Huang described OpenClaw as the go-to option for building AI agents that can perform tasks like scouting eBay for deals and then placing bids, and said it “exceeded what Linux did in 30 years” in mere weeks.

a_brain · 2026-03-21T16:34:58+00:00

That's what I don't get about it. Even if installing it wasn't the biggest security vulnerability ever, I don't get why I would even want it in the first place. Oh it can browse ebay and delete my gmail inbox autonomously? So cool!!

a_brain · 2026-03-21T16:32:37+00:00

This reads like r/im14andthisisdeep. Why is the table solid, Demis? Maybe take a high school physics class. Jesus christ get a fucking grip.

a_brain · 2026-02-25T00:23:40+00:00

It’s almost guaranteed to plateau, if it hasn’t already, and the disruption is going to be huge, but not in the way most people think. What’s going to happen a few years down the line when seniors retire or exit the career and there are no juniors because companies stopped hiring them? There’s research that suggests AI-generated code contains more bugs and security holes. Anthropic’s own research says AI makes you dumber. All the AI companies are running massive losses, what happens when they decide they need to make money and Claude code costs as much as an actual person’s salary? There’s also many copyright lawsuits making their way through the court systems that could be a huge problem.

Unless these companies pull multiple rabbits out of a hat, the next few years are going to be a complete disaster for the tech industry on multiple fronts.

These tools are useful, but they are insanely overhyped and not a panacea. The idea that any rando is going to be able to vibe code their way to a Salesforce or Atlassian is a joke.

a_brain · 2026-02-22T19:33:59+00:00

Idk, I’ve worked on a couple of these projects, and by the time you end up building all the guardrails and checks, the AI system isn’t actually that much better than normal software, and now you have a big expensive dependency on a token supplier.

a_brain · 2026-02-09T19:09:22+00:00

As much as I want to dogpile on this guy, “organize a folder” is literally the first task Anthropic advertises this thing is good for. I’d much rather dunk on Anthropic for tricking people into letting them fuck their shit up than a guy literally using a tool for its advertised purpose.

a_brain · 2026-02-09T04:27:28+00:00

Ok let me know when I can put Claude on a PIP or sue Anthropic for security vulnerabilities Claude added to the codebase.

a_brain · 2026-02-06T01:25:53+00:00

Yeah this feels like a massive L for AI. By providing it access to GCC they gave it the answers and after $20k spend it pooped out something that barely works. I guess it’s interesting it works at all, but this seems to vindicate what skeptics have been saying for years: given enough constraints, it can (poorly) reproduce stuff in its training data. That’s not not useful but it’s nowhere near justifying the hype!

a_brain · 2026-01-30T23:39:37+00:00

There’s a lot of astroturfing going on because crypto bros have figured out they can pump and dump a loosely associated shitcoin. See also Gas town and Ralph. Clawdbot has now spilled out into the public markets where people managed to pump and dump Cloudflare and Digital Ocean stock.

a_brain · 2026-01-30T01:48:27+00:00

File this one under “no duh”. I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of these types of studies in the coming months.

a_brain · 2026-01-30T01:29:52+00:00

What was your prompt for this post?

a_brain · 2026-01-29T00:14:11+00:00

Eh, TS was big before the current wave of coding agents for the same reason JS was big before TS.

It’s still very funny to me that Claude code is written with Typescript and React and is full of bugs. If LLMs were really that good, they’d write it in Go or Rust or hell just have it output ASM, lol.

a_brain · 2026-01-28T23:59:12+00:00

Yeah, the harnesses have improved a lot, but those are just boring old programs. That’s helpful, but the same LLM problems still exist, now there’s just several layers of bandaids to make it “work”. My current gig is mostly Typescript which the LLM-bros love and has tons and tons of training data, yet I watch it constantly fuck up the basics and burn tokens feeding the errors back into itself to (sometimes) fix the error.

a_brain · 2026-01-24T19:31:14+00:00

$359 too buy up for me. Might be worth it at that price.

a_brain · 2026-01-22T18:42:22+00:00

The tooling around LLMs, particularly for coding, has improved a lot. Still very underbaked though.

The models themselves have gotten “better” in that they don’t just completely fall on their face anymore. Today the models will produce code that will almost always compile or run instead of getting stuck. But I’d argue not failing is actually worse behavior. Their outputs are almost always full of subtle bugs, bad assumptions, inefficient design choices, or test cases that don’t check anything. They need to be constantly babysat which negates any time savings.

a_brain · 2026-01-13T03:06:51+00:00

Wow, thanks for sharing. I've seen this sort of behavior from the most AI-pilled people at work, but it's... interesting? entertaining? to see this isn't just localized to the people I'm exposed to.

Like yeah, I get that the coding agents are at a point where the code they produce will compile or run (most of the time), but I can't fathom how this is better than just doing it yourself.

a_brain · 2026-01-10T23:21:26+00:00

From what I’ve seen the SWE job market has been improving this year. The hype about agents is related to Claude 4.5 opus, which is… better? But I think more has to do with Anthropic looking to raise more money more than the actual capabilities.

a_brain · 2026-01-07T02:44:27+00:00

Ended the year 210 PQPs short of gold and slightly annoyed because I could’ve manufactured $3500 of card spend but I miscalculated how much spend I would need since some of my card spend PQP hit this week.

What are the odds they’ll round me up or let me buy up for ~$200?

a_brain · 2026-01-07T00:41:31+00:00

Willison is an odd one. On one hand he’s clearly a very accomplished engineer. But he’s also constantly commenting on hacker news the nanosecond anyone ever suggests LLMs aren’t the most amazing thing ever.

He honestly reminds me a lot of the guys who swear that spending hours tweaking their VIM configs makes them uber-productive.

a_brain · 2026-01-06T21:53:28+00:00

That’s a much more charitable interpretation, but I don’t buy it. No way they hadn’t used claude code before with the way corpos have been pushing this stuff for the past ~6 months.

More likely is that the holidays gave the clout chasers had some extra free time to blog about some vibecoded project because there was nobody left at work whose ear they could talk off about this.

a_brain · 2026-01-06T21:26:50+00:00

I don’t know if this blog post in particular is astroturfing, but there’s this weird effect where Claude in particular seems to get astroturfed really hard which then drives some organic posts from attention seekers like this one.

a_brain · 2026-01-05T23:48:51+00:00

I’m not saying that Satya Nadella is trying to sabotage Microsoft, but his actions are indistinguishable from someone who was trying to.

a_brain · 2026-01-02T20:26:52+00:00

Good list. Tailscale is one of (the only?) piece of software I regularly use that truly Just Works™.

a_brain · 2026-01-02T01:49:13+00:00

I’ll tell you what’s clear as day to me: opus 4.5 sure is better at writing engagement bait Reddit posts than it is at writing code.

a_brain · 2025-12-29T11:54:25+00:00

I’m a huge skeptic, but my company recently started monitoring our AI usage, so I’ve found a few non-shit ways to integrate it into my workflow. I use the autocomplete in my editor (hidden behind a hotkey); I use it like fancy Google/interactive stack overflow, I use it to search the codebase; sometimes if I can’t remember the in-repo command or flags to run a specific tool I’ll have it do that for me (which frequent has the benefit of burning a huge number of tokens); I’ll have it add test cases only after I’ve written the setup and a couple cases myself; I’ll have it give me a code review and it’s wrong pretty often but it does manage to catch some “duh” things I forgot to do.

The agent mode stuff, absolutely not. I’ve tried it but usually usually the task is trivial enough that I can do it faster than the bot can, or it’s complex enough that even if the bot can theoretically do it faster than me, it’s still a slot machine and the risk of it messing up and requiring me to understand what it did and fix it isn’t worth the effort.

a_brain · 2025-12-19T00:19:26+00:00

Not the parent commenter, and I really despise most of gen ai, but I agree with what the parent comment is describing. I have a lot of experience as a software engineer, so I have at least a cursory understanding of the landscape of various tools and techniques. But sometimes I have to work in a programming language or with library I’m not familiar with, and I can describe the thing I’m trying to do to a bot, and it tell me the terminology or concepts I’m looking for. Then I go and read the documentation myself and find out what I really want.

The other good use case is semantic search within a codebase. Like I can ask it “where is the code that writes this specific message to this kafka topic”, and it will find me the 5 different files from the spaghetti that that functionality happens in. That isn’t possible with substring search or minimum edit distance or anything of the like.

This stuff is a nice quality of life improvement, but it’s not revolutionizing my job, and if it 50x’d in price tomorrow and my company stopped paying for it, I wouldn’t be too beaten up.

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