That's a fair point regarding pure content absorption, especially given that many classes do suffer from poor didactics. However, the university's value proposition often lies elsewhere: access to professors researching innovations (not yet indexed by LLMs), physical labs for hands-on experience that you can't simulate, and the crucial peer networking with future colleagues. These human and physical elements, along with the soft skills developed through technical debate, are hard to replace. But for standard theory taught by uninspired lecturers, I agree that the textbook plus LLM approach is arguably superior.
That's my experience too. Agent coding works really well for existing codebases that are well-structured and organized. If your codebase is mostly spaghetti—without clear boundaries and no clear architecture in place—then agents won't be of much help. They'll also suffer working in those codebases and produce mediocre results.
Regarding building apps and systems from scratch with agents, I also find it more challenging. You can make it work, but you'll have to provide much more "spec" to the agent to get a good result (and "good" here is subjective). Agents excel at tasks with a narrower scope and clear objectives.
The best use case for coding agents is tasks that you'd be comfortable coding yourself, where you can write clear instructions about what you expect, and you can review the result (and even make minor adjustments if necessary before shipping it). This is where I see clear efficiency gains.
Sharing mine: https://thomasvilhena.com/
— writing on engineering, lessons from building a company as a technical co-founder, and whatever I’m currently curious about.
I shortened a link and when trying to access it in Chrome I get a red screen with this message:
Dangerous site
Attackers on the site you tried visiting might trick you into installing software or revealing things like your passwords, phone, or credit card numbers. Chrome strongly recommends going back to safety.
I was going to mention the same thing, also the page is clearly designed by a woman. Never mind that neither Sundar nor Satya are not white, or that many VPs in the Big Tech world are women. OP seems to have a very distorted view of the corporate world and has villified the white alpha male in her mind.
Explanation for non-native speakers (like me) who didn't know the rule:
The words "how" and "like" clash because "How" already implies manner or appearance, making the addition of "like" (which serves a similar function with "what") superfluous.
In this case. It's hard to make a firm rule because you can construct sentences with both words in them that aren't wrong-sounding, because the same word can be used in subtly grammatically different ways.
A good rule of thumb is to phrase the sentence as a question and see if it sounds correct. "What does it look like?" is fine. "How does it look?" is fine. "How does it look like?" does not. In the question "Like how?", "like" is more akin to "I said, like, what do you want me to do?" - I'm no linguist, but they do have a term for that use.
Hah, this reminds me of the Isaac Asimov story about catching Nazi spies inflitrating the US...
Given Americans' general indifference to perfect grammer, if it "sounds" right they usually don't make a fuss. So they might have learned something new as well.
I haven’t read the Asimov story, but it was probably based on this true event:
As a result, U.S. troops began asking other soldiers questions that they felt only Americans would know the answers to in order to flush out the German infiltrators, which included naming state capitals, sports and trivia questions related to the U.S., etc. This practice resulted in Brigadier General Bruce C. Clarke being held at gunpoint for some time after he incorrectly said the Chicago Cubs were in the American League[7][8][9][10] and a captain spending a week in detention after he was caught wearing German boots. General Omar Bradley was repeatedly stopped in his staff car by checkpoint guards who seemed to enjoy asking him such questions. The Skorzeny commando paranoia also contributed to numerous instances of mistaken identity. All over the Ardennes, U.S. soldiers attempted to persuade suspicious U.S. military policemen that they were genuine GIs.
Ugh, I'd fail any questions based on US sports. And, these days, 30 years removed high school civics, I'd likely miss some of the state capitals as well.
This is how it actually works. The brain machine learns from available data and sorts out which is correct. "Sounds right" is the output from that neural network. The "rules" are then derived from what some set of people think sounds right.
Hi, American here and "how" + "to look like" makes my teeth itch. However, people generally find grammar corrections to be needlessly pedantic when the erroneous grammar does not impede comprehension, so I've personally decided to choose my grammatical battles and simply fume about people talking about "how something looks like" in private instead.
I generally also choose to keep such complaints private, and I'm not sure what whim motivated me to speak up this time. Rather to my surprise, this trivial gripe has been voted up more than almost anything else I've written here over the last sixteen years. It would seem that there actually is, in some contexts, somehow, at least some appetite for grammatical pedantry!
Language is tricky. One of the trickiest things! There's so much tied up in it, objective and subjective. It's a simple tool. It's an academic object. It's a well-defined spec. It's a living ambiguous blob. But it's also one of the biggest pieces of one's culture. There's a reason the French are so possessive of their language where it lives in cultural exclaves. There's a reason the Irish have laws to keep their native language alive.
I can see at least two grammatical errors in your first two sentences.
Imagine being a grammar pedant and missing a comma before the conjunction linking two independent clauses.
It's more of an emotional reaction to the life-changing impact of $9 million, expressed that way, rather than a literal feeling to be taken word for word.
According to the article, the issue was caused by:
> "engineers had identified DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint for US-EAST-1 as the likely root cause"
Interestingly, we found matching errors in our own logs:
> System.Net.WebException
> The remote name could not be resolved: 'dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com'
Occurrences were recorded on:
- 2025-04-30
- 2025-05-29
- 2025-06-17
- Yesterday
We had logged this as a low-priority bug since previous incidents only affected our AWS testing environments (and never our production env which is on Azure). At the time, we assumed it was some CI/CD glitch.
It now seems that the underlying cause was this DNS issue all along, and only yesterday did it start impacting systems outside of AWS.
You just made me realize we had random DNS failures using ElastiCache last weeks... Totally randomly, some elasticache endpoints would fail to resolve within our VPC, bringing down some of our services.
Good read, but it stretches "data model" a bit. It's really about the product's conceptual/domain model, the primary entities you elevate and design around, and how that choice cascades into UX, pricing, and go-to-market. The examples (Slack channels, Notion blocks, Figma’s canvas, Toast's menu items) show how a strong model can compound value across features.
Where it blurs things: data model != UX strategy != business model, and success isn't only about a novel model, execution and distribution still matter greatly.
My takeaway: read "data model" here as "core conceptual model", and ask whether your product has a clear center that lets new features inherit context instead of becoming one-offs.
I would still defend the author that in fact once we look at a data model, we can see the limitations of the product. And there is no way to nullify all limitations; it will always be a tradeoff.
The elephants wandered off, and now a bunch of giraffes are drinking from the pond. Some of them even spread their legs wide to keep their feet from getting wet. Very relaxing to watch.
> Some of them even spread their legs wide to keep their feet from getting wet.
I always interpreted the spreadeagle pose of a drinking giraffe to be a way of bringing their head closer to the ground. Do they sometimes not do that?
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