I think what it will mostly do is hardening existing customers anti-cloud stance.
There already was big reluctance by many enterprises to switch to Exchange Online and New Outlook due to lack of feature parity and control, to the degree that Exchange Server SE became a product (with support until at least 2035) and Classic Outlook is still the prescribed Outlook variant in many organizations (with support until at least 2029). I also know of some customers, which migrated back from Exchange Online to on-premise Exchange Server because they were so unsatisfied with it.
This will only make it harder for Microsoft to pull all customers to their cloud offerings. I think in general that's a significant blow to SaaS-ification of the field.
For nearly 20 years the UK has had "faster payments", free instant transfers, now up to £1m, and while you can't send to a phone number, the routing numbers needed can't be used to withdraw so are generally safe to give to people.
UK system is rather inconvenient and most web sites do not have even an option to use that. And forget using that to pay in a shop. Compare that to Bizum in Spain or Vipps in Norway where one can very conveniently pay using that both online and in shops and the systems naively supports refunds and payment reservations and subscriptions similar to debit cards.
Yes, it's less about payments than more modern systems. The UK has free current ( checking) accounts with debit cards that are essentially free to use, so there's not much incentive for other payment systems. A contactless debit card is quicker and easier to use than an app anyway, although google/apple apps work with that too.
Subscriptions are often done via "direct debit" ( since 1970 ), which is safer than letting anyone take money if they have your details, so that's been a solved problem here for a while too.
The downside is the first-movers problem, where the UK having been ahead a couple of decades ago will now likely be behind for a while, because there isn't so much incentive.
Hopefully not as long as the USA has been behind though!
I get the benefit for the merchant to use an instant payment system. On the other hand, I don't understand the benefit is for the consumer. An increasing number of UK merchants use Pay By Bank (which is essentially an easy way to make a payment by pre-filling the merchant's bank details in your banking app), but if you choose to use it you're instantly losing the consumer protections that come from using a debit or (especially) a credit card: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/pay-by-bank-warnin...
The only way I would use such a system for purchases would be if the merchant refused debit/credit cards, and even then only if there wasn't an alternative merchant I could use.
I've always paid for Airbnb type places (not actually airbnb, obviously) in the UK using the fast electronic payment system. There's usually a button on the web site or they email their account and routing number.
I've learned that rather than juggle too much, I just accept that I'm still more productive than ever before, even if I'm "idle", it's important to take time to have a break and to recharge, refresh and reflect.
So I limit myself to at most 2 or 3 things at once, and if all of those are in long running sessions, well so be it, I know I'll be deep back in it soon.
But it's tempting to start "just one more session", especially something like getting it to better profile and improve performance. That feels super productive, but is often just to stop me feeling "idle".
I think the multitasking problem will become a thing of the past when (or “if”) the models get much faster. I would absolutely love to just work on one thing at a time with a super fast model.
In the earlier days when they were slower and their code was worse so you had to review it, I’d watch the model code and just noodle away on guitar while it did its thing, interrupting it from time to time. Now they’re too fast for that to work, but still too slow for it not to be worth it to start a new task. It’s an awkward in-between stage.
If Anthropic made fast mode four or five times faster rather than just twice as fast, I’d probably shell out for it sometimes just to be able to single-task productively.
If call centres are anything to go by, it will be penalized to work on a single thing at once. The longer your workplace can resist measurements related to agents, the more sane the workplace will remain IMO, otherwise, it will turn into what happened to call centres around the 2000s. Measure everything down to the second, and introduce expectations that you will need to spend time justifying if you miss them.
You still won't be able to internalize the updated state across all of these changes because you are not doing the changes yourself. I can still recall most of the code I wrote in the first 20 years of my career, if not in super great detail then at least in enough detail to know where I should start if I want to do something with that code. With AI generated code it feels much the same as if someone else wrote it, I have absolutely no idea about code written like that last week even if I did review it simply because it was too much to keep in mind beyond the most superficial top level.
I main Deepseek Flash and the biggest bottleneck often isn't the model itself, its external stuff like compilation, testing things, making requests, running linters
The bottleneck is not only the model latency, Although it would help.
When you compile an ios app, or wait for some query result, search slack or wait for Github CI to finish, it all introduces significant wait between agent turns.
Models getting faster would help but would not eliminate the problem.
My cycle with agents has become: spend several days doing detailed planning architecture documents. Codify all new plans into Jira cards as isolated features. Mass fanout on the cards whenever possible with up to 32 agents running at a time, basically becomes a question frenzy for a couple crunch days. Stop and do testing and reviews for a week or two, I can generate up to 20 PRs per crunch day fairly reliably. Rinse and repeat. I feel lucky the type of software I'm producing is amenable to this process, some types aren't.
Not too dissimilar from my approach at work these days, sans the "up to 32 agents" bit.
I try to work on planning docs, scrutinize them a fair bit to look for edge cases or anything that stands out as a problem, whatever.
Then break down the work further into meaningful chunks and hand those out to agents. Mostly one agent at a time but with the directive to use subagents as needed for implementation/review/whatever other perspective I want.
I feel like I'm exercising my brain similarly to how I had in the past. Before LLMs we'd whiteboard things similarly and figure out if a design made sense and like you said, chunk it into Jira tickets. it's really just the implementor (?) that's changed.
At the moment I'd say tradition. AI is new enough and scary enough that everyone still feels better with a human in the loop. That being said we rarely find issues when the architecture is planned in advance. Trust is growing.
Very large codebase modernization/conversion to newer libraries for interop and compliance reasons. Fan out only works if you have enough to do without the agents stepping on each others work. It is amazing when you can do it. Conversions make it even easier because you have a baseline metric of tested functionality to meet. We did pull off mass fanout on an ambitious greenfield internal tool that went very well. It feels like my entire job now is figuring out how to parallelize as much work as possible for the agents.
Agreed -- I only do 2 active things at a time, and maybe something third that is long-running in the background (like training a model or classifying thousands of files, where I just need to check in occasionally to make sure it hasn't veered off-track).
It's rare that with my 2 active things, they're both busy, since one usually finishes while I'm drafting my reply to the other.
When it occasionally happens that both are busy for the next 5 min, I just get to enjoy the break and stretch my legs and walk to the kitchen or something.
I like this approach. I do exactly the same: do less with more focus. I do feel more productive. Otherwise there are too many sessions open and I get distracted and lost.
I keep a couple sessions running on one monitor, and DOOM in the other. When I need a break from one, I move to the other. It’s a very enjoyable cadence.
I only ever run one. You need to just write thoughts on a piece of paper while the agent runs. Do some design work or something.
The thing is, you’re not going to remember any of it so you’ll be useless to companies, and they can just hire someone else to have their own AI figure out what work your spaghetti agents did.
Just a few days ago, opus 5.5 in auto mode deleted backups that it shouldn't have, and in the "apology" it even said, "Nothing was lost, I didn't delete your original files".
This is dated today but I could have sworn I read a similar story here a few years ago about hacking their gym's QR code, but I can't now find it on algolia.
Update: It was hard to find because it was titled, "I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer"
Gas Town was never "the hype", it was always a bit of a joke, in fact the original post was hard to separate from satire. Linking to the HN comments here would show that.
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