yep, and I have the same thing, but then I am not going to tell everyone it is super productive for the actual task of farming. I say that I have a hobby farming (which I do) and talk about my tools and my meager yields (which won't make any money if sold). I am not going to say that my workflows are so productive while my neighbour who is a professional farmer just has old crap and just starts and works from 5 am to 9 pm making a living of his land.

If I only spend $1000 on hydroponics and 3 weeks tending to a vertical garden I can grow a $1 head of lettuce FOR FREE!

I like farming but a lot of the tools are annoying to use so I find myself tinkering with them (gardening in your analogy I guess). It's not that I prefer tinkering in the shop to farming. More that I just have very little patience for tools that don't conform to the ways in which I think about the world.

Gear Acquisition Syndrome is a very different problem. Even if you haven't cured the issue the new synth was meant to fix, at least you have a new synth.

I have a fantastic keyboard, but I'm not taking pictures of it, changing the keycaps, posting about it. It's a tool, not a fetish; that's how I differentiate these things.

It's a keyboard attached to an article of clothing you put your head into so the keys drape over your shoulders. You then type, but also end up giving yourself a shoulder massage!

It's just boredom probably. Obsessing over productivity tools is relatively more productive than say, something completely unrelated to your work.

Not in our (30+ year old software company) experience and we have large code bases with a lot of scope creep ; more than ever as we can deliver a lot more for a lot less (lot more revenue / profit too).

This is an area I'm very interested in. Do you have a particular application in mind? (I'm guessing the recipe example is just illustrate the general principle.)

Anything involving numbers, or conditions like ‘less than 30 minutes’ is going to be really hard.

I suspect LLM-like technologies will only rarely back out of contradictory or otherwise unsatisfiable constraints, so it might require intermediate steps where LLM:s formalise the problem in some SAT, SMT or Prolog tool and report back about it.

I've seen some interesting work going the other way, having LLMs generate constraint solvers (or whatever the term is) in prolog and then feeding input to that. I can't remember the link but could be worthwhile searching for that.

It’s the first thing I turn off in Aider.

Same here. Using Codex with GPT-5.2 and it has not once tried to make any git commits. I've only used it about 100 times over the last few months, though.

  > Sandboxing these things is a good idea anyways.

Like we want to act like these programs are identical to a person on a system but at the same time we're not treating them like we would another person on the system? Give me a fucking claude user and/or group. If I want to remove `git` or `rm` from that user, great! Also makes giving directory access a lot easier. Don't have to just trust that the program isn't going to go fuck with some other directory

but then they can't open your browser to administer your account.

What kind of agentic developer are you?

just because i havent gotten to try it out really.

but what is it about Amp Code that makes it immune from doing that? from what i can tell, its another cli tool-calling client to an LLM? so fwict, i'd expect it to be subject to the indeterministic nature of LLM calling the tool i dont want it to call just like any others, no?

Typically agents are not operating as a distinct user. So they have the same permissions, and thus credentials, as the user operating them.

Don't get me wrong, I find this framework idiotic and personally I find it crazy that it is done this way, but I didn't write Claude Code/Antigravity/Copilot/etc

Making a git commit typically doesn't require any special permissions or credentials since it's all local to the machine. You could do something like running the agent as a different used and carefully setting ownership on the .git directory vs. the source code but this is not very straightforward to set up I suspect.

how do those guard rails work? does the system notice you doing it and not put that in the context or do they just have something in the system prompt

This matches my experience. You mostly want to not even mention negative things because if you write something like "don't duplicate existing functionality" you now have "duplicate" in the context...

What works for me is having a second agent or session to review the changes with the reversed constraint, i.e. "check if any of these changes duplicate existing functionality". Not ideal because now everything needs multiple steps or subagents, but I have a hunch that this is one of the deeper technical limitations of current LLM architecture.

Could you describe what this looks like in practice? Say I don't want it to use a certain concept or function. What would "positive reinforcement" look like to exclude something?

Doesn't that mean you're less likely to catch bugs and other issues that the AI spits out?

I'm really dubious of such claims. Even if true, I think they're not seeing the whole picture. Sure, I could churn out code 10x as fast, but I still have to review it. I still have to think of the implementation. I still have to think of the test cases and write them. Now, adding the prerequisites for LLMs, I have to word this in a way the AI can understand it, which is extra mental load. I have to review code sometimes multiple times if it gets something wrong, and I have to re-generate, or make corrections, or sometimes end up fixing entire sections it generated, when I decide it just won't get this task right. Overally, while the typing, researching dependency docs (sometimes), time is saved, I still face the same cognitive load as ever, if not more, due to having extra code to review, having to think of prompting, I'm still limited by the same thing at the end of the day: my mental energy. I can write the code myself and it's if anything a bit slower. I still need to know my dependencies, I still need to know my codebase and all its gripes, even if the AI generates code correctly. Overally, the net complexity of my codebase is the same, and I don't buy the crap, also because I've never heard of stories about reducing complexity (refactoring), only about generating code and fixing codebases with testing and comments/docs (bad practice imo, unlikely the shallow docs generated will say anything more than what the code already makes evident). Anyways, I'm not a believer, I only use LLMs for scaffolding, rote tasks.

I'm a "backend" dev, so you could say that I am very very unfamiliar, have mostly-basic and high-level knowledge of frontend development. Getting this thing to spit out screens and components and adjust them as I see fit has got to be some sort of super-power and definitely 20x'd my frontend development for hobby projects. Previous to this, my team was giving me wild "1 week" estimates to code simple CRUD screens (plus 1 week for "api integration") and those estimates always smelled funny to me.

Now that I've seen what the AI/agents can do, those estimates definitely reek, and the frontend "senior" javascript dev's days are numbered. Especially for CRUD screens, which lets face it, make up most screens these days and should absolutely be churned out like in an assembly line instead of being delicate "hand crafted" precious works of art that allows 0.1x devs to waste our time because they are the only ones who supposedly know the ancient and arcane 'npm install, npm etc, npm angular component create" spells.

Look at the recent Tailwind team layoffs, they're definitely seeing the impact of this as are many team-leads and managers in most companies in our industry. Especially "javascript senior dev" heavy shops in the VC space, which many people are realizing they have an over-abundance of because those devs bullshitted entire teams and companies into thinking simple CRUD screens take weeks to develop. It was like a giant cartel, with them all padding and confirming the other "engineer's" estimates and essentially slow-devving their own screens to validate the ridiculous padding.

Yeah this is the key point. Part of me wonders if it's just 0.1x devs somehow reaching 1.0x productivity...

And an added "6 months" later to see which delivered result didn't blow up in their face down the road.

Theo is the type of programmer where you don't care when he boos you, because you know what makes him cheer.

Nerd circles are in no way immune to fashion, and often contain a strong orthodoxy (IMO driven by cognitive dissonance caused by the humbling complexity of the world).

Cargo cults, where people reflexively shout slogans and truisms, even when misapplied. Lots of people who’ve heard a pithy framing waiting for any excuse to hammer it into a conversation for self glorification. Not critical humble thinkers, per se.

Hype and trends appeal to young insecure men, it gives them a way to create identity and a sense of belonging. MS and Oracle and the rest are happy to feed into it (cert mills, default examples that assume huge running subscriptions), even as they get eaten up by it on occasion.

The smartest people I know are full of doubt.