Sidequest: METR is weird (as a nirmie)

I wish I’d bionifed my Archive browser.

AWS ask

If you’re the 150th team to implement tagging, there’s a lot of prior art to automate against, no coordination needed(the oythrrr 90% of software engineering.!

Maybe everyone else figured it out and I’m the laggard, but as a normie (one of the foundations of the approach to this blog). I have trouble understanding exactly what Fable is for. Specifically, one of the biggest advertisements of it seems to be the METR improvements. You can let Fable sit there and chug away on big intractible problems, and it will chug away for days on end completing them.

But this is completely foreign to my workflow (as a Platform engineer) which mostly involves trying to make my changes as atomic as possible. Even if we could get a change completed, and Merged, which everyone talks about as the current bottleneck, getting the code out to production, and then importantly - used by people - is still a huge bottleneck. I could use Fable to churn out 300 features, but then internally marketing those features to software devs? That’s another step entirely.

It sort of makes me think, what is the actual mental model around “Automating code”. I don’t think it’s an engineer sitting at a terminal prompting code changes.