7 comments

  • jpease 1 hour ago
    “Ray became VP of Sales at a $2B company when he was 19”

    I guess that’s OK, but I was skateboarding at 19.

    Can you even kick flip?

  • billehunt 1 hour ago
    Command Center is really cool. I worked with Jimmy at Thiel Fellowship - wicked smart guy.
  • sltr 4 hours ago
    I'm Doug, quoted above. I took Jimmy's excellent course, and when I learned about Command Center, I subbed immediately. I wasn't disappointed. It's a bit like turning your LLM into a graduate of that course.
    • pooploop64 2 hours ago
      Not trying to accuse anyone of anything but this sounds exactly like one of those scam courses that turns out to be a pyramid scheme centered around selling the course to other people.
      • Darmani 2 hours ago
        We have a referrer program

        Doug has not signed up for it.

  • yegemberdin 5 hours ago
    How do you guys ensure that the refactoring improves the existing code?
    • Darmani 4 hours ago
      Ooh. The answer is probably more interesting and philosophical than you expected

      I can tell you that we do extensive testing, we figured out how to objectively measure the code quality on certain benchmark problems, empirically it's extremely helpful nearly all the time.

      But in the general case: it is not actually possible to guarantee this.

      That's because whether a change improves the code often depends on information which is literally not present in the codebase.

      Some of these are more trite. E.g.: whether a comment is helpful or redundant slop depends on the audience.

      Some are deeper. E.g.: whether a piece of duplication is good or bad depends on the intent, and that is often impossible to recover from the source. https://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/01/the-design-of-software...

      A simpler example: There's a function that's never called. Should it be deleted?

      There's a number of factors outside the codebase that determine the answer. Including the obvious one "Not if your next prompt is going to start using it."

      • foecalfork 3 hours ago
        You found a way to objectively measure code quality?? Sell that! Why even sell this course when you have the ability to literally beat every software company?
        • Darmani 3 hours ago
          In honesty, that's not a bad idea, and we hadn't thought of that.

          It's pretty expensive to measure even for small programs. It's also more of a relative than an absolute measure, i.e.: it scores two variants of the same codebase, but the raw scores aren't very meaningful on their own. So our goal had been to use this in the benchmark set we're working on when we release a standalone refactoring product.

          But the more I think about this suggestion, the more I think: "Hmmm, why not?"

  • eltonlin 3 hours ago
    Code walkthroughs are underrated
  • csunoser 3 hours ago
    Oh hey, this is the jj workshop person!
    • Darmani 3 hours ago
      And indeed, I think we're the only agentic coding environment with jj support.

      The most difficult code in the 1.0 release is some gymnastics to avoid the appearance of a concurrency conflict with a user running their own jj commands, made at the request of the person who introduced me to jj.

  • jing09928 2 hours ago
    [dead]