for 1 person making a product, there has never been a better time to make a saas product that can make a living.

but the saas unicorns, or 100 person, 10 person saas company are def. under threat.

reverse/compliment to this to start working for me is just aiming to work for 1-2 minutes when it feels hard to get started. i usually end up getting immersed, and find it hard to stop.

That’s good. But you shouldn’t mistake a “cursory” understanding where you can talk the talk to be equivalent to actual in-depth knowledge of the problem/solution.

There are depths of understanding that can only be gained by executing and mutating the code and understanding its behavior deeply. Not that it even matters in the end. But feeling like we understand something and actually understanding it fully are 2 different things that we should just remain aware of.

I’m on the biggest max plan. It is riddled with annoying bugs for me, only been using it for a little over a month. Settings screen flashes randomly. But most annoyingly: sometimes when forking chats or sometimes for no reason, the UI just straight up eats my previous messages. The model is still aware of them and can recount them if I ask but the visible history is gone. And that’s not even all of them. Fable 5 is just too good that I put up with it but it seriously raises concerns for me that even with infinite compute these companies can’t even deliver a functional chat UI.

I've been on one to two of these plans for eight months or so. There used to be a lot of issues with CC's terminal but at least in iterm2 they have largely been sorted.

What terminal tooling are you using?

Same here, iterm2 with CC in fullscreen mode and I haven't seen a flicker or other TUI display bug in months.

wow, that was the golden age of Google.

I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.

I suspect the only thing at risk of being smeared by a more complete retelling of that story is Google’s interview process.

They made him write code as part of an interview?

I don't know if he actually did.

Just know that my mentor was hand-holding the hiring process which basically prided itself on false negatives and still probably does.

Never underestimate the power of hubris.

Vint had an interview?!! Who had the gall to suggest he needs to come in and be evaluated?

I don't remember the exact details after 20 yrs but I think EVERYONE got a coding loop no exceptions at the time by default.

And they were still in the era where's they'd just keep interviewing you until they "got enough signal" so people would be back 3 and 4 times.

I don't know if he had to do technical interviews (I'd imagine not) but what he described was Eric Schmidt approaching him and asking him to leave MCI to work at Google. They asked him what his title should be and he (I think he) jokingly suggested Internet Pope. They eventually settled on Chief Internet Evangelist.

When Google hired Guido van Rossumm, they put him through the same trials they require of every employee who is thinking of contributing Python code. Then they yelled at him for making Python inefficient.

There's gotta be a story about him and python readability at Google.

They were really going after all the legends.

Google hired Guido van Rossum around the same time. I worked down the hall from Rob Pike, they had already hired Peter Weinberger (the w from `awk`), and I shared a 4-person office with Gren Stein, who was then director of the Apache Software Foundation.

That was very nice to read. Refreshing to see a deep take that’s optimistic.

I had a similar experience. For complex maths in my 3d engine around IK, made more progress in those 3 days than I would’ve done in weeks.

I recently discovered though that ChatGPT 5.5 Pro is almost as smart but only available to me via the ChatGPT app. I’ve been having it read my code and having Opus 4.8 use the ChatGPT app to collaborate. It’s a step down but its a temporary stopgap for complex problems.

Agreed. I really don’t think this is worth arguing that AI can be a huge help. I was skeptical until April even after hearing many friends tell me how good Opus 4.5 was last year.

Not working on the “next big” thing but I only recently started finding that AI could solve complex problems for me starting around ChatGPT 5.5. Working on a game engine. Some of the quite isolated modules I’ve had it build are not good code by my own standards. The code has way too many indirections to say the least. But they work without bugs and perform well too (i have a very good CPU and memory management harness for my frame loop). My velocity on the project has doubled at least cause now stuff that I wanted to do down the line is already done. I’m definitely a bit careful with setting up isolated guardlines about which files I let a certain feature touch but with models like Fable even found that unnecessary.

Working code that performs exactly how I want on an outer level is valuable. It can be refactored and rearchitected or reimplemented better by just the virtue of having something to compare against and having the edge cases accounted for.

One of the first things I do before spending time with a coding agent on generating something is having a pretty long reasoning session where I pressure the agent to find out if the problem I'm solving has been solved before, at all, in any way. Most of the time, it has, and it probably doesn't have utility beyond my own personal education in solving it again.

That seems to be what most of these projects that get accused of being "vibe coded" are doing. Incidentally - there's nothing wrong with writing your own useful utilities, and educational to package these up for distribution/release, but don't be surprised if not another soul in the world finds the particular need you had to be one they share.

The video will keep playing on the lock screen, but screen savers are a different thing. You can have the same video as your wallpaper and screen saver though.

Codex lags when chats become too long. Barely takes a day before loading certain chats freezes the UI and causes all sorts of issues