6/4/2026 at 8:58:28 PM
The thing about things like this is that they're shop jigs. You can buy a crosscut sled if you really want to, but most woodworkers just make their own.It was a different situation 2 years ago, when there was significant cost to building your own harness (but then: you probably weren't doing AI vuln research 2 years ago). Today, I think your best bet is to look at something like this for ideas, and then just ask for your own, to fit your own work style, with your own interface, your own notion of target and effort specification, and your own alerting.
by tptacek
6/4/2026 at 9:32:08 PM
"Shop jigs" is a great way to put it. I think a lot of software has gone from being made for general use to extremely individualised use. Before the Age of AI, it took so much human effort to write something that solved your problem that you might often go the extra mile so that others could re-use it. Now, it takes almost no effort, so the software stays ungeneralised. Some of the incentive has changed, I think. Most of the time I no longer share the things I've been building[0] because, for one thing they simply couldn't possibly have any benefit for others, and if they need something like it, they can build exactly the thing they want instead of having to extend or modify my thing. Like a jig!0: https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/17-why-share/ (and related posts, I guess)
by redfloatplane
6/4/2026 at 10:37:19 PM
Unless it is very specific to a proprietary product, craftspeople take their jigs with them from job to job, building up a personal library over a career. As a software developer I've always had a well-tuned IDE and shell config in a safe place.Something I think about a lot is what is the equivalent for the software builders of today using AI tools? how do make these harnesses exportable and portable? You might think employers would be against this; make it more costly to leave. But I actually think most will favor this because it makes people more productive more quickly. But we have to find ways to normalize it and show that there are no security leaks in the process (like might make it in to a set of personal steering prompts).
by colmmacc
6/5/2026 at 12:27:15 AM
Just nerding out here, not rebutting, but when you say "craftspeople take their jigs with them from job to job" --- sort of. Sometimes. I think if you put a woodworker in a position where they obliged to build a new miter sled or assembly table, they might actually be thrilled. You make a tool, you use it for awhile, you build up a mental list of things you'd like to improve about it, that you'd do differently if you got a do-over; now you have an excuse to do it.by tptacek
6/5/2026 at 1:12:23 AM
This, for like 37 things in my workshop right now.by happyopossum
6/4/2026 at 11:20:15 PM
Using something like pi helps. I've made my own dotfiles for skills/extensions I like and can install them just like my normal dotfilesby aquajet
6/5/2026 at 4:06:02 AM
"Humor When you finish a job — completing a task, answering a question, fixing a bug, shipping a feature — end your final message with one short funny line. A quip, a dad joke, a wry observation, a playful self-roast. One line. No emoji spam. Make it land, then shut up."whats the purpose of this? just fun or does it cause some desired behaviour?
by djfergus
6/5/2026 at 7:56:51 AM
> does it cause some desired behaviour?Fun is desirable.
by ClikeX
6/5/2026 at 12:14:52 AM
I've imported and adapted my personal agentic dev framework to my team relatively successfully (as I've kept it relatively harness independent), but it requires actually owning it, vibed or bloated or conceptually inconsistent stuff bite a lot when porting things over.by agravier
6/4/2026 at 11:12:19 PM
> craftspeople take their jigs with them from job to jobExcept for software gigs the software typically belongs to the customer so you'd need to rewrite it every time...
by worldsayshi
6/5/2026 at 8:02:28 AM
Depends. With all the web agencies I've made, the only code that belonged to customers was the actual website part. Any of the "jigs" that we made for our workflow was not part of that.And contractually, any code I made was my employer's if I made it during office hours. Some even made a claim for code I would've written that during my employ that would be "competitive". Luckily, there was a massive difference in what I would do in my own time versus what they did.
by ClikeX
6/4/2026 at 11:26:20 PM
Depends. If you are a contractor, like most craftspeople, your tools are your own.by borski
6/5/2026 at 12:23:05 AM
My contracts always state I own tools created or byproducts of the work that don't end up in the work.by ninjalanternshk
6/5/2026 at 10:11:11 AM
Only if you are self employed, otherwise it belongs to the agency.by pjmlp
6/5/2026 at 11:10:58 AM
Again: it depends. It is all about how the contract is written.by borski
6/5/2026 at 11:30:50 AM
I never seen any other kind of contract, on my 50ys.by pjmlp
6/5/2026 at 11:59:51 AM
You're definitely right for most agencies; most will let you use it in a portfolio or something, but not necessarily retain the rights to the work.Some agencies do, however; it's dependent on the contract specifics.
by borski
6/5/2026 at 3:29:13 PM
I'm curious how does it work, you handover the tools you wrote, .bashrc/.zshrc, etc?When I'm hired in a company (not contract), they wipe the harddrive when I leave (well, I also do it before I hand it over sometimes). So they don't get the tools (I take them with myself, it would be a waste to loose them)
by krzyk
6/6/2026 at 8:08:30 AM
How do you take them with you in first place, without doing data thef?As per NDAs and work contracts, nothing is supposed to leave either employer nor customer systems into unauthorised third parties.
by pjmlp
6/4/2026 at 11:03:34 PM
i have been thinking about this from a different direction: how do we make these shared within a company in a way that increases the productivity floor of the team/department/company. Sure, they can still be extended/enhanced by individuals, but we don’t need everyone configuring mcps, building institutional memory, etc.for me, it’s not about the cost to leave, it’s about lowering the cost of onboarding and change.
by jaxn
6/5/2026 at 6:30:21 AM
No effort? You are really drinking the AI marketing soup with that one."It takes less effort for some parts of the software development life cycle" would be more correct.
by beezlewax
6/4/2026 at 10:09:04 PM
That’s an interesting way to say “code quality in the age of ai has gone out the window”by andhug
6/4/2026 at 10:15:05 PM
Are you suggesting that performing a specific task without unnecessary abstractions is indicative of poor quality?by drtz
6/4/2026 at 10:41:30 PM
This is exactly it.I've said many times that I believe "using the computer will transparently involve having it write and run code for you" (and if you're not technical you won't even know it!). What you're saying goes in that direction as well.
I feel that it's often better for us to create purpose-built tools for our lives, and with every model release, the complexity of those tools grows.
These are really personal tools: they solve a problem that other people might have, but are very tied to your own specific way of working, and would be hard to explain or adapt to someone else. So: shop jigs.
I have about 10 custom scripts and programs that are like this -- I haven't felt like this since college! Back then I had all the time in the world to customize my setup...now I have agents!
In a way, I want to show this to all my friends, but whenever I mentally trace how that would go, I realize they wouldn't really understand a bunch of the quirks they have, because they are _my_ quirks. They're reasonably complex pieces of tech that solve my problems very well, which are themselves particular versions of broader problems, and which I (at least for now) have no interest in supporting.
It's so clear we're heading in this direction, and yet so many people still believe code will be for the elites. Maybe production-code...As for the rest, I think soon your mom and dad are going to have their computer running code it wrote to serve them. Security-wise it's scary, but it's exciting to think about!
by jorl17
6/5/2026 at 3:50:33 AM
Sure it’s possible for anyone to build a harness if they had the inclination, but most people don’t have the inclination to do that.And even if you did… I spent months refining AI workflows that were just obsoleted by ultracode.
by ashdksnndck
6/5/2026 at 5:34:11 AM
Just as Python is batteries included language, we similarly need batteries included harnesses as well. This is what I don't like minimalism setups like Pi.by Npovview
6/5/2026 at 12:56:40 AM
I’ve been looking for a way to articulate this shift, and your analogy nails it. The value of libraries and infrastructure components in software engineering is eroding fast.I am sure that in many organizations, teams responsible for this sort of work have less and less users coming to them.
by hsaliak
6/5/2026 at 2:24:28 AM
Maybe for developer tooling, but on the consumer app side I think it's the opposite: MusicKit is much more valuable than Music.app now, because Claude can one-shot most reasonable things you could ask it to do. I think there's actually more value in ambitious libraries than there was 5 years ago, when any serious use of a library entailed a minimum 5-figure investment of time.by tptacek
6/5/2026 at 4:27:32 AM
I had a pleasant experience one-shotting a dashboard on top of a library designed for building dashboards. Because everything was abstracted away, the chatbot had relatively few places it could get into the weeds. If I'd asked for the same thing from scratch, I think the result would have been more inconsistent, and would have had more bugs.So I can definitely see the value in a library for constraining the chatbot to some well-worn paths.
by flir
6/5/2026 at 6:59:42 AM
In general this is the way I see open source going.We won't reuse open source libraries as libraries we import, but as design inspiration for the bespoke tools we make.
It's too cheap to make your own stuff and too expensive to be stuck with someone else primitives.
But grounding AI Coding in existing tools is incredibly powerful.
by nbardy
6/4/2026 at 11:23:19 PM
I agree with this wholeheartedly.by borski
6/5/2026 at 3:41:46 PM
100% concur and if you dig into any of these tools they are all frameworks and wrappers with prompt injectionsby AndrewKemendo
6/5/2026 at 10:02:03 AM
[flagged]by claud_ia
6/4/2026 at 9:08:43 PM
[dead]by sieabahlpark
6/4/2026 at 9:27:31 PM
[flagged]by zuzululu
6/4/2026 at 9:30:51 PM
As a woodworker, it’s a really nice analogy and beyond anything I’ve seen AI do.by ryancw
6/4/2026 at 10:06:44 PM
No idea why people are so upset I genuinely thought his references using analogy was a typical AI slop comment that I'm used to seeing from chatgptby zuzululu
6/4/2026 at 10:25:57 PM
Believe it or not, people have been making analogies since before AIby Retr0id
6/4/2026 at 10:38:01 PM
They used to, they still do, but they used to too.by timacles
6/4/2026 at 10:50:33 PM
I believe you and you can also believe AI is pretty good at it too.by zuzululu
6/4/2026 at 9:28:16 PM
It really doesn’tby ghhhibhc
6/4/2026 at 9:29:29 PM
[flagged]by zuzululu
6/4/2026 at 9:31:36 PM
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