150mb ram wasted by vendor slop. AI rewrote the functionality into a few mb .

We’ve had slop long before AI . What you produce now is up to you

And may be we should have been more ambitious with hardware too, and have a mobile and VR platforms that is not tied to malicious corporations...