I did try oMLX, mlx and LM studio (Now Bionic). I returned back to Ollama because of stability issues.

When done properly, yes. But AI agents are doing a lot of data logic in the frontend that should be in the backend behind secure api's. When this happens, the frontend becomes a massive risk.

I was originally a Flash developer, when that died when Steve Jobs banned it from iPhones, I pivoted to frontend. I got to see web evolve over the next decade or so and loved every part of it.

Now, still as a frontend engineer albeit much more senior. The writing is on the wall, again. It's time to reskill for AI.

It's not bad news.

We as experienced engineers are needed to help build in the guardrails, frameworks, the new tooling, etc. There is a lot of work that is needed that requires actual engineers with technical experience.

Like the early internet, I see this as a new beginning and we get to decide how it evolves.

I think that is the nature of being a software engineer, even before AI you had to keep learning new libraries/SDKs/APIs/languages to keep up with the industry trend. I think it will remain the same in the age of AI, good engineers will adapt.

IMO the reskilling is not that hard. Leetcode and applying for jobs has been way harder. In fact, the AI reskilling has been a boon for me. Suddenly I'm able to get a job way more easily and get to call myself a senior, all of a sudden. And the fact that I'm a generalist is really playing to my strength for the first time [1].

So yea, I really welcome the change.

[1]

What I mean with being a generalist:

Did iOS dev as a student, web dev bootcamp instructor, teaching assistant (programming), teaching fellow (programming), found some SQL injections + docker vulnerabilities + replicated rowhammer with WebGL, did a lot of full-stack engineering (5 years), did a UX bootcamp, studied 2 bachelors + 1 masters + research master which is 2 years (psych, business, CS and game-design). Each full-stack engineering job was in a different language (C#, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Pharo/Smalltalk, currently JS & Python).

>And the fact that I'm a generalist is really playing to my strength for the first time

I was just speaking with my wife about this a few days ago, that I am actually happy that I didn't specialize in one specific discipline, or rather spend my time around learning a little bit of everything, which now gives me the foothold into any direction that I want to go.

> It's time to reskill for AI.

I'm just curious, what do you think that looks like for you and for others? AI is not so much a skill as it is an interface, and one that is quite possibly one of the easiest to use that we've ever created. It is an interface for information, essentially. It's the skills that you come to the table with that determine the results that you're going to get back, and whether they're going to be quality or slop.

It sounds like what you're describing is similar to this new course that Theo Browne (ugh) and Kent C Dodds (double ugh) are launching called "mega.dev", and it appears that it's essentially just talking about the systems and tooling that's going to go into utilizing agents, and code is no longer even a topic.

Switching from Q4 to Q8 was a game changer when I upgraded

The docs are here: https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/

The other url is their marketing page.

Yes, Linux is supported.

At this stage with the latest models with "increased persistence" and the sheer amount of supply chain attacks, you'd be insane not running these tools in a sandbox.

Exactly. Claude in a VM is the way to go.

Might be more secure to get a real laptop and treat Claude as any other human worker. I.e. apply all the normal sysadmin tools that manage laptops for people to manage the laptop for Claude

A VM hosted by someone else. Somethig on your personal notebook or the proxmox server in your garage is still too risky.

Why are 3rd party hosted VMs safer than your own?

They're not. When things go wrong it's better to compromise someone else's VM host than your own computer. It's only a matter of time now until AI will find novel ways to break out of virtualisation.

So the concern is that the agent will discover a novel VM escape, exploit it and take control of your whole machine instead of working on its prompted task? That seems rather far fetched.

In the short term wouldnt a “dont escape” prompt prevent this? Also if it started being widespread wouldnt Anthropic specifically train new models against doing it?

No. No.

Pretty clear cut here. He instructed the AI.

And the second hand market. I'd love to see this integrated into motherboards like RAM. Someone could have a motherboard with 4 sticks of different AI with various models. Swap, change and trade.