alt Hacker NewsI love this post. It’s also interesting to revisit in the age of agents.
Using the language of the article, I’d say “push all your innovation tokens into agents” is probably a good move. This means the tech your agents work with should all be boring tech.
Another way of saying this is “use in-distribution technology”. If agents are substantially better at Rust than Zig, probably you should use Rust, even if Zig is “better”. The amount that Zig is better is going to get swamped by the amount that in-distribution agents are better.
(This is not a claim that Rust actually is better, just a hypothetical fact pattern for discussion.)
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I admit I have a hard time following this logic. If an agent has a baseline intelligence, you can... instead of using boring technology, just DIY/NIH the simplest custom solution which fulfills your requirements. And you'll usually do a better job than a general-purpose software library.
Even if in the other approach, the LLM knows the stack better, you're just going to push the complexity into your client code, so it's not like it's a huge gain to use boring tech stack.
> I’d say “push all your innovation tokens into agents” is probably a good move
Or better yet, just don't use agents, deliver something better with all the stability and boringness that you have. There's never been a better time than now to produce software that actually seems to work and march along steadily; your competitors are all flailing wildly like morons.
I find agents default to popular which heavily overlaps with boring although you could steer them more boring for sure.
One thing I learned about AI is that, e.g., if you're making websites you're much better off going for php/ruby/elixir, even if you don't like the languages much.
Pipelines and deploys gets much easier and faster than the very common TypeScript monorepo, and so does communication between server and client.
And I say that as a TypeScript and Effect aficionado who has no particular love for neither php or ruby, but they are extremely solid choices to move fast, well, and get excellent performance and tooling out of the box.
It's a total tangent but AI being so good at developing rust means that my first impression of seeing a rust project has totally changed.
4 or 5 years ago if I had to weigh up two options and one was written in rust it was almost a sure thing that the program was snappy, fast, reliable and that the author was competant.
Now it's a sure fire sign that the project was probably vibe coded. Not saying it can't still be good, I just have a different first impression now