Rob Hunter
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robbobobbo.com
Rob Hunter
@robbobobbo.com
260 followers 130 following 180 posts
Software engineer, I work with AI a lot and write about it a little:
https://robbobobbo.substack.com/
Bills fan, married to a Bears fan.
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robbobobbo.com
And where does that line shift for personal vs business use?

robbobobbo.substack.com/p/thomas-the...
Thomas the Tank Engine ABCs
How I build a custom ABCs app with Claude Code
robbobobbo.substack.com
February 8, 2026 at 12:07 AM
robbobobbo.com
So they cloned Slack, Jira, etc, and for the sake of argument let's say that it cost 1k or less in tokens. If that's the future, should you pay for Slack and Jira? What software should you pay for?
[The Digital Twin Universe is] behavioral clones of the third-party services our software depends on. We built twins of Okta, Jira, Slack, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Sheets, replicating their APls, edge cases, and observable behaviors. With the DTU, we can validate at volumes and rates far exceeding production limits. We can test failure modes that would be dangerous or impossible against live services. We can run thousands of scenarios per hour without hitting rate limits, triggering abuse detection, or accumulating API costs. How do you clone the important parts of Okta, Jira, Slack and more? With coding agents! As I understood it the trick was effectively to dump the full public API documentation of one of those services into their agent harness and have it build an imitation of that API, as a self-contained Go binary. They could then have it build a simplified Ul over the top to help complete the simulation. With their own, independent clones of those services -free from rate-limits or usage quotas - their army of simulated testers could go wild. Their scenario tests became scripts for agents to constantly execute against the new systems as they were being built.
February 8, 2026 at 12:07 AM
robbobobbo.com
The article itself seemed fine? I wanted more depth around what sorts of things got escalated, what sort of responses humans could give, but the headline they used was really malpractice

bsky.app/profile/robb...
robbobobbo.com Rob Hunter @robbobobbo.com · 6d
These passages jumped out to me. The security risks make me nervous but it seems mistaken to compare this to Amazon's shop and go thing
"They provide guidance," he argued. "They do not remotely drive the vehicles. Waymo asks for guidance in certain situations and gets an input, but the Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input." Waymo has been fairly upfront about its human operators. In a May 2024 blog post, the company compared it to a "phone-a-friend." "When the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment," the post reads. "The Waymo Driver [software] does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times." In case the car's driving software encounters something atypical, it may choose to send a request to a human fleet response agent, who then can help out by viewing real-time feeds from the vehicle's exterior cameras. Put simply, the remote agent may not control the steering wheel, but they still make major decisions on where the vehicle navigates next. During the same hearing, Tesla's VP of vehicle engineering Lars Moravy told lawmakers that Tesla's vehicles also rely on similar remote operators. "We have many layers of security within our system and, similar to what Dr. Peña said, our driving controls, go, stop, steer, are in a core embedded central layer that cannot be accessed from outside the vehicle," he said. Moravy also argued that to stop anybody from taking control of vehicles, the company "actively participates in hacking events, trying paying people to try to get into our vehicles."
February 6, 2026 at 10:17 PM
robbobobbo.com
These passages jumped out to me. The security risks make me nervous but it seems mistaken to compare this to Amazon's shop and go thing
"They provide guidance," he argued. "They do not remotely drive the vehicles. Waymo asks for guidance in certain situations and gets an input, but the Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input." Waymo has been fairly upfront about its human operators. In a May 2024 blog post, the company compared it to a "phone-a-friend." "When the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment," the post reads. "The Waymo Driver [software] does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times." In case the car's driving software encounters something atypical, it may choose to send a request to a human fleet response agent, who then can help out by viewing real-time feeds from the vehicle's exterior cameras. Put simply, the remote agent may not control the steering wheel, but they still make major decisions on where the vehicle navigates next. During the same hearing, Tesla's VP of vehicle engineering Lars Moravy told lawmakers that Tesla's vehicles also rely on similar remote operators. "We have many layers of security within our system and, similar to what Dr. Peña said, our driving controls, go, stop, steer, are in a core embedded central layer that cannot be accessed from outside the vehicle," he said. Moravy also argued that to stop anybody from taking control of vehicles, the company "actively participates in hacking events, trying paying people to try to get into our vehicles."
February 6, 2026 at 4:09 PM
robbobobbo.com
It doesn't work because it's immature, missing something(s), or fatally flawed?
February 5, 2026 at 3:02 AM
robbobobbo.com
The one dumb feature I've longed for is timeout. A follow said something so dumb and outside of their expertise, but I don't want to unfollow - I just want them muted for a week.
February 5, 2026 at 2:51 AM
robbobobbo.com
Claude has been rotten at following directions for the last couple days. I'll give codex a try... I wonder if this will be the consumer/hobbyist version of needing a contract with AWS and GCP to keep everyone honest
February 5, 2026 at 2:11 AM
robbobobbo.com
I hope the Benson score cheered you up a little. My brother is at the game and said his Panther-fan-friends conceded that it should have been worth two.
February 3, 2026 at 1:25 AM
robbobobbo.com
Starring. Have you tried it yet?
February 2, 2026 at 3:49 AM
robbobobbo.com
Seems bad: www.404media.co/exposed-molt...
Exposed Moltbook Database Let Anyone Take Control of Any AI Agent on the Site
'It exploded before anyone thought to check whether the database was properly secured.'
www.404media.co
February 1, 2026 at 2:29 PM
robbobobbo.com
Of course, the next nightmare is always coming soon... make hay while the sun shines.
I expect companies would happily pay around the $1-3k/month mark for a sane, understandable, higher quality, and lower waste version of Gas Town. Maybe that sounds absurd to you, given we’ve all become anchored to the artificially low rate of $100-200/month for unlimited usage by the major providers. But once the AI bubble pops, the VC funds dry up, and providers have to charge the true cost of inference at scale, we should expect that “unlimited” tier to look a lot pricier.
January 23, 2026 at 7:04 PM
robbobobbo.com
In particular, stacked diffs have been on my mind a lot lately. When I discovered them [late] a couple years ago at Uber it was like I was finally waking up from a horrible nightmare.
But there’s another way to sidestep merge conflict nightmares that Gas Town doesn’t have built in: ditch PRs for stacked diffs . The traditional git workflow puts each feature on its own branch for days or weeks, accumulating commits, then getting merged back as one chunky PR. Stacked diffs avoid this conflict-prone approach by breaking work into small, atomic changes that each get reviewed and merged on their own, building on top of each other. Every change gets its own branch, forked off the previous change, forming a “stack” of changes dependent on one another. When a change earlier in the stack gets updated, all the changes below it automatically rebase on top of the new version.
January 23, 2026 at 7:04 PM
robbobobbo.com
@maggieappleton.com has a very thoughtful and thorough writeup on this.

bsky.app/profile/magg...
maggieappleton.com Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 20d
I have Gas Town derangement syndrome and spent the last few weeks writing thousands of words on agent orchestration patterns; how they shift our bottlenecks and force us to ask whether and when we should stop looking at code

maggieappleton.com/gastown
Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale
On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code
maggieappleton.com
January 23, 2026 at 7:04 PM
robbobobbo.com
I doubt that orchestration systems remain in the "personal software" category, but for now that's where they've got to be. His phases of AI coding seem pretty correct to me, at least for one common path. I do think "code review best practices" are an open question.
Steve Yegge's Phases of AI Coding: First, you should locate yourself on the chart. What stage are you in your AI-assisted coding journey? Stage 1: Zero or Near-Zero AI: maybe code completions, sometimes ask Chat questions Stage 2: Coding agent in IDE, permissions turned on. A narrow coding agent in a sidebar asks your permission to run tools. Stage 3: Agent in IDE, YOLO mode: Trust goes up. You turn off permissions, agent gets wider. Stage 4: In IDE, wide agent: Your agent gradually grows to fill the screen. Code is just for diffs. Stage 5: CLI, single agent. YOLO. Diffs scroll by. You may or may not look at them. Stage 6: CLI, multi-agent, YOLO. You regularly use 3 to 5 parallel instances. You are very fast. Stage 7: 10+ agents, hand-managed. You are starting to push the limits of hand-management. Stage 8: Building your own orchestrator. You are on the frontier, automating your workflow.
January 23, 2026 at 5:43 PM
robbobobbo.com
I think he's directionally correct - you're going to want to wrangle 20+ agents in the future, and this seems like a good stab at the problem that works for Steve. Lots of engineers are writing orchestrators (myself included), and he's def ahead of me. steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-g...
Welcome to Gas Town
Happy New Year, and Welcome to Gas Town!
steve-yegge.medium.com
January 23, 2026 at 5:43 PM