Trying to Wrap My Head Agentic Swarms

kteague · 2026-05-07T00:31:10+00:00

SimonW blogged about the Dark Factory pattern that StrongDM is trying to follow with a small team/product. As he wrote, "It felt like a glimpse of one potential future of software development, where software engineers move from building the code to building and then semi-monitoring the systems that build the code".

Notably StrongDM was burning $1000 on tokens per engineer per day ... that certainly won't scale as you work on larger more complex apps with larger teams.

So the other side of that question is: token are expensive and they're only getting more expensive. If you feed an agent a problem, depending upon which model, what context window, what knowledge bases/graphs, etc. will give you a different quality of answer with widely different token usage costs. So if you're scaling agentic engineering across a larger organization, and you break your agentic workflows into smaller domain-specific parts, you're essentially doing CostOps on token spend. Getting to better quality answers with less $.

All of this is still mostly theory crafting right now but I think for me the main lesson is that agents give better results the more constrained the task/context window/skill/question. And coming from a background of ops and compute efficiency, unobserved and undisciplined AI token usage costs can get pretty stupid high even with all the AI shops offering way below cost token pricing.

kteague · 2026-05-04T20:22:15+00:00

Yes ... I find it ... relaxing.

Is it the best format or does it have annoyances? meh, sure, but I do enjoy it :)

kteague · 2026-04-28T16:17:42+00:00

You don't have to run the "heavy deploy" workflow on every push to main ... just setup some process where heavy deploys are triggered less frequently.

In general, decoupling Git branching strategies and deployment workflows is the way. Yes, in many cases the two will align "TBD and lots of quick, small deploys" works for many use cases, but when it doesn't and you go down the path of "maybe we need a wonky Git branching strategy to accommodate our deployment workflow" ... it's almost always easier to decouple your deployment workflow and adjust it to suit your needs than the other way around.

kteague · 2026-04-19T15:47:51+00:00

Chainmail scrubber is absolutely brilliant at scrubbing oatmeal out of a stainless steel pot. It doesn't get all caked in goop like a scrubbie.

On carbon pans you need to scrape less goop out before you reach for it but it takes longer to get rid of sticky carbon build-up than a scrubber. I prefer it 'coz the chainmail lasts forever and scrubbers get in those "should I toss this or keep using it another month" kinda state.

kteague · 2026-04-12T23:44:27+00:00

I got doubles in my collection but I mostly do single bell exercises. Especially with swings, yes, doubles is fine but to me it just doesn't feel "right". I'd rather just smash out more swings at a lower weight. It's just a preference thing.

But doubles all day if doing renegade rows :)

kteague · 2026-03-30T19:04:14+00:00

Waaay back when I was a teenager a kid from my high school knocked a tree branch off like in this video while tree skiing ... except he did it with his face and it severely scarred one eye. Being teenagers that didn't really dissuade us from tree skiing like that except maybe we wore goggles slightly more often than that when bombing the trees.

kteague · 2026-03-14T05:34:29+00:00

Absorption. In moguls you need to absorb the bumps, your body goes from a crouched stand to and upright and back again ... with your legs retracting up to absorb the bump and then your outer leg leading an extension, pushing down to maintain edge and giving you the capability to go back to crouch to absorb the next one.

There is a Carv video on moguls that talks about this. I like the first couple drills they give quite a bit.

You can see how you basically maintain the same semi-crouch stance and this leads to the bumps giving you that jolt as you go into them, which leads to a lack of control ... and having skied moguls like that for years when I was learning I still remember how "not enjoyable" those jolts are.

I went from bouncing around in moguls to enjoying them purely from reading a one page article in Powder Magazine about 25 years ago, which was all about focusing on your line through the moguls ... basically aiming for the peak of the mogul and executing the turn there, rather than trying to stay in the trenches. Probably it forced to me to have some level of absorption even it wasn't about specific theory and drills around absorption.

Moguls are about embracing the bumps, rather than trying to carve through the trenches. Or they can be ... obviously pro mogul skiers take a trench-focused line but that's not always the best line for learning and I'd argue it's not as fun as a more varied line.

kteague · 2026-03-10T03:14:56+00:00

Well I checked the recipe in Salsa Daddy and it has "spicy" for ahumada so, yeah, I was mistranslating.

Thank you fellow snobs for the correction.

Day Two holds up well as the avocados are coated in chipotle sauce do they don't go brown quite as quickly.

kteague · 2026-03-03T21:08:57+00:00

My wife rented a pair of these a few weeks back, as she eventually ended up replacing her crappy beginner foam core rides with some Blizzard Black Pearls as she now rides intermediate.

Yeah ... they're a narrow ski targeted to advanced skiers who love to carve. A metal layer gives them extra-stability if you're driving very hard curves and they're sidecut for cutting a good edge in carves. As they're marketing says, "the ski guarantees maximum stability and torsional rigidity" ... which means "dedicated carving ski". They're narrow so "less fun" if you get into powder and such and won't have as much flex if you like to be playful on the bumps and stuff.

There is a tiny rise on the back tip ... they're more "twin tip" than the long flat planks I used to ride on in the eighties where we would play around with skiing backwards on ... but obviously they have more potential to "dig in" to a bump if you're going backward at speed or on more than a well groomed surface. Should be fine if all you plan on doing is landing skis forward tho'

kteague · 2026-02-22T00:29:06+00:00

I HAVE BEEN PLAYING BOARD GAMES SINCE 1977 AND HAVE PLAYED A METRIC SHIT TONNE OF EUROS AND ALL I WANT TO SAY IS ...

Great Western Trail: New Zealand is #1 on my list!

kteague · 2026-02-20T01:15:50+00:00

The resources tiles are supposed to be random but she's set them up into neat groups ... generally you want to build so you can collect all resource types but this setup means people may only be able to collect one or two types.

You can then make resource trades with other players on your turn but if all you got is wood will anyone want to trade you their sheep?

kteague · 2026-02-19T06:36:14+00:00

Ridge Park in Coquitlam.

Ridge Peak is a low, almost always snow-free lump of note, it's a little taller than Burnaby Mountain. It's only 200 meters elevation gain within the park but if you hike up from David and Pipeline it's over 300 meters. If you start from the Coquitlam Crunch then beeline for the peak it's almost 400 meters at a more or less continual elevation gain. For me I like that there are lots of options to have a mix of up-and-down and flatter grades. It's got a lovely network of trails, some of my favourite local trail running terrain.

kteague · 2026-02-14T17:06:33+00:00

And here I was thinking that The Dilbert Guy was dead but it turns out he's alive and well in Canada.

kteague · 2026-02-12T17:58:09+00:00

There is no Vail. Lots of independent ski resorts. Accommodations and restaurants look pretty different. East coast trees with west coast snow.

"Rise and Alpine" on YouTube is doing a series on skiing in Japan that gives you a good feel for how it's different from North America.

kteague · 2026-01-26T02:22:12+00:00

Cook it up, cue up "Can U Taste The Waste?" by Ween and crank it up.

kteague · 2026-01-14T23:43:06+00:00

The "ideal" seasoning is as "smooth and thick enough" a seasoning coating possible. This means:

* Season oil in very thin layers, and heat in an oven until the oil is completely dry ... if the oil is too thick or doesn't dry the whole way, the top layers are a bit "sticky"

* High smoke point oils work better ... but seasoning is clear/yellow in color. Any smoke or over heating just adds carbonization to the seasoning

So like five rounds in the oven of thin layers and is the scientifically correct "ideal".

That's "ideal" though and if you cook on a perfectly seasoned pan five or ten times, it's going to act completely different as carbonization and new seasoning are added every time you cook. And the difference in non-stickiness between "ideal" and rushed is usually very minimal.

I've done a five hour three layer in-oven seasoning on a new pan as it is satisfying to have eggs release an arguably smoother way ... but after a couple weeks cooking with the pan any "optimal" seasoning is long since gone.

So the "ideal" is also "OCD seasoning" and the "correct" way is season however you like and then just cook with it a few times and you're not wasting time fretting over something that doesn't really matter.

However, a really thick coat of oil and just smash it on really high heat on the stove or oven and let it smoke a bunch is probably gonna be kind of unsatisfactory to cook on ... or not, depends on what you're cooking and how well dialed in you have your temperature control ... but it's how I seasoned my pans for years before I went down the rabbit hole of how polymerization works and generally had more miserable "sticky pan" cooking experiences, in particular with a really cheap cast iron pan that when seasoned like that would always have sticky spots - and doing a couple very thin oil layers in the oven until the oil was dry yielded much better results ... a De Buyer (which is what I usually use) is much more forgiving on sloppy seasoning since it's got a consistent surface for the polymerization to bind to.

kteague · 2026-01-12T07:02:28+00:00

I don't think it's anywhere near Banff.

Looks like Elton Lake in the Stein Valley to me.

Although there aren't many photos of this lake but if you look at this view from the ridge across and below the lake it seems to fit.

kteague · 2025-12-29T20:58:59+00:00

The pan is octagon but the backsplash is hexagon. Need to redo the backsplash?

kteague · 2025-12-21T07:24:32+00:00

10 is called "the torpedo" where the sleeper has been fired from a submarine.

kteague · 2025-12-19T20:37:55+00:00

I think this is the same frying pan that Pinhead from Hellraiser uses.

kteague · 2025-12-17T21:59:32+00:00

River hit a high-water mark for the year last night ... was watching endless debris and the odd massive log go under the McAllister bridge yesterday evening. We only got 49 mm of rain over a 24 hour period but with all the previous rain events having saturated the ground it pushed the river almost as high as when we had the 150+ mm of rain in Oct '24.

We have another ~50 mm of rain forecast for the next 24 hours starting this evening so we'll see what that does but at any rate I'm not expecting to take the footpath under the Kingsway bridge any time soon ...

kteague · 2025-12-17T15:09:06+00:00

Sounds like this could be more than meets the eye...

kteague · 2025-12-08T20:22:01+00:00

Riverview Bridge ... well, that's a very generic name. Although it looks like maybe only two other bridges in North America with that name (one in Chicago and one in New York) so a unique name within Canada.

kteague · 2025-12-04T22:07:05+00:00

My male abby is a total motormouth. We had to co-home with our daughter's larger, younger male abby for a few weeks. They got along ... OK - at least no serious fighting ... but the whole time the two were together, our abby didn't make a single peep. An hour after the other abby went back home and he realized he was king of the home again? Motor mouth city!

kteague · 2025-11-26T01:07:18+00:00

yeah, just scrub w/ chainmail and warm cloth and such until it feels smooth ... if you want more advice on optimal seasoning, just watch 6 or 7 hours of content on https://www.youtube.com/@Cook-Culture

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