My view is at the end of 35 years in the industry the current wave of “software” and “systems” engineering coming out of the AI harness community is pretty garbage. But web technology and distributed systems followed a very similar arc, as did protocols and memory management; and microcode before them. But it feels like this is particularly bad because the mistakes being made are plainly obvious to the grey heads who have been here a while. As opposed to before when mistakes were in new domains being explored, these are mistakes made before and have good solutions to.
I feel people too readily blame the LLMs themselves for this, but I’ve found LLMs know the history of computing thought evolution better than anyone I’ve ever encountered. Once you push them in the right direction, ground them in the philosophy of thought of hard won engineering ideas, they are astoundingly precise and accurate in their read and application (keeping every session grounded is the trick!). So it’s not the machines making these same mistakes with ready conceptual frameworks around them, it’s the 22 year old gatekeepers dashing head first into wall after wall, when we painstakingly built the door two feet to the left about the time they were gestating.
Anthropic in 2025: We can use our dominant market position to degrade the harness experiences of our competitors because they will never adopt CLAUDE.md
Anthropic in 2026: We are losing our market position. Users who adopted other harnesses have a degraded Claude Code experience because it doesn't recognize their AGENTS.md
Sounds like free market at work to me. I am just glad there is quite a lot of competition in a field that I would have assumed would have huge costs of entry
Building small models is a lower barrier. Think of something like to just train on a corpus of internal corporate data. I've see some small models that do this. It's like a super RAG thing. I think more of that will happen. Excited to see a SLM vendor emerge.
The walls are closing in and the president is gleefully lighting fires he has no intention of putting out. There's a reason they're rushing like mad to an IPO, but as we saw with OpenAI it's easier said than done when your business model is "Lose tons of money to eventually maybe dominate a market with the moat we don't have, but trust us AI is huge give us trillions."
Its like the Epic Games Store supporting Linux, or [any website] supporting dark mode. You'd think its an easy to implement bare minimum that everyone asks for, but its like pulling teeth to actually get it done.
> ..or [any website] supporting dark mode. You'd think its an easy to implement bare minimum that everyone asks for, but its like pulling teeth to actually get it done.
At least with dark mode, you can ignore most web developers and get a browser extension to make everything dark, then only webmasters who don't follow standards gets it wrong.
<Platform> is basically impossible to support. <Company> pulled it off by shipping a complete copy of the Chromium browser with <Product> and turning it into a web application.
In any case I don't see how this is materially different from Windows where it's the norm for every game to ship its own libraries and install various redistributables to function.
My view is at the end of 35 years in the industry the current wave of “software” and “systems” engineering coming out of the AI harness community is pretty garbage. But web technology and distributed systems followed a very similar arc, as did protocols and memory management; and microcode before them. But it feels like this is particularly bad because the mistakes being made are plainly obvious to the grey heads who have been here a while. As opposed to before when mistakes were in new domains being explored, these are mistakes made before and have good solutions to.
I feel people too readily blame the LLMs themselves for this, but I’ve found LLMs know the history of computing thought evolution better than anyone I’ve ever encountered. Once you push them in the right direction, ground them in the philosophy of thought of hard won engineering ideas, they are astoundingly precise and accurate in their read and application (keeping every session grounded is the trick!). So it’s not the machines making these same mistakes with ready conceptual frameworks around them, it’s the 22 year old gatekeepers dashing head first into wall after wall, when we painstakingly built the door two feet to the left about the time they were gestating.
Anthropic in 2025: We can use our dominant market position to degrade the harness experiences of our competitors because they will never adopt CLAUDE.md
Anthropic in 2026: We are losing our market position. Users who adopted other harnesses have a degraded Claude Code experience because it doesn't recognize their AGENTS.md
Sounds like free market at work to me. I am just glad there is quite a lot of competition in a field that I would have assumed would have huge costs of entry
Building small models is a lower barrier. Think of something like to just train on a corpus of internal corporate data. I've see some small models that do this. It's like a super RAG thing. I think more of that will happen. Excited to see a SLM vendor emerge.
The walls are closing in and the president is gleefully lighting fires he has no intention of putting out. There's a reason they're rushing like mad to an IPO, but as we saw with OpenAI it's easier said than done when your business model is "Lose tons of money to eventually maybe dominate a market with the moat we don't have, but trust us AI is huge give us trillions."
With the "let's stop AI now" statements, can it really be said that they're rushing to an IPO?
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Pretty typical capitalist moves.
Its like the Epic Games Store supporting Linux, or [any website] supporting dark mode. You'd think its an easy to implement bare minimum that everyone asks for, but its like pulling teeth to actually get it done.
> ..or [any website] supporting dark mode. You'd think its an easy to implement bare minimum that everyone asks for, but its like pulling teeth to actually get it done.
At least with dark mode, you can ignore most web developers and get a browser extension to make everything dark, then only webmasters who don't follow standards gets it wrong.
Linux is basically impossible to support. Valve pulled it off by shipping a complete copy of Ubuntu 12.02 with Steam.
<Platform> is basically impossible to support. <Company> pulled it off by shipping a complete copy of the Chromium browser with <Product> and turning it into a web application.
In any case I don't see how this is materially different from Windows where it's the norm for every game to ship its own libraries and install various redistributables to function.
Where does Valve use Ubuntu? SteamOS is Arch.
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