I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations.

I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!

> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.

This seems like a false dichotomy. You don't have to do this. It is still possible to build magical things. But agents aren't it, I don't think.

It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from a founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years. I formed connections, spent thousands of hours enjoying them together with other people, and pushed myself hard to become one of the top 100 players on the CoH leaderboards. Those competitive multiplayer games taught me everything there was to know about self-improvement, and formed the basis of my growth as an individual - learning that if I put my mind to it, I could be among the best at something, informed my worldview and led me to a life of perpetually pushing myself to further self-improvement, and from there I learned to code, draw, and play music. All of that while being part of amazing communities where I formed friendships that lasted decades.

All of this to say, Relic was magic. The work Relic did profoundly impacted my life. I wonder if you really believe your current role, "building trust infrastructure for AI agents", is actually magic? That it's going to profoundly impact the lives of thousands or millions?

I'm sorry for the jumbled nature of this post. I am on my phone, so I can't organize my thoughts as well as I would like. I am grateful to you for founding Relic, and this post probably comes off stupidly combative and ungrateful. But I would simply like to pose to you, to have a long think if what you're doing now is really where the magic is.

Edit: On further consideration, it's not clear the newly-created account I'm responding to is actually Alex Garden. The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing, but I will nonetheless leave this up in the hope that if there are people who built magical things reading this, regardless of whether they're Alex Garden or someone else, that it might just inspire them to introspection about what building magic means, about the impact software can have on people's lives even if you don't see it, and whether this "agent" stuff is really it.

[55yo] My sense is that those problems we worked on in the 80s and 90s were like the perfectly balanced MMORPG. The challenges were tough, but with grit, could be overcome and you felt like you could build something amazing and unique. My voxel moment was passing parameters in my compilers class in college. I sat down to do it and about 12 hours later I got it working, not knowing if I could even do it.

With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

I started a bit younger and am a bit older, and relate. But only so much. I started programming in 3rd grade (also BASIC) when I found a computer and learned how to play a game on it, then found the source code for the game and randomly started changing it. In 7th grade I was paid to port a BASIC program to C (super new at the time), which I did on paper because I didn't own a computer (I used the money to buy my first). To be clear, I was really bad a programming for a long time and simply kept at it until I wasn't.

I love messing about with computers still. I can work at the byte level on ESP-32s on tiny little devices, and build massive computation engines at the time time on the same laptop. It's amazing.

I feel for those who have lost their love of this space, but I have to be honest: it's not the space that's the problem. Try something new, try something different and difficult or ungainly. Do what you rail against. Explore.

That's what it's always been about.

First of all, Homeworld was an iconic game for me growing up, so as other people have said, thank you for being apart of its creation.

I could not agree more. It feels like the creativity is back. I grew up building fun little websites in the 90s, building clan websites for Quake 2.

That creativity died somewhere between Node.js, AWS, npm, and GitHub.

Some might say, well, that's growing up and building serious apps.

Maybe. But it doesn't change that I spent the last 15 years doing the same frontend / backend wiring over and over again to churn out a slightly different looking app.

The last 2 years have been amazing for what I do. I'm no longer spending my time wiring up front ends. That's done in minutes now, allowing me to spend my time thinking about solving the real problems.

For me it's both - I mourn the loss of my craft ( and my identity ) but I'm also enjoying the "magic".

Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C source code and found it.

I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like magic

The original Homeworld team was casting spells!

I'm still amazed by how you got ships to usually fly in formation, but also behave independently and rationally when that made sense.

That game was a magnificent piece of art. It set a unique and immersive vibe on par with the original Tron movie. I'm really glad I have a chance now to tell you.

I couldn't agree more. Also, thanks for making Homeworld, it was great!

I was building a 3D space game engine myself as a kid around the time Homeworld came out and realized that rather than using a skybox with texture maps, you had it created out of a bunch of triangles with color interpolation.

IIRC, I had problems reverse engineering your data format in order to incorporate them in my engine. I emailed someone on your team and was very surprised to get a reply with an explanation, which helped me finish that feature.

In the second half of my 40s now and I'm in the same boat. I started slapping keys on a c64 when I was 2 years old. Really enjoyed software development until 10-15 years ago. With the current LLM tooling available the number of systems I've been able to build that are novel and tackle significant problems has been kind of mind blowing over the past 8 months or so.

Staying up late, hacking away at stuff like I used to, and it's been a blast.

Finally, Homeworld was awesome and it felt magical playing it.

I'm feeling the same.

AI development actually feels like a similar rate of change. It took 8 years to go from the Atari 2600 to the Amiga.

An 8 year old computer doesn't quite capture the difference today.

> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.

I still vividly remember setting up gcc in a docker container to cross compile custom firmware for my cannon camera and thinking about the amount of pain my local system would have been in if I had to do all the toolchain work in my host OS. Don't know if it felt like magic, but it sure didn't hurt like the alternative!

Wow, Alex Garden on Hackernews. Hello fellow canuck. I'm now getting up there, still a few years shy of y'all but not much. I came up through the 90s and early 2000s, all web/linux stuff, irc servers, bash scripts, python, weird php hacks, whatever, I was a kid. I'd lose track of time, It was Monday night after high school then all of a sudden it was Sunday morning and I was talking on irc about the crazy LAMP stack I'd put together. 2am? pfft, what is sleep?! Sadly with very strong dyslexia and dyscalculia, being a real programmer was never in the cards for me, I understood how everything worked, I can explain the whole thing end to end in great depth, but ask me predictably how to do a table in html or some fairly simple CSS, and I'll be there for hours. I'm grateful the rest of my life allowed me to be programmer adjacent and spend so much time around developers, but always a little frustrated I couldn't pick up the hammer myself.

These days, I've never been more excited about building. The frustration of being slow with the code is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells.

Yes yes yes!!!

I'm 45 yo. And also started programming quite early around 1988. In my case it was GWBAsic games and then C ModeX and A Later Allegro based games.

Things got so boring in the last 15 years, I got some joy in doing AI research (ML, agents, Genetic Algorithms, etc).

But now, it's so cool how I can again think about something and build it so easily. I'm really excited of what I can do now. And im ot talking about the next billion dollar startup and whatnot. But the small hacky projects that LLMs made capable.yo build in no time.

I'm in my 40s, and I've been involved with computers since I was old enough to read. I was talking to some customers today about how magical it feels to blast past my own limits of my coding abilities with the help of LLMs. It's not perfect, and I mostly won't generate stuff that's a polished, finished product. But when it works, it sparks the same joy that it did when I was discovering the first bits of what computers can do on my Apple ][+.

Yeah it’s drugs and or religion. Feels pretty good.