Agentic Avalanche Avoidance
The fundamental task we ALL face in the 2020s.
When I wrote In A World Moving On it was a tacit acknowledgement that the fifteen month epilogue to what this site once was needed to be firmly put down, or the unquiet spirit of fifteen years of rear guard defense of democracy would arise again.
That is well and truly over, it’s society’s problem now, but I find myself in a similar place that echoes those years. AI is coming at white collar work like a newly detected kilometer class asteroid, not a full on extinction level event, but there’s an imminent global winter for those of us in knowledge work, and it’ll last a lifetime.
The first and last line of Stephen King’s magnum opus, the Dark Tower series, again comes to mind.
“The Man In Black Fled Across The Desert,
And The Gunslinger Followed.”
So what do we DO about this agentic avalanche? There’s a lesson in how skiers handle masses of sliding snow on the slopes. You keep moving, swimming as hard as you can, because when the motion stops that white stuff sets up like concrete. So that’s it, that’s the plan - we’re going to move.
There are three sorts of things you’re going to find here going forward.
Free Problem Statements and a paid Solutions section.
Tool Time will be a review of whatever new thing being inspected.
Parabeagle is a legal and intel focused fork of the Chroma vector database.
I’ll pose real world problem and my solutions with the intent that you spend five minutes reading and twenty five minutes tinkering with your LLM of choice, getting a feel for how to solve a puzzle that fits into one single learning session.
I’m spending $100/month for Claude Max, I’m watching Perplexity struggle to keep up via a gratis $20/month Perplexity Pro account I got last year, and recently I grudgingly paid for some Anthropic API tokens. If you’re not spending at all, get the $20/month Claude Pro. If you’re spending $20/month on several things, maybe scrap all of them like I did in exchange for the potent Claude Max. I am aiming to get my activity level to overrun that $100/month subscription, getting to the $200/month level, and having probably another $100 in other tools. When the Perplexity Pro freebie runs out I’ll continue giving them $20/month, assuming they survive.
That is a guess at what an active, successful professional will need. If you expect inference to be free, you are relaxing while the avalanche buries you, and you’ll end up too deep for anyone to get to you in time. Remember your cell phone bill from the turn of the century, when it was a dime a minute? That’s where we are, get used to paying if you want something that works.
Hardware wise I’m on Mac and so is everyone I work with closely. The combination of Apple Gear and a Max subscription gets the new stuff weeks and weeks before the groundlings see it. An M1 Mac Air is under $500 if you need mobile, the minimal Mac Mini is $600 if you’ve got a desktop environment. I won’t harp on this, but there are going to be articles where “open your Mac and log into your Claude Max” will be the foundation of the Solution section.
I am on a 7x16 schedule, trying to get my startup funded. Part of what motivated this reboot has been hearing “Wait, how did you …” a couple times a week from my cofounders. As the one with a computer science education, professional certificates in networking, and a four decade run in the business, I am generally ahead of the rest on ingesting all of this change.
I am sharing what I do here for a number of reasons, and one of the most important is that you never truly know a topic until you have to convey it to someone else.
