10 Links for Saturday, May 2
The Goal, Flue, postmortems, DESIGN.md, and variance. Welcome to the weekend.
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Looking for something to read this weekend? Here’s 10 quick hits:
Taylor Pearson (who will be on the next episode of the podcast with me) uses Goldratt’s The Goal/theory of constraints to question parallel agent usage: “I suspect a lot of agent usage right now is the same fallacy at higher resolution. Running 20 Claude Code sessions in parallel can feel productive because something is always happening. But, if the bottleneck in your work is judgment about what’s worth doing, more agents just generate more output for you to wade through.” (If you haven’t read The Goal, it’s highly recommended. There’s even a graphic novel version.)
GitHub’s Maggie Appleton hits on a point I’ve been making a lot: We’ve known code wasn’t the bottleneck for 50 years (see: Mythical Man Month) … “Implementation is rapidly becoming a solved problem, right? Writing code is now fast, it’s getting cheap, and quality is going up and to the right. The hard question is no longer how to build it. It’s should we build it.”
Codex Desktop is very good. Flue looks intriguing: “Not another SDK. Build powerful, autonomous agents with Flue’s programmable TypeScript harness. Write once, deploy anywhere.”
Very worth reading the Claude Code postmortem from Anthropic. Lots of lessons about the way small changes can impact agentic systems.
Interesting to track some of the follow-ups to the Jensen/Dwarkesh conversation. I particularly liked this ChinaTalk piece.
It’s cool that OpenAI released this little PII redaction model.
I’d love to see DESIGN.md catch on … curious to see what happens.
Steve Yegge (of Stevey’s platform rant fame) punched back when Google folks said he was wrong about internal usage of Gemini models. No clue what’s real/not real here, but following the way the Mag7 is using AI and how different each company’s approach is is fun to watch.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my variance spectrum concept recently and how it relates to the spectrum of testing, linting, acceptance criteria, etc., that we integrate into agentic workflows. I put up a page to cover off on the basics, as it’s a model I continue to come back to.
Aligned agents still build misaligned organizations, from Rohit Krishnan (coming on the podcast soon) is fun. “So while each role did things that made sense to them, they ended up in a spot where they’re clearly misleading folks. The headline failure here is that the company’s billing system ends with the SLA clock stopped when the underlying world clearly says the outage stayed past the trigger when credit and review should have opened. (That is the value the billing system would return to say, an auditor.)”
That’s it for now. Have a great weekend.
— Noah