I’ve been slowly converting my org to use opus 5.5 as default over sonnet and the difference is night and day. More usage, because it does shit better the first time. Less cost, because it does shit better the first time. It’s literally been the thing that’s kicked our org in the pants to actually adopt agentic methodology at scale.
pretty much this, though i did notice a rebound where it can make people meander further into overengineering things, creating a bit of an induced demand
Harness: Claude Code plugin for VS Code. At some point I guess I'll switch to just the claude code app but tbh this is super ergonomic for me.
No agent orchestration besides literally just letting claude spin up agents for me.
No broader systems.
And I'm _massively_ productive with the setup I describe above. I say this not to gloat, I'm sure others have great methods but I do say this in case anyone is feeling overwhelmed by the options out there. My 2 cents is don't overthink it.
For example, say you want to search for bugs in 100 code files. Ask Claude to “use subagents to look for bugs across these files” and it will likely spin up 5 agents, each taking a different section of the codebase. Theoretically in the limit case this is 5x faster than Claude doing it without subagents.
Any kind of problem shaped like map reduce can be accelerated this way: Looking through your banking records, searching through a database, asking Claude to find that one weird file you remember from three years ago but forgot where you saved it, etc.
Just know that there’s no quicker way to hit your limits than to use subagents. So use them if it’s paid for by your work or whenever you need the 5x speed boost.
You can tell it to do so, but what you'll find is it knows to do it when it needs to. This is another case of "don't overthink it". Just let your agent decide when spinning up sub-agents makes sense.
If you focus too much on optimization, and you do so in the wrong ways, you'll actually find you saved no time/money/tokens vs just letting it decide when to do it. This applies as much to Agentic engineering as it did with programming pre-AI.
tl;dr it will literally do it for you, and it'll tell you when it does so
Buddy works at a public university. Can confirm oracle has their greedy hands in all of the crevices of that place. Slows down the tech stuff so much, since they have to work on top of all this proprietary junk.
The 2 week notice isn’t just out of the kindness of your heart. It’s an amount that’s been generally accepted by everyone as “good enough” to not burn bridges. Ultimately, if you don’t need those bridges and you’re good screwing your coworkers (there are rare times this makes sense), you always could give zero notice and quit. Why even quit at that point? Just no-show and see if they keep paying you.
Those bridges can really come in handy though. People always say it’s who you know, not what you know. That’s 100% true in my experience and when I look at the people making the most money around me.
FWIW I like to say I’m giving 3 weeks notice to my new employer, then give 2 weeks notice to my old one, and have a week to breathe :)
> The 2 week notice isn’t just out of the kindness of your heart. It’s an amount that’s been generally accepted by everyone as “good enough” to not burn bridges.
That's the whole issue though. It's all employer-centric. Employers don't worry about burning bridges 95% of the time and will typically terminate "effective immediately". From TFA:
> the firing-vs.-quitting dynamic has always been asymmetrical. Even really wonderful employers almost never cease employment with a kind offer to let you keep working there until you find a new source of income.
and
> A Reddit thread from a few weeks ago recounts someone attempting to leave a job, after four years, with dignity and a standard two weeks’ notice. Twenty minutes after they told their boss about their plan to leave, their boss cut off their access to email and Slack. They felt like “a corporate spy who had just stolen company trade secrets instead of an employee who gave them four years of dedication.” The redditor wrote, “They wouldn’t even let me say goodbye to my team or grab my coffee mug from my desk.”
The 2 weeks notice thing is from a different time. The time when working unpaid overtime and skipping your lunch breaks to meet deadlines got you noticed and promoted. Employers don't give a rip about you in 2026.
> That's the whole issue though. It's all employer-centric. Employers don't worry about burning bridges 95% of the time and will typically terminate "effective immediately".
We might be speaking past each other. I completely get the point of the article. If we're talking in reality vs in theory, the power has always been in the hands of the employers. It shouldn't be that way, I agree! But if I quit today and give zero notice, there's a good chance I can no longer put my employer up as a reference for a job in the future. This matters less and less with age, but especially early in careers, references really do matter to build trust with potential employers.
2 weeks notice is an easy thing to do on my end to secure references. Also, and let's be real, you don't have to let the company suck your soul for the two weeks. It's not like they are going to fire you if you're kind of clocking in and clocking out for those 2 weeks. And if they do? I get a couple weeks to hang out before starting my next role.
It's wrong not to mention that many employers offer severance pay. (When not firing for cause.) The only time I ever got laid off I got 6 months of pay and health insurance. That's better than average, but I think 2 weeks of pay is the standard minimum. Even if the employees are sent home right away.
I think you've been fortunate in your experiences. Some states don't even have protections against baseless termination, employers can just terminate at will. In the states that do, employers often fight all unemployment cases on policy. I've seen 3 companies transition into new owners. In almost every case, the new owners proceeded to terminate almost all department managers and lots of front-line staff without notice or benefits. In the case of the managers, they'd often be shadowed for a while to see the ins and outs of what they did before termination.
> It’s hard to mentally reconcile that if I had performed better on a few coding tests a few years ago, I would be 100x wealthier than I am today.
Wealth like this sounds great to those not that wealthy, but those experiencing it often aren't any happier than those who have their needs met. Look at any of the tech (b|tr)illionaires; do they seem as genuinely happy/content as the neighbor down the street who gardens regularly and has a tight-knit group of friends and family they spend time with?
Don't get me wrong, money is great! But the "keeping up with the joneses" never stops. You quickly adjust your mindset and feel poor compared to your buddy who has 400 million dollars.
> Wealth like this sounds great to those not that wealthy
It’s also great to the wealthy. Speaking as someone moderately wealthy myself.
Not having to worry about day to day bills, being able to splurge on friends and family for a celebration or when they have an emergency, being able to travel to see things because you read about it in a book and want to check it out, not caring about your credit score and being able to single-handed direct non-profit efforts to achieve civic outcomes they’d otherwise have to spend months fundraising for, all of these are tremendously rewarding. I agree that once folks get into the billionaire bucket there seems to be a negative return on wealth. But going from having to think about the mortgage to not is a major step up in quality of life, and it’s something of a sour-grapes middle class myth that I also grew up with which preaches that wealth isn’t actually all that, hard work is the reward yada yada.
90% of my extended family’s issues and my partners family’s issues could be resolved with 10 million dollars. Sure we would graduate to “rich people
problems”, but they don’t carry the same sting of desperation and futility
> I can assure you that if I had a $40M payday that I'd cash out, never work a day in my life again, and be perfectly content.
I recently listened to an npr story on why people work into older ages. Of course some of it is financial need, but a surprising number of people return to work because retirement is isolating. People find missing that structure and need to wake up and work on something with others crippling to their health, both mentally and physically.
I also think I'd do the same if I had a 40M payday, though I'd immediately be thinking about what I need to do for work to fill in those gaps, something physical, social, etc. Something like gardening, working on community gardens, joining a local pottery co-op, etc.
Just something to think about in case you strike it rich someday! In my case, I'm saving for early retirement with a goal of 50 at the latest.
I'd likely do "something" but it definitely wouldn't be tying myself to the grindstone.
I've had the good fortune to wind up with a few funemployment stretches over the years, and yes, I'd go stir crazy quickly if I just went off the grid completely. In fact I learned that the hard way on the first one. But I learned quickly that about 10 hours a week of "something useful" was enough to fill in the gaps. And that paints with a broad brush in terms of what the activity is.
The recent Money Stuff newsletter had a blurb about how many anthrophic employees were quitting because you can’t use stock as collateral while working there. That condition only applies to emoloyees so once they left they can do that and rebalance their wealth out of a single position.
> There was this really interesting one where it reads your lips
This is what I thought the original post was about. The glasses you have to wear is where that lost me.
If we could get lip-reading via your computer/phone camera down perfectly, that's the real win. Making people wear your goofy frames is where you lose a massive portion of people. Nobody wants to look like Zuckerberg lol
Lip reading is one of the other modalities we tried as well beyond IMU, EMG and RF! We worked a lot on fine tuning Auto-AVSR, one of the most commonly used open source lipreading models. It's very enticing to work on, since it gets to about 17% word error rate, which looks good enough that you would think working on it further would get it down to product quality, but we found there's an information-theoretic limit on the modality. Speech has 40 phonemes, but only about 12 to 15 visemes (externally visually separable phonetic states). For example P and B look very similar from a camera. This causes the scaling laws on lipreading to flatten out at an error that's too high to be product ready but just low enough to make for a good demo. Our original plan was actually to ship a lipreading software to see if people would want this behavior, but we realized you couldn't make lipreading work!
Not well enough! You can get to 15-20%ish WER but going beyond that doesn't seem feasible with the info available from a camera, even with a great language model
Is your implication that hyperscalers (big companies) will always do better at this than smaller companies?
Just becuase a company has more money doesn’t mean they direct that money well, and even money directed well at the wrong people will result in failures.
No one ever got fired for putting creds in AWS Secrets Manager. I'd take the hyperscaler every time because even if something happens, it is a very defensible decision.
Sometimes compliance do help improve security. Hyperscalers have resources for that. They have resources and they do security well. Hyperscalers are treated as critical infrastructure.
One person's machine being compromised does not bring the whole org down.
In general I’d agree with you but where else would you go to take the money that’s more exciting than the forefront of AI in the world? Retirement makes sense, though if they wanted to retire they all could and own multi-million dollar homes and do so now, pre-IPO. Post ipo I guess you get a few super yachts and some land in Hawaii? Idk at a certain point I think these guys like the chase more than the result.
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