I'm very curious about the viability of this. Like many, I've built something along the same lines, twice (for personal, and work use); I staple on the features as I need them. On the one hand, it doesn't feel unique enough to attempt to polish and monetize. Then on the other, I expected thousands of these and yet when I look at my colleagues workflows, they aren't doing this. So I'm curious if it'll work out that its simply more efficient to use a paid service like this which you can drop into place, than rolling your own.
Two other quick thoughts. One is I think if people are struggling with costs, they really should explore a worfklow like OPs. Merely breaking up long running tasks by producing summaries / next steps and spinning up new agents off of them greatly reduces runtime costs. I'm regularly running out of time / mental energy these days than my $20 claude subscription, but I realize if I don't note share early and often, I can burn up the quota in 20 minutes. Its amazing the difference. Second is I feel encryption plays an important role. I feel like it is more important than merely keeping your own ideas private, and somehow impacts the generation and evolution of unique / diverse ideas _in general_.
Anyways, good luck OP, the use case is definitely there and important!
I too am curious about the viability of a shared knowledge MCP! Ha, as I did do the work to take the one I’ve built twice and turn it into something others can use. OzBrain.com ~ maybe you don’t have to build it a 3rd time now? :)
Brings back memories; so much nostalgia. I still remember clearly the first real graphics card (I think it was voodoo) I got and when I fired up TFC (which I'd played sans graphics card up to then), just staring at the water for a bit and being amazed by it. The funny thing too is when 3d graphics were first taking over, the games themselves didn't look as nice as the former 2d ones; I remember being a little confused at first that everything looked worse. But of course it enabled all kinds of new and more immersive experiences. It was funny to experience... how it felt. To look both crappy and amazing at the same time; to be its own "thing" really.
I also enjoyed introducing people to it, and watching them look at it the first time. You could tell who would get hooked. Some people would play the game a minute or two and be like wow yeah this is pretty neat, and then go about their life. Others would kind of just stop and almost watch themselves, and almost invariably just start laughing. It was so pleasing to watch it melt people's minds the way it had mine.
Anyways, a special time. Really fun seeing these projects.
'everything looked worse', I entirely know what you mean, coming from a tight, high fidelity Amiga background, but now all these years later it all looks so logical.
It was Comanche on my Dad's shitty office pc that allowed me to appreciate big pixel 'shit' graphics.
I played the Half Life Uplink demo on a Pentium II 450Mhz Gateway (with no 3D acceleration) and remember seeing Half-Life for the first time on the Voodoo 3 after it, thinking it looked "worse". There was something about the colors of the software rendering that were different and felt "warmer". That being said, the framerate of the Voodoo 3 did blow me away.
Voodoo 1-3 couldn’t render 32-bit color, so maybe you were noticing the lower bit depth?
3dfx did design some tricks into the video pipeline on Voodoo 2 and 3 cards that allowed for what they called 22-but color, and it definitely looked better than other 3D accelerator cards’ 16-bit modes - but it was still not as clean looking as true 32-bit color. (Interestingly, the filtering they did was applied after the framebuffer, so screen captures would only ever show the lower quality original.)
I desperately wanted a voodoo card (I was late to the pc party). I'd been playing lots of Goldeneye on the n64 and the gaming press had me convinced that real FPS shooters were on the pc not consoles. What a load of shite, I bought a voodoo 3 for my dad's pc, got quake 2 and was bitterly disappointed. Gameplay wise it was so limited compared to Goldeneye. The world was no were near as interactive. Recently I've seen gabe Newell talking about half life and the crowd bar hitting walls was their way of showing the player real world feedback. He's right, but that's nothing compared to the bullet holes in Goldeneye. To be fair, quake 3, unreal tournament 99 and Deus ex alone justified the voodoo card purchase, but it still felt like a let down.
Yessss...I got a friend who went on vacation to the US to bring back a Voodoo (2,I think?). I played a lot of Quake 1 and I remember playing online and seeing the water transparency and my rivals underwater...good times.
Valve was working on TF2.. but it took years to be completed. It started as a more serious military shooter and became the lovely cartoon version later.
The reason the code is the specification is because people don't take specification seriously. Usually for good reason, but sometimes not. Real, long-lived RFC's can exist, and can have directional and corrective impacts on your LLM generated code. The trick is the RFC needs to be human written and maintained. The moment the org allows the LLM themselves to modify the spec... then yes the spec is no longer useful; or rather, "why" comments in code + a sliver of high level directional / summary content is probably all that is valuable.
A fun example can be having the LLM implement a well known spec (which it cannot edit), and then to use the spec in review to find mistakes and corrections. That's helped it really click for me. All these tools that let LLMs generate spec, even with iterative planning... I haven't found it useful for very long. It's great for building something complex in the very short term (e.g. days). But i haven't found keeping them afterwards to provide any benefit.
Their whole algo is good. I had it work on me recently on facebook marketplace, the only social media outside hn im still using. And its shockingly quick at finding niche things im interested in (somy cameras in a certain range, 30L osprey backpacks, im expecting it to infer my shoe size soon). and its fun. And also revealing in how it can make you want things you dont really need, if youre paying attention. Clearly bad for you. But definitely a strong (sub) product on their otherwise dismal facebook app.
Notably, I read this on both my iphone and mac (LG Ultrafine 5k). It is was enjoyable to read in a fun way on my phone, it did not really bug me as a fun blog font. I was more excited about the theme/design than the content. But on my main screen, which is hi res, it _did_ bug my eyes quite a bit. Interesting.
There is such a thing as difficult concepts that code can express elegantly and words cannot. Its far beyond the simple preferences you allude to. Recursion is the simplest example i guess. Perhaps maths is even more elegant, but im among many a non mathmetician for whom code is the only way ive experienced it thus far.
Especially when you combine and mix those concepts in expressive, simple, intuitive ways. Im just not sure what else is like it that our minds can percieve.
Narration is an obvious one. Theres also a huge risk to less qualified folks and jr employees. ie in most software shops, youll get more mileage giving your best engineers bigger opus budgets and a raise than jr engineers to train. Which means we meed maybe half or less as many, and at least half of that savings is floated up to sr folks and ai companies. That seems rather disruptive?
because you are now getting coded products written in large by people who do not have technical foundations, so the way they interact with and even prompt the model is different. We all know how to fix this scenario; be more specific, or diagnose the abstraction mix ups and straighten those out.
Ask for change A and get unwanted change B happens all the time with bad programmers and tradgedy of the commons (ie poorly architected, no restraint) codebases.
Yeah, a while back I did a small project with a stack I wasn't familiar with, and it was really non-critical. So I decided to vibe code it. The experience was pretty similar to this satirical example. But when I work in areas in which I'm paying attention and understand the stack better, I don't experience this nearly as much
Shutting down the isp doesnt let them read what you've sent. There wouldn't be intensive government efforts to eliminate private encryption if it wasn't effective.
Two other quick thoughts. One is I think if people are struggling with costs, they really should explore a worfklow like OPs. Merely breaking up long running tasks by producing summaries / next steps and spinning up new agents off of them greatly reduces runtime costs. I'm regularly running out of time / mental energy these days than my $20 claude subscription, but I realize if I don't note share early and often, I can burn up the quota in 20 minutes. Its amazing the difference. Second is I feel encryption plays an important role. I feel like it is more important than merely keeping your own ideas private, and somehow impacts the generation and evolution of unique / diverse ideas _in general_.
Anyways, good luck OP, the use case is definitely there and important!
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