There's a livestream every Tues about house/landscape remodeling I've followed for years to fix my own property https://m.youtube.com/@PerfectGuyLife/streams and they talk about how any good contractor will never run out of work because it's all based on trust and local networking. Eventually these guys go into lumber yard sales because they've built up a huge network of trust that every other builder knows them and lumber sales commissions are enormous. Most yards are all locally owned family businesses too no faceless national corps.
There's a well run diner here beside the courts and because they have booths which are a little more private than tables it's always full of lawyers with clients or architects with builders that need space to lay out plans. It's always some professionals utilizing the whole table. Many armed sheriffs too so there is always security. It's run like a Michelin star restaurant the second you are out of water someone is there to refill. You will never come in and not be acknowledged immediately no matter how busy inside the staff have magical training to be able to multitask. There is tight windows for court staff they have to return on time and can't be waiting around trying to pay a bill with no staff in sight.
Beside it is a row of various hyper trendy restaurants that I never see similar patrons inside because they have terrible service and seating. The worst of them requires you to stand in a huge line and prepay then they bring the food out to you. This means watching idiot after idiot fumbling around with their phone or taking forever to find their card to pay while you stand in this line and burn up your lunch time. The clientele here is much different it's mostly tourists so is dead in the off season as no locals go.
I'm always interested in seeing how service industry runs things and it's usually just doing the basics better than everyone else that makes all the difference
This is how you get to 10x with a LLM in my limited agentic experience for doing all the scratchwork of architecting a program before you generate it:
The user facing part of your program can be planned out using conceptual design https://essenceofsoftware.com/tutorials/ the author of that book teaches it in MITs old software studio course https://61040-fa25.github.io/schedule the point is to plan out modularity and the prof does enjoy using overly complex language to describe this method but once you read through the slides and tutorials you will understand why he describes it that way because he's trying to differentiate between features and concepts. For example HN has an upvoting concept who's purpose is to establish rank then a seperate concept karma which allows you to downvote but placing both functions inside the upvoting concept breaks modularity and conceptual design makes this obvious once you practice with it. Once everything is planned out this way then generating code is trivial again in my limited experience as I'm no expert on agentic coding but I've had success doing this.
All the code the user won't see can be modeled using one of the 'lightweight' formal methods out there like forge or alloy https://forge-fm.github.io/book/2026/ where a complex protocol you write or entire system can be tested first to find illicit states. Imagine you are designing some company app where there needs to be multiple logins of different security abilities this is how you would model your security plan first and make sure a combination of states doesn't produce an unexpected breach or that you missed a state. A custom network protocol that does kernel bypass is another example. The rules of a game you build is another you don't want the system to reach a state like winner unless they actually won. I now use Forge to plan css too because I don't want to show broken css states since I have limited design experience.
Now generate the whole system as modules and never look at the code. The same property tests I used for the Forge model I make into an Oracle and then blast the agent code with random inputs.
I built several gigantic prototypes this way mostly of papers I read in database designs and screwing around with graphical interfaces for them.
I still write anything critical by hand. For example some app that accepts uploads of PDFs to change format I'm going to escape and prep that data by hand so the vibe coded microservices only ever see cleaned/safe data.
If you can skip some or all electives and instead receive credits for joining research on campus as an undergraduate then it's worth it. There were a few TAs at my school who joined some professors project and only did that their last two years of undergrad where they had to produce a research paper for credit but they all ended up graduating with their name on multiple papers, going to invite only graduate summer schools, getting employment or grad school offers none of the rest of us were offered. Otherwise the cost seems too high now for a 4yr undergrad unless you scheme for a cheap bachelors (Europe? UoPeople?) and invest in a masters instead
AI copilots and prompts give me massive lines of imperative OCaml and the interface for that code always requires changing to properly describe the data it will receive when I can write it myself in a few minutes. I can however write a simulation of some hardware quickly with Java or C using claude code and then run my hand written programs in there for testing. An example is mimicking the runtime environment of some controller
Had to modify some program so just read the code and guessed mimicking what I read. It mostly just worked so continued doing that and reading enough docs I could write my own. Did that hacking for years until I finally read a real book on programming languages I think it was SICP but could have been something else before that like a SML compiler book
I assume this works where the ransomware authors, who likely are in some untouchable nation and the son of some major politician, provide a binary/kit with their own addresses to take the ransom then pay the person who planted it out minus their cut. Those wallets used for paying crime commissions are probably reused often or otherwise identified as they don't care if you get caught and you need to either sit on those coins for years until the limitations runs out or have enough knowledge to (correctly) wash them and anyone doing this is already making bad life decisions so likely greedy and cashed those in a traceable way like driving to work in his new Ferrari.
Sometimes except I learned the hard way that if you write everyday Python math code it's actually variable-time arithmetic and totally unsuitable for applied cryptography, oops
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