I remain convinced we won’t look at project estimates as time based in software engineering as our primary cost estimate. And this is transition will happen rapidly. We’re going to shift to a capex/token spend model for project estimates where the business will say “ok I do want that feature for $1000 in tokens”.
I agree with you directionally that project estimates are/will be affected by this but I don't see a scenario in which time is completely removed from the equation with respects to projects & estimates to execute on them. We're all constrained by time, finite resource. It's always a factor in business.
A lot of enhancements came on the model side which in many ways enabled context engineering.
200k and now 1M contexts. Better context management was enabled by improvements in structured outputs/tool calling at the model level. Also reasoning models really upped the game “plan” mode wouldn’t work well without them.
I generally do this when I arrive at the agent getting stuck at a test loop or whatever after injecting some later requirement in and tweaking. Once I hit a decent place I have the agent summarize, discard the branch (it’s part of the context too!) and start with the new prompt
As I understand it, Master of the mint was more about knowing enough metallurgy to not be ripped off by people using weak alloys to smelt coins. It wasn’t like a modern central banker or anything like that.
Its funny you mention excel, I see vibe coding in the business sense right now being a gateway to replace all of the ad hoc uses of excel. We've basically leveled up the quality of the software you can build before buying a SaaS product or a hiring an in house engineer.
It was 2020 and they were using a format that was replaced in 2007.
It. says more about their issues than Excel. I doubt paper forms would have saved them. Maybe they'll run out of paper and just ignore new entries too.
The moment vibecoded excel has a bug that regular Excel doesn't and a user has to wait on you to re-vibecode it's over. They'll just use Excel while you're trying to get the llm to find and fix the bug.
I’m more interested in what happens when a language is designed specifically for llms? When doing vibe coding a lot of code is a lot more verbose than I’d do normally. Do we drop down the abstraction level because llms are just so good a churning out boilerplate?
Llms are already good at churning boilerplate, so the next step really is making them good as so they develop taste and architectural consistency imho.
Don't forget shortening copyrights would have a major impact on this issue as well! 25 year copyright would make most of these libraries public domain. Then the price would truly reflect what we would all like to be subsidizing: the new stuff.
Does the rights to Friends being traded around for the Nth time really benefit anyone?
Explanations aren't sufficient either. The industry has burned that bridge. Strong contractual guarantees. Ceasing personal data collection operations, etc. etc. Concrete steps only. Thus far we have one concrete step that is proof of the opposite direction.
> f you need one in zig you can go that approach or use a tagged union just that zig is open about what an interface is.
Perl objects worked like this and the ecosystem is a mess as a result. There's a built in `bless` to add a vtable. There's some cool stuff you can do with that like blessing arrays to do array of structs vs struct of arrays and making it look like a regular object in user code. The problem is there are like 4 popular object libraries that provide base stuff like inheritance, meta objects, getters/setters etc and they're not all compatible and they have subtle tradeoffs that get magnified when you have to pull multiple in to get serious work done.
It’s several factors and all of your alternatives are true to some degree:
1. An h20 is about 1.5 generations behind Blackwell. This chip looks closer to about 2 generations behind top end Blackwell chips. So ~5ish years behind is not as impressive especially since EUV is likely going to be a major obstacle to catching up which China has no capacity for
2. Nvidia continues to dominate on the software side. Amd chips have been competitive on paper for a while and have had limited uptake. Now Chinese government mandates could obviously correct this after substantial investment in the software stack — but this is probably several years behind.
3. China has poured trillions of dollars into its academic system and graduates more than 3x the number of electrical engineers the US does. The US immigration system has also been training Chinese students but having a much more limited work visa program has transferred a lot of knowledge back without even touching IP issues
They also have some insane power generation capability - doesn't seem that far fetched that they just build a shitload of slower chips and eat the costs of lower power efficiency.
In theory, but I'm not sure that's true in practice. There are plenty of mundane, non-groundbreaking tasks that will likely be done by those electrical engineers and the more people, the more space, the more tasks are to be done. And not to mention more engineers does not equal better engineers. And the types to work on these sorts of projects are going to be the best engineers, not the "okay" ones.
The more engineers you can sample from (in absolute number), the better (in absolute goodness, whatever that is) the top, say, 500 of them are going to be.
That's assuming top-tier engineers are a fixed percent of graduates. That's not true and has never been.
Does 5x the number of math graduates increase the number of people with ability like Terrance Tao? Or even meaningfully increase the number of top tier mathematicians? It really doesn't. Same with any other science or art. There is a human factor involved.
This is not necessarily true. Hypothetical, if most breakthroughs are coming from PHDs and they aren't making any PHDs, then that pool is not necessarily larger.
You just said what I said. I didn't say that 100% of the graduates are stupid, but certainly not all high tier either. We aren't in extreme need of the average electrical engineer or the average software engineer. That's a fact. Look at unemployment rates.
Doesn’t seem to work for India. Wuhan university alone probably has more impact than the sum of. Of course a competent state and strategic investment matters.
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