> How do you budget an workforce that could turn 20% more expensive overnight?

Like, say, oil or DRAMs?

Exactly. Big headaches. It doesn't happen to the salaries of the employees of the companies affected by those price hikes. That's the point.

I personally find the almost absence of spam on WhatsApp a big success story for it. Think about how much Spam still hits your email inbox (and nobody knows how much is filtered away before it does).

I totally understand why they try and make it hard for integration to happen. When compared to classic SMS, the fact that you need to start a conversation with a preapproved template means that they have a way to control casual interactions.

My impression is that at the moment the value you get out of Claude is simply incredible.

As a senior engineer, you get an assistant that never gets tired and can do quite a lot on its own. For me, it’s been an eye-opening experience. I used to have a collaborator called M that had a good general culture, but was not too smart. The calculation going into my mind every time I ask Claude for something is: how much would that cost, in terms of time and effort, to get M to do that? M was a resource that costed many thousand dollars per month, plus the time I spent correcting and directing, while Claude is actually smarter and does what it is asked with a degree of autonomy and common sense that M could never dream of.

The flipside of the coin is obvious: Anthropic will find a way to claw back - no pun intended - some of this value by raising the cost of subscription. They would be crazy not to.

value is high but what about the competitors?

is claude that good? the last time i tried claude it was sonnet 4.5. it was ok, not worth the api money clearly. but i only use api tokens for llms.

If you look at SWE, Claude models aren’t that special. Other benchmarks come up with different results.

But… anecdotally, Claude is just that good. Gemini needs a lot of hand-holding, and it will still tell you it’s done when it achieved half the work. Or say, “this test isn’t passing, I’ll just delete it”. Every now and then I get tired of it and give the same task to Sonnet 4.6; 5 minutes later I’m done. Bug fixed, UI properly working, React hooks not being conditionally rendered, theme variables used properly. It’s wonderful.

I’m not sure about large agentic work or deep thinking, but I’m mostly automating away the drudgery of dealing with React Native. I still want to do the deeper work myself, but even there Opus is usually a really good sparing partner.

Were you using the Gemini model with the Claude Code harness? Otherwise, it is not an honest comparison.

I haven’t, but I’ve used Opus in Antigravity and it performs pretty much the same? It’s hard to tell minute differences.

Do you think Claude Code is what makes their models operate better?

And by the same token, then what would give Gemini a fair run? Because the Gemini chat app, Stitch, and the CLI are all things I’ve used and the model can’t help itself from a) saying it’s done when it isn’t; b) going off-rails; c) ignoring strict instructions after a while.

Matches my experience. I am not sure why, but subjectively it feels better.

The 4th issue is a feature- it’s what allows zero downtime hot updates.

The fact that it was written by ChatGpt does not mean that a human did not decide what to put in it. For non native speakers it’s a huge advantage.

that's exactly right, Dutch is my first language

The first thing that comes to my mind is that reliance on a external infrastructure (Azure) is a big no no for industrial applications. You would not want your oil refinery plant to stop working because there is a connectivity issue to a server located in a different continent.

Azure, together with Power Platform tools such as Power Apps, is primarily used for large-scale training. Since the odor and gas data require efficient labeling to be reliable, Power Apps combined with Data Explorer provides an easy, cost-effective, and scalable way to manage this process. Once trained, the model can be deployed directly on the edge.

I skimmed the index but… no Clojure? My impression is that it is by far the most used current Lisp. This said, I’d love to read the book - definitely interesting.

There's a whole chapter on Clojure, don't worry :) (that's probably why it didn't make the index)

chapter 13 covers Clojure

So Long Discord, It’s not like It’s the only forum in town

I have been looking for ways to only use local packages for our software builds. I am looking for something that can act as a local cache for Java and NPM packages. The idea would be that developers can only use packages belonging to the allowed set for development, and there is a vetting process where packages are added to the allowed set (or removed).

I have been playing with the idea of using a single git repository to host them, Java packages as an Ivy repository and JavaScript packages as simply the contents of node_modules.

Anybody does something similar?

Modern JVMs are pretty effective in most scenarios right out of the box.