Back in @MeasureCampSyd I had the opportunity to reflect on lessons I picked up throughout my tenure as a data scientist at Atlassian. This led to a fun discussion at the APH on what it actually means to "get things right" in data analysis.

Can a Jew let his agent run over Shabbat if the last prompt was Friday afternoon?

Can confirm. Just claimed $50 USD Claude usage credits. I always remained within limits so I have no idea if that will last 5 minutes, 5 days or 5 weeks with my usage patterns.

Antigravity is great but "eager to get to work building" is an understatement, especially with Gemini. Me: for <feature X> what are the pros and cons of implementing option A vs option B? AG: I implemented option C. 5 files deleted. 7 files modified. git add . git commit bye

how my codebase written entirely with claude code runs

Continuing to have AI build a weird game demo a day. Here is: "Make a game where you have to prevent the apocalypse, but the interface is just Jira tickets" Pretty fun/funny branching storyline, all text is AI created with minor feedback from me. Play: gentle-bienenstitch-01e24b.n…

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

Interesting thesis on what destroys software engineering productivity at large enterprises: it's that legibility is prioritized over everything else. seangoedecke.com/seeing-like…

"Hey, can you write me a script that does X?" Gemini: Sure, here are 50 LOC that do just that ChatGPT: Sure, here are 400 LOC. I added some basic error handling in case a solar flare flips a bit during execution

I feel like vibe coding is the slot machine of the LLM era. Maybe the next prompt will make it work exactly like you wanted. In the meantime, please feed another coin into the machine.

This is an excellent read. It also aligns with my experience. I have my coding agents on a very short and tight leash, and no generated code gets pushed unless I have cleaned it up and understand it myself. Everything else leads to pain and suffering. albertofortin.com/writing/co…

When you're working well with AI, you have it gently helping you go with your natural flow. It's *your* nature that is the foundation, not the AI's. "Vibe coding" today isn't like this at all. It's a battle against the AI to control it under your will.

US data scientists are so cooked right now. they can't import pandas anymore

🎉Announcing Spider 2.0 Text-to-SQL challenge in the LLM era! 6 years after our Yale Spider 1.0, we're pushing it forward with: 🍊Real complex cloud DBs (3000 cols) 🍋Multi-dialect SQL complexity 🍎Agentic coding workflows 🧐Best o1 only solves 17%! 👉spider2-sql.github.io

Narrative on X: 🦋 has no AI/ML and just talks about itself My actual feed on 🦋:

My favorite description of a large language model was accidentally written by Ray Bradbury in 1969, more than half a century ago, and it's eerie how fitting its rendition of an emergent language mind is: Suppose and then suppose and then suppose That wires on the far-slung telephone black poles Sopped up the billion-flooded words they heard Each night all night and saved the sense And meaning of it all. Then, jigsaw in the night, Put all together and In philosophic phase Tried words like moron child. Thus mindless beast All treasuring of vowels and consonants Saves up a miracle of bad advice And lets it filter whisper, heartbeat out One lisping murmur at a time. So one night soon someone sits up Hears sharp bell ring, lifts phone And hears a Voice like Holy Ghost Gone far in nebulae That Beast upon the wire, Which with sibilance and savoring! Down continental madnesses of time Says Hell and O And then Hell-o. To such Creation Such dumb brute lost Electric Beast, What is your wise reply?

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