markbao

5 ms·

1.
by markbao 14d ago
This is great. People always talk about how important the harness is and yet we have so few harness benchmarks. Agree with sibling commenter that ‘harness x model’ is needed. People always talk about how Cursor harness has some secret sauce
2.
by markbao 24d ago
I’m not sure if the underlying data is counting subscription use for Fable, which is where a lot of people are using it because token pricing is very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was counting enterprise token usage only. As ri
3.
by markbao 24d ago
I’ve never had an agent fail to write the actual implementation. Has it done so badly, yes, but not nothing but tests . This sounds to me like a rare case that doesn’t generalize. If the general idea is that these agents write too many tes
4.
by markbao 1mo ago
Y'all need to try PR review tools that split PRs into chapters. Stage was the best product in this space, but Linear Review has it, Graphite has it, and some other tools too. You get the full contexts while each piece is still reviewab
5.
by markbao 1mo ago
For me absolutely not. Fable 5 has been a step function change in the ability to hand off stuff to Claude. Opus 4.5 was itself a step function but I was still steering that significantly. Fable is one-shotting stuff that took multiple redir
6.
by markbao 1mo ago
This is phenomenal. I know everyone is asking for their pet feature in this thread, but I would really like to see this in split keyboard format. They are much more comfortable to use since they put your wrist in a more natural position. An
7.
by markbao 3mo ago
And to be specific, the METR study was using the Cursor harness with Claude Sonnet 3.5/3.7, along with other models of that era of the participant’s choosing. Which is ancient at this point, and half a year older than the November 2025
8.
by markbao 3mo ago
And the comment you’re replying to, which is entirely a reasonable opinion, was flagged, proving their point. I’ve been here for 18 years and similarly alienated by the cynicism here.
9.
by markbao 3mo ago
I don’t think this is entirely wrong, in that there is a ‘class thing’ about riding the bus, but it’s more practicality than a class marker for a lot of people. - In SF you can either walk 1-10 minutes to the bus, wait 0-15 minutes for the
10.
by markbao 3mo ago
I’m all for standardization but you could just use this argument to keep any suboptimal status quo in place. XML is good enough and a standard. SOAP is good enough and a standard. etc. The claim is that Conventional Commits are good enough
11.
by markbao 5mo ago
That seems a bit reductive. Even with humans, there’s a range of interpretations and ways that something can be built or a task completed. Engineers remember stuff so you don’t have to keep repeating yourself. Skills are a way to describe y
12.
by markbao 5mo ago
I don’t really buy that Claude Design will remove all the complexity around design. Vibe-coded apps using Claude look simpler because they are simpler. They’re not a gigantic product suite with extremely specific UI components tailored to e
13.
by markbao 6mo ago
Goody | Remote | $150–250K + equity and benefits | US and Canada | Full-time I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. We're building a gifting product that every business can use to recognize employees, retain customer
14.
by markbao 6mo ago
> What’s become more fun is building the infrastructure that makes the agents effective. Solving new problems is a thing engineers get to do constantly, whereas building an agent infrastructure is mostly a one-ish time thing. Yes, it evo
15.
by markbao 6mo ago
If you save 3 hours building something with agentic engineering and that PR sits in review for the same 30 hours or whatever it would have spent sitting in review if you handwrote it, you’re still saving 3 hours building that thing. So in t
16.
by markbao 7mo ago
Goody | Remote | $150–250K + equity and benefits | North/South America | Full-time I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. We're building a gifting product that every business can use to recognize employees, reta
17.
by markbao 7mo ago
An intuition for what people like. Inherently subjective, but you can still approximate ‘more or less tasteful’ by how many people respond well to it.
18.
by markbao 7mo ago
That is exactly the type of awesome app that can now be built. I edited my comment to clarify that the grocery app and $5/month app are separate examples, but I think your example shows that someone with coding knowledge can build some
19.
by markbao 7mo ago
Yes, that’s a possibility! And for app types that have a limited ceiling of how much value they can provide, that will definitely be a thing as an AI app can saturate all of that value. But for apps that have a lot of ceiling, people will s
20.
by markbao 7mo ago
Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Un
21.
by markbao 7mo ago
There’s a difference between abstracting away the network layer and not understanding the business logic. What we are talking about with AI slop is not understanding the business logic. That gets really close to just throwing stuff at the w
22.
by markbao 8mo ago
This is not hype-chasing. AI is a key part of software engineering now. For this to be absent from Xcode would be an existential risk for the future of the product.
23.
by markbao 8mo ago
TUI is easy to train on, but hard to use for users. Part of the reason it’s easier to have LLMs use a bunch of Unix tools for us is that their text interface is tedious and hard to remember. If you’re a top 5% expert in those tools it doesn
24.
by markbao 8mo ago
Goody | Remote | $150–250K + equity and benefits | North/South America | Full-time I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. We're building a gifting product that every business can use to recognize employees, reta
25.
by markbao 8mo ago
Is Postgres fast enough for job processing these days? We do hundreds of millions of jobs now and even years ago when our volume was a fraction of that, we got a huge performance boost moving from Postgres + Que to Redis + Sidekiq. Has that
26.
by markbao 8mo ago
Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn’t feel like what future of publishing should use. It’s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things. A lab manager once told me about a study that people who used MS Word to t
27.
by markbao 8mo ago
This is a great option if you work outdoors a lot. As a designer though, I couldn’t get used to the “dusty” appearance of the nano texture (and yes, contrast loss – glossy displays are just more punchy) at least on the Pro Display XDR. You
28.
by markbao 8mo ago
Yeah, I think designing a system for the LLM to check its own work will replace prompt engineering in key LLM techniques (though, it itself is a form of prompt engineering, but more intentional.) Given that LLMs are doing this today already
29.
by markbao 8mo ago
That’s not the point of this. This was an exercise to measure the strengths and weaknesses of current LLMs in operating a company and managing operations, and the video game was just the simulation engine.
30.
by markbao 8mo ago
+1. There’s also more upstart motorcycle makers than car makers willing to take a bet on new tech. Plus the difficulty of scaling manufacturing to serve much larger capacity car batteries.

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