When I was choosing between learning python and perl in the late 90's, it was the context sensitivity of perl expressions which really squicked me. To me, that was the critically bad language decision in perl. You can make context-sensitive expressions in python (using operator overloading, for instance), but you have to go out of your way to do it in one way or another. In perl you can easily do it by accident, and it can result in serious bugs. It seemed masochistic, to me.
> So it seems to me that we are likely to have worse software over time.
IMO, it's already happening. I had to change some personal information on a bunch of online services recently, and two out of seven of them were down. One of them is still down, a week later. This is the website of a major utilities company. When I call them, they acknowledge that it's down, but say my timing is just bad. That combined with all the recent outages has left me with the impression that software has been getting (even more) unreliable, recently.
Maybe it's not as necessary with a codebase as well-organized as Oxide's, but I found gemini 3 useful for a refactor of some completely test-free ML research code, recently. I got it to generate a test case which would exercise all the code subject to refactoring, got it to do the refactoring and verify that it leads to exactly the same state, then finally got it to randomize the test inputs and keep repeating the comparison.
To be honest there's really no secret sauce in there. It's primarily how to get started with agents, when to abandon your context and start anew, and advice on models, monitoring cost, and prompting. This is not to diminish the value of the information as it's good information written by great colleagues. I just wanted to note that most of the information can be obtained from the official AI provider documentation and blog posts from AI boosters like Thorsten Ball.
Warfarin needs blood tests at least every 2 or 3 weeks. I bet those tests are not cheap in the USA. Furthermore you can't have any food with significant amounts of vitamine K or its precursors. There are pills that cost more but don't require any of that. And actually they cost very little or zero, at least in my European country. Prescription only, of course.
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