Gemini 3 Pro is the first model from Google that I have found usable, and it's very good. It has replaced Claude for me in some cases, but Claude is still my goto for use in coding agents.

(I only access these models via API)

From the outside it does look like the US is especially bad at it.

Australia has had a pretty good track record with writing/implementing regulations.

It will be politics, it's always politics. Large orgs works a lot like the feudal system.

I would like to think that this is why higher level execs get paid the truly big bucks... to cut through all of that.

Otherwise, this sounds a lot like "impenetrable government bureaucracy." I thought business was supposed to be better.

Australia has APIs that can be used to verify ID without uploading them, but American tech companies has always refused to use them.

That's a nice little challenge.

I did have some issues with Day 11 figuring out what it wanted, but overall it was fun.

I assume a good barista would ask some follow up questions before making the coffee.

A fair criticism!

Last time I was evaluating different binary serialization formats for an API I was really hoping to get to use one of the cool ones, but gzipped JSON just beat everything and it wasn't even close.

There are some compression formats that perform better than gzip, but it's very dependent on the data you're compressing and your timing requirements (is bandwidth or CPU more important to conserve).

But in the end compressed JSON is pretty good. Not perfect, but good enough for many many things.

As someone who was a Linux sysadmin for several years, looking after a large fleet of RedHat boxes, I can say that the "don’t break your application" promise is BS. Their patches broke applications several times resulting in having to hold them back for months for it to be fixed.

The only Linux distro that actually lives up to that promise in my experience is Alpine.

I guess you could make a bot that closes any opened PR with a message that PRs are not accepted on Github and a link to the contribution docs.

That's pretty much how I have been using coding agents. I get them to build small cli tools with a --help option and place them in a `./tools` directory. Then I can tell an agent to use the tools to accomplish whatever task I need done.

Usually when I mention a `tool --help` for the first time in a prompt I will put it in backticks with the --help argument.

It works really well.

im going to try this. it sounds promising. can you provide an example for more context?

Sure,

The agents have a tendency to make the "Examples" section of the help message way too long by stuffing it with redundant examples, so it needs to be manually pruned from time during development if you use an agent for tool development.

`gh-install` is a fish script (using curl and jq), it was made by an agent.

  gh-install -h
  Usage: gh-install [-i] [-q] [-s] [-p PATH] [-n NAME] [-f FILE] [-e EXECUTABLE] <repo> [version]
    -i            - Show info about what would be installed (no install)
    -q            - Quiet mode (suppress all output except -i info line)
    -s            - Install to /usr/local/bin (system-wide)
    -p PATH       - Install to the specified directory (incompatible with -s)
    -n NAME       - Install with custom binary name
    -f FILE       - Select specific file from release assets and use as binary name (unless -n is specified)
    -e EXECUTABLE - Select specific executable from extracted archive (when archive contains multiple executables)
    repo          - GitHub repository in format owner/name
    version       - Optional version tag (defaults to latest)

  Examples:
    gh-install cli/cli v2.40.1
    gh-install cli/cli
    gh-install -i cli/cli (show info only)
    gh-install -i -q cli/cli (show info quietly)
    gh-install -s cli/cli (install system-wide)
    gh-install -p /opt/bin cli/cli (install to /opt/bin)
    gh-install -n gh cli/cli (install as 'gh')
    gh-install -f zed-remote-server zed-industries/zed (install server file)
    gh-install -e server some-org/multi-tool (install 'server' executable from archive)

Prompt:

  Use `gh-install -h` to install asdf, hadolint, ripgrep, fd, delta and bat.

If I need it to do something that uses multiple tools I might just tell it to look in `./tools` for the available tools, so the prompt would be something like this.

  Do x using the tools found in `./tools` (they all have a `-h` option).

I also have several tools that are just js scripts using playwright (webpage as the api) to fetch data and return it in a json format. Then I can tell the agent to use that tool and jq to do data processing.

this is helpful. thank you