Liked this post a lot, well done! Definitely appreciated that it was a site that actual has a unique design, and isn't just another Medium article...
A book on a similar subject that I don't see mentioned very often but which I quite enjoyed as "Tough Things First" by Ray Zinn [0]. Not the most popular one, but really down to earth and approachable ideas. Kind of like PG's "do things that don't scale," just applied on a broader timescale.
It really was/is a gem of a museum, very fun to visit and quite approachable. We went a couple times, once when they had some fly-ins that made it extra special.
This. I definitely agree with this statement at this point in AI-assisted development. This gets at the "taste" factor that is still intrinsically human, especially in software engineering. If you can construct and guide the overall architecture of an application or system, AI can conceivably fill in the smaller feature bits, and do so well. But it must have a strong architecture and opinionated field in which to play.
My main takeaway, too. Been using Claude on my side project that I have singlehandledly been working on for three years. It works well initially, you catch all of AIs mistakes or unfavorable approaches because you know the architecture in and out. But as you stop thinking about the new features, stop losing touch with all the stuff AI throws at you, you fail to develop intuitive feeling on when and how to abstract and introduce architecture.
Another note was for me e2e tests; while AI can write them it never comes up with just basic organization or abstraction required to manage a large e2e test suite with hundreds of tests. It immediately starts to produce spaghetti code.
I've had at least 256GB on my phones for the last couple of generations after having had to deal with storage issues beforehand, and it's been much nicer.
But I picked up a 16e for my son a few months ago, with 128GB, and yes, we're running into issues with storage space when it comes time to do an OS update. Between local music and photos storage, base storage, and the image for the new update, two or three times now we've had to delete stuff temporarily in order to get the update going. So I'm happy the new base is 256GB, at least that will probably last us a couple more generations before ~~640KB~~ 256GB is enough for everyone.
I’d love to see an article about designing for agents to operate safely inside a user-facing software system (as opposed to this article, which is about creating a system with an agent.
What does it look like to architect a system where agents can operate on behalf of users? What changes about the design of that system? Is this exposing an MCP server internally? An A2A framework? Certainly exposing internal APIs such that an agent can perform operations a user would normally do would be key. How do you safely limit what an agent can do, especially in the context of what a user may have the ability to do?
Anyway, some of those capabilities have been on my mind recently. If anyone’s read anything good in that vein I’d love some links!
Xoogler here (so I can’t help with any changes or feature requests now unfortunately) but yes, all of Google runs on Gmail. The amount of email I got as a software engineer there was crazy voluminous. I and most Googlers around me made heavy use of filters, labels, and all the text search operators available (see https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en&co=GENIE.P...). I also learned to operate Gmail purely via the keyboard with the built in keyboard shortcuts.
I’d occasionally have the frustration of not finding what I was looking for, but usually if I combined a search with at least one other operator (who it was from, what label it might have received, etc.) I almost always found what I was looking for pretty quickly.
And as for the signature image attachments thing, I think that’s actually an artifact of how the sender compiles the email, not Gmail. The “has:attachment” operator is one I use a lot and is usually quite reliable.
Hey @code_brian, would Tavus make the conversational audio model available outside of the PALs and video models? Seems like this could be a great use case for voice-only agents as well.
Just a plug for the book this content is derived from, Noam Wasserman's "The Founders Dilemmas." It lays out so many facets of startup decisions that deserve thought from the outset to prevent issues. It also strikes a good balance IMO between being based in statistics and research, and including anecdotes from actual experiences that bring the statistics full circle. I'd highly recommend it.
I’ve never been on the Spotify train, but with an all-Apple household, including HomePod Minis in multiple rooms, I’ve been stuck in iTunes/Apple Music land. We own our music, which is nice. And I dutifully pay the $24.99 per year for iTunes Match so that I can tell Siri what to play on HomePods, but I will be 0% surprised when they deprecate that service.
Anyone have a good non-Apple way of getting Siri to play songs from a personal music collection on HomePods? My kids use it most.
Just yesterday I paid my annual $24.99 iTunes Match subscription to keep my music library synced between my laptops, phones, and HomePods. It’s a beautiful thing, but it feels tenuous every time that renewal goes in. Will it be my last? I hope not!
There is just something about actually owning the music that appeals to me and my wife (and yes, we’re children of the original iTunes era, when you could load up your playlist and then click the cool nuclear-looking button in iTunes to burn it to a CD). It won’t last forever, but I’ll keep with it till it dies because it works.
Every month, many newspapers publish a list of "Here's what's leaving Netflix this month."
Because of the "100 million songs!" marketing from the various streaming services, a lot of people don't realize this happens with music, too.
My wife is a streaming person, and occasionally something she likes will no longer be available when she looks for it. I think the most recent instance was some David Bowie album.
That can't happen to me, because I buy my music. It can't be taken away because some company's contract changed somewhere.
I like to believe I'm extra-resilient because I buy my music as MP3's and then import it into iTunes.
A book on a similar subject that I don't see mentioned very often but which I quite enjoyed as "Tough Things First" by Ray Zinn [0]. Not the most popular one, but really down to earth and approachable ideas. Kind of like PG's "do things that don't scale," just applied on a broader timescale.
[0] https://toughthingsfirst.com/book/
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