alt Hacker NewsOpus 3.x building me a productivity system with Obsidian MCP originally.
Next was discovering "create a mathematical model of the problem and derive the solution as a result" type prompts.
But, the real "oh s**" was a longer process of spec'ing a compiler/runtime for real-time DSP (with a lot of novel ideas) and it actually working.
My sequence was: (1) if helps me understand myself, (2) if helps me put together good ideas, (3) it can generate novel ideas given the right inputs, (4) it can build useful tools on my machine, (5) it can compound good ideas into better and better ideas with repeated passes, (6) it can build significant, ambitious machinery that's way beyond my ordinary capacity.
Current frontier: it can compound large codebases into better and better machinery with repeated passes.
The key thing I track is whether I'm running a process that converges and compounds or whether I'm spinning in place / diverging.
Such a great comment, and I agree with all of them.
For me in a similar vein:
- mar ‘24: thinking about how to survey the field and implement a hard research task in Natural Language Processing, and then just approximating it well enough with a prompt and a completions api
- mid ‘25: Llama 3 being able to analyze a good sized codebase I was onboarding onto, and synthesize it into diagrams that matched the quality of ones I’d generated by hand with deterministic tools.
- dec ‘25: opus 4.5 basically generating multi-class modules and tests perfectly (syntactically). Finding that errors were my own under-specification of the prompt. Stopped writing code by hand, mainly because it was good enough and came with tests, docs, build scripts, and other goodies for free.