Michael Murphy @murphym4

This paper is f*cking brilliant A computer science paper establishes harness engineering as the primary determinant of AI agent reliability The result: the ETCLOVG seven-layer architecture unifies execution sandboxes, tool protocols, context state, lifecycle graphs, observability, verifiers, and governance The crazy part is how harness engineering boosts performance without changing the underlying model Optimizing the execution harness alone increased SWE-bench coding benchmarks from 6.7% to 68.3% Most developers try to fix agent failures by upgrading to larger LLMs This framework shifts system reliability from model weights to deterministic harness architecture Read the complete paper + article below Bookmark it for future reference

beamnxw ./ @beamnxw

2 months ago

x.com/i/article/2080…

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In South Africa we have watched a quiet but relentless slide into lawlessness. Jumping traffic lights has become commonplace. Driving under the influence is often treated lightly. Pedestrians cross roads with little regard for the danger. Informal settlements spring up overnight on any open piece of land. Illegal electricity connections are no longer treated as serious offences - they are simply accepted as part of daily life. Informal traders claim pavements and intersections as their own. Prisoners somehow manage to keep smartphones. Driving without a licence is widespread. One could go on forever. The point is simple: there has been a clear breakdown in law and order. On the surface, the relaxation of rules is understandable. For decades, harsh and often humiliating laws targeted black South Africans in particular. So society swung from one extreme to the other, from rigid control to an “anything goes” environment. In many ways this chaos is presented as freedom, the freedom that was denied to the majority for so long. We even open our borders to illegal immigration with the argument: “They took us in when we were running from the apartheid police.” A noble memory, but a problematic policy. I once listened to a Minister of Correctional Services speaking about prisoners. The minister spoke much like a principal talking about learners, our collective duty to help them reach their full potential. The fact that some of these individuals were rapists, hardened killers and career criminals seemed to fade behind the focus on rehabilitation. We appear to have confused ordinary criminals with the political prisoners of the past. In our emphasis on ubuntu there is often little room left for the discipline that law and order require. It is as if, as a nation, we struggle to hold both compassion and consequences together. This confused state is not progressive. It is setting us backwards. I know of no country that has ever become successful on a foundation of chaos. We urgently need to strike the right balance, one that honours our painful history without using it as a permanent excuse to abandon the very rules that keep a society from falling apart. #ProudlySA

🇿🇦When people don’t know what they’re doing things get broken … ☹️😡🇿🇦

Currency @currencynewsza

2 months ago

EXCLUSIVE | It’s a full-blown governance crisis at the PIC: the CEO is challenging his suspension in court; the deputy finance minister has resigned as chair; the board has apparently collapsed; and the finance minister is accused of interference. currencynews.co.za/high-drama-as-…

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Unbelievable. There is no management of anything, but even if there were, there is now no money to do anything about anything. The City has been run into the ground.

SABC News @SABCNews

2 months ago

WATCH | Seven months ago, the City of Johannesburg lost access to all automated traffic speed cameras. The Johannesburg Metro Police Department’s contract with the service provider, Syntell, lapsed in December last year, and no replacement has been appointed yet.

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If you've been in tech for some time, this should be obvious: Every single "success story" about a rewrite/migration etc published on a company page is half-truth. The positives will all be true! But those posts will not share all or some key negatives (even ones people observed) "real" alternatives considered... and even if they did, they would not contain: The Incentives + Dynamics The internal, often unsaid incentives that help with faster career advancemement, the internal dynamics that are unique to a set of companies. And without understanding all of these, if you copy this "success story" inside your team/company with different incentives and dynamics, you'll be disappointed.

If you lived through the era when sysadmins stopped handcrafting server pets, what's happening now should feel eerily familiar. Nondeterminism will require more engineering discipline, not less. This is our best chance to take our engineering values mainstream. charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/ai-demands-m…

For the first time in 123 years, Argentina has achieved a sustained fiscal surplus without being in default. We are one of only 5 countries in the world in this position. LONG LIVE FREEDOM, DAMN IT...!!!

Most codebases don't need a rewrite. They need a thousand small fixes that nobody schedules. That's the 𝗕𝗼𝘆 𝗦𝗰𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗥𝘂𝗹𝗲: 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁. Robert C. Martin popularized it in his book Clean Code (2008). This term comes from Scouting: leave the campsite cleaner than you found it. How does this look in practice: You open an old module to add a feature, but inside you find a processData() method that has more than 200 lines, and some blocks of commented-out code. You could add your feature and leave it. The rule says 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 while you're there. Split the function. Delete the dead code. Rename the variable that lied to you for ten minutes. Each fix cost you a few minutes, but they compound. Google engineers have a phrase for this: 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗼𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘁, 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗶𝘁. Modify a file and its quality is now yours. Over a product's lifetime, thousands of these cleanups happen during unrelated work. That's what keeps a decade-old codebase workable. Two boundaries keep the rule honest. First, it's not yak shaving. One small improvement near the code you're already changing, not endless polishing. Second, it's not charity. It's 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆. A developer who dumps sloppy code just to close the ticket makes the codebase worse for everyone who comes after. Broken Windows Theory says one visible hack invites the next. The Boy Scout Rule is the 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿-𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲. Instead of leaving the first broken window, you repair one pane on every visit. What's the smallest fix you shipped in your last PR?

Stanford + Meta just dropped the paper that flips everything about AI agents. It's called "Code as Agent Harness." Right now, we treat large language models as text generators. When they need to solve a complex problem, they rely on a "chain of thought." But natural language is slippery. It's vague. It loses context. When an agent hallucinates in English, it just keeps talking. So they introduced a framework that changes the entire architecture of autonomy: "Code as Agent Harness." They stopped asking the AI to reason in words, and forced it to reason in code. Code isn't just the final output anymore. It is the memory. It is the environment. It is the boundary. Instead of writing a paragraph about how to solve a problem, the agent writes a script, executes it, and reads the output. Tests become its senses. Execution logs become its memory. Sandboxes become its physics. If an agent makes a mistake in English, it apologizes and hallucinates again. If an agent makes a mistake in code, the compiler throws an error. The trace tells it exactly what broke. The system forces it to fix it. This is where prompt engineering dies, and systems engineering takes over. The paper proves that reliability doesn't come from a smarter base model. It comes from the "harness" wrapped around it: - The model proposes. - The harness executes. - The environment returns feedback. - The verifier checks.

3 days ago, Elon Musk sat in front of JP Morgan’s 3,500 wealthiest investors and explained why the AI economy is moving to space: 1. Starship is the first rocket in history designed to be fully reusable. Every other mode of transport... planes, cars, ships... you take reusability for granted. Rockets have always been thrown away after one use. That ends with Starship. Once you achieve full reusability, the only cost is fuel. Starship runs on liquid oxygen and methane. Both are cheaper than jet fuel. 2. Sending cargo to orbit will soon cost less than international air freight. This is not a distant projection. It is the direct mathematical outcome of reusable rockets plus cheap propellant. The economics of space change entirely. 3. Starlink V3 is 10 to 20 times more capable than what's currently in orbit. The satellite is so large it can only launch on Starship. It cannot fit on any other rocket on Earth. 100 times more bandwidth. Half the latency. It may become the highest bandwidth, lowest latency communication system that exists. 4. AI and robots will consume bandwidth at a scale humans cannot picture. Peak human bandwidth is a few hundred bits per second. A computer runs at a trillion. The appetite of AI for data infrastructure will be unlike anything built for human use. Starlink V3 is being built for that world... not this one. 5. Data centers are moving to space. Not as an experiment. As the primary way to scale AI compute going forward. It is increasingly hard to build power plants on the ground. Nobody wants one near their home. Space removes that constraint entirely. 6. From the moon, you can scale to 1,000 terawatts of compute per year. From Earth... maybe 1. The moon has no atmosphere and one-sixth Earth's gravity. You can manufacture solar panels from moon materials and launch data centers with a railgun. No rockets needed. The math on this is not close. 7. Current human civilization uses less than one trillionth of the sun's energy output. You could scale to a million times Earth's entire economy and still be using less than one millionth of what the sun produces. The ceiling on what's possible is so far above us it barely registers as a ceiling. 8. There is not a single high-volume computer memory fab in America right now. Zero. The chips needed to build the AI future do not exist in sufficient quantity anywhere in the Western world. That is why SpaceX is building one. Not to compete. Because there is no other option. 9. SpaceX has been cash flow positive since around 2014. The IPO is not a distress move. Past funding rounds were not even fundraising... they were liquidity events for employees. The company bought back its own stock. The IPO is happening now because the next phase requires capital private markets cannot absorb. 10. The senior team has barely changed in over a decade. The CFO has been there 15 years. Musk joined as the seventh employee in 2002. He says people who believe in the mission don't leave. And above technical skill, he now looks for one thing... whether someone is genuinely a good person.

The average South African earning R30,000 a month pays almost half of their salaries to the government. businesstech.co.za/news/business-…

Creation of exploits enabling cyberattacks takes only a few hours when done via AI. Good luck keeping pace with security in slow-paced corporate or enterprise ecosystems. red.anthropic.com/2026/n-days/

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If you've adopted AI at your company but haven't seen any tangible results, read this 1990 article: "The Dynamo and the Computer" by Paul David. When electricity first arrived, factories that "adopted" it barely got faster. They just swapped the steam engine for an electric one and ran everything else exactly as before: same machine layout, same workflow, same management. Electricity in, no real gains out. The most common mistake with any new technology is to drop it into the old organization and then declare the transformation done. The real leap came decades later, when each machine got its own small motor. Suddenly machines no longer had to be lined up around one central drive shaft. They could be rearranged around the actual flow of work. The productivity gains didn't come from electricity. They came from REDESIGNING THE ENTIRE FACTORY around it. AI is the same. Bolting it onto your existing process gets you a faster steam engine. The payoff comes when you redesign the work itself. (link to paper in comments)

You can't describe what you haven't met. Your AI agent keeps shipping garbage and you keep "fixing the verifier." But the verifier isn't the problem. It's checking the output against a reality your agent never actually saw. That's the trap nobody names: a broken step low in the stack disguises itself as a problem higher up. Bad context looks like a bad checker. So you tighten the checker. Nothing improves. You're interrogating the judge while the witness is lying. There's an order to this, and it's not a vibe. It's gravity. You can feel a thing before you touch it. You can touch it before you can describe it. But you can't describe what you've never touched, and you can't verify what you've never seen. Encounter → then describe → then check → then coordinate. Never backwards. So when your agent fails, don't start at the top. Start at the floor: Did it actually see the real task, or a stale summary of it? Are you debugging from the raw trace, or from a pass/fail score that tells you nothing? Fix the encounter first. Everything you build on top of it only becomes trustworthy once the thing underneath is real. Specs describe reality. They don't replace it. Build in that order or you'll polish the map while the territory burns.

Businesses are driven by self-interest. Yet in pursuing it, they build infrastructure, hire workers, and support universities and technical colleges to secure skilled talent. If growth opportunities exist, they seize them aggressively. The “investment boycott” narrative is makes no sense.

I hold no candle for Musk but what I really cannot abide anymore is the sort of rich person, often but not always paid by the public, who always thinks there’s something more important than growth and jobs. South Africans are so inured to our staggering level of unemployment that we simply cannot see the world historical scale of it. It is more or less unprecedented globally, outside of war zones. Ever. Public policy-making involves tradeoffs. Given our mind-blowing level of unemployment, there are very, very few things that make risking more growth a good idea. Very few. Starlink is not one of them. Yes, there are security considerations to take care of, and we should take care of them. But for Pete’s sake, can we just, for once, work backwards from the real problem here?

Max du Preez @MaxduPreez

4 months ago

Strong arguments by @RediTlhabi that cannot simply by swept off the table by the minister

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@MaxduPreez @NatashaMarrian @RediTlhabi So let me get this right. Starlink is available in over 150 countries worldwide but it’s a national security threat to SA? #MuskDelusionSyndrome

Redi Tlhabi just dropped a piece calling @Starlink a “national security threat” to South Africa… and warning us not to sell our democracy to @elonmusk . But she “forgot” to mention her piece is hosted on Phillip van Niekerk’s Substack, the same guy who’s A PAID CONSULTANT FOR MTN. MTN has every incentive to slow-walk Starlink while pushing its own satellite plays. Transparency matters when lecturing about “democracy” and foreign influence.

Redi Tlhabi @RediTlhabi

4 months ago

My piece on why Starlink IS a national security issue for South Africa. africaunscrambled.substack.com/p/dont-hand-so…

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Eli Lilly has done it. They've gone and made what seems to be a powerful, permanent gene therapy for LDL cholesterol. That means they'll be able to effectively prevent most heart disease with a single infusion!