Your experience mirrors my own. I don't know if he coined the term, but Steve Yegge talks about 'heresies' that creep in to a system -- untrue things that stick around and permanently influence its behavior. I still find that these happen regularly and stopped using self-managing memory systems because they make heresies even harder to diagnose and remove.
Within projects, I make heavy use of path-scoped rules to intentionally bring context where it's needed, and also make heavy use of temp directories. LLMs are more than happy to produce ad-hoc memories/summaries/context docs that I can then point a session to, but I can be selective and intentional about it.
I like that memoryfield is portable, intentional and composable. I'm not convinced that sharing memoryfields between users will be practical, but I keep isolated virtual environments for absolutely everything. I like the idea of being able to intentionally bring collections of managed context around with me. There are other ways to do that, but will keep an eye on this.
This is a real problem, and it’s not just in markdown files and docs. Claude loves to write things we’ve “discovered” in comments and then later in treats the comments as gospel truth.
You have to constantly tend the garden and weed these things out.
Whenever Claude makes some error ask it where and why? And then dig out the weed.
And of course if it’s in the context, probably time for a handover doc (which will need weeding) and started fresh.
> This is a real problem, and it’s not just in markdown files and docs. Claude loves to write things we’ve “discovered” in comments and then later in treats the comments as gospel truth.
There's a simple fix for this: do not let it write comments. Ever. This also has the nice property that there's much less AI slop to clean up afterwards.
Having lived in the DC area for almost two decades, I don't agree. There are absolutely pockets that match your description but, if that's all you see I think you might be stuck in a bubble. I see so much more. There are cool companies that have been and are being built here (I was going to list them, but the Washingtonian "DC Tech Titans" list has lots of good examples), many not B2G... and people who still have 'the spark' (and many more who I think could rekindle it).
There's also a hugely educated workforce, many of whom don't love their daily grind (hiring opportunity). There's a creative community in DC and even more so if you include the greater DMV or mid-Atlantic. A ton of compute and infrastructure (including us-east-1) is based here, which has its own benefits for businesses.
In my opinion, one of the things that would benefit the region is a less conservative (read: more risk-tolerant) investment community. YC isn't the only way to get that done, but I think it would be a helpful catalyst.
Washingtonian is very pay to play. However, I'll point some that appear private like Cvent are in DC area because their early customers were trade groups that put on big conferences. These trade groups are here because they lobby the government. So doesn't appear government focused at first but is.
Others may have private sector customers but do huge amount of business with government. Appian, looking at you.
Yes, almost all my work in DC area was with companies nowhere near the government but it was very difficult and I stayed with jobs longer than I wanted. Also, hiring was very very difficult. We would churn through tech resumes and interviews because either inflated salary due to clearance or just people who wanted to push button and get paid well for it. It was always very frustrating.
Also, why do people seem to think there is tech hubs around big cloud datacenter? When did people start caring about being close to their workloads?
Completely agree those lists are pay to play, but they also include some cool companies that underscore my point.
Rocket Money (nee True Bill; Silver Spring) is fintech. Optoro (Bethesda) is retail supply chain. Alarm.com (Tysons) is home security. FrameBridge (also Tysons) is home goods. (Beyond that, you've got companies like Mapbox, ID.me, Opower, Motley Fool, and Capitol One.)
Cvent - agreed on causation, but don't agree that it's government focused. The US Government spending is something like 1/3 of GDP. It has massive ability to influence policy and national investment. It makes sense that non-profits, associations, and others would congregate in the DC region. It's why we have at least 2 nuclear fusion companies based here (one of which has a freaking rail gun in Chantilly).
I should really do the math, but it feels like a significant portion of the Fortune 500 have "more than just lobbying" footprints within ~25 miles of DC.
On hiring I agree that it can be hard, but I do still see cool small companies in the "#DCTech" scene. I think there's talent out there that could be moved to companies doing interesting impactful work.
As for data centers, I'll concede that point. I almost omitted it originally because I couldn't connect the dots either.... I should have.
Sure, with the money involved, there is some private companies. I worked for one you named. However, startup scene will always have government focused entities and therefore non-government specialized VCs (like YC) probably don't see juice worth the squeeze to try and find a few diamonds in the rough.
As for talent moving to companies doing interesting impactful work, I'm not sure I see it. Tech people moving into area seemed to be drawn by government work so they are gone. Home grown tech workers are mixed bag of which I'm one. Some followed their parents and join the ranks of government employees/contractors. Others did find private employment. Really good ones seemed to depart the area. I wasn't really good one, I just moved for my partner.
everyone is moving away from us-east, the talent is mostly in northern virginia and focused on defense not actual tech talent,
i took a brief look at that "Tech Titans" list and frankly it is not that impressive, compared to an actual hub like SF, NYC, Seattle or even compared to tier 2 hubs like Boston or LA.
i mean they're counting "Vox Media" as a tech startup... which is very DC, I guess. many of the others also are due to regulatory reasons, like Revature or Wirewheel.
Some people may be moving away from us-east, but new datacenters are going up. That wouldn't happen unless someone thinks there's growth ahead.
As for "not actual tech talent," I don't agree. There's talent from Richmond to Baltimore. But something is missing, which was the point of my original post in this thread... a mindset shift could be impactful.
For the tech titans, it's not a complete list, but I used it as a shortcut. There are companies on there you may have overlooked (Rocket Money, Optoro, Alarm.com)
Maryland has companies across edtech, health tech, bio/pharma, hospitality, and cyber (not enumerating since many aren't household names, though Marriott is).
NoVa has regional/global HQs for Amazon, Capital One, CustomInk, E-Trade, Google, Iridium (and several other satellite companies), Mars (the candy people), Microsoft, Nestle, Rolls-Royce, USA Today (and Gannett), and Volkswagen.
DC itself is largely focused on gov and gov-adjacent companies, but the community is rebuilding. There are still people pushing tech forward here.
I'm not affiliated with either but DC Tech has a meetup Wednesday, and TEDXMidAtlantic happens Saturday. Sounds like you might not live here anymore but, if you're at either, I'd love to say hi and continue the conversation.
There's still movement in the region. Anzu-Green today announced a $100 million fund [1] and two weeks ago Andreessen Horowitz announced they're opening a DC office this quarter [2].
I'm aware of Astroscale (https://astroscale.com/). They're a Japanese company with a presence in the US and UK that's commercializing this sort of service. I'm not sure if they have plans for multi-satellite de-orbit services, but they do have single-satellite plans.
Among other things, they're promoting a standardized docking adapter (https://astroscale.com/docking-plate/) to give satellite operators a path to either life extension (refueling and/or orbit raising) or de-orbit.
Within projects, I make heavy use of path-scoped rules to intentionally bring context where it's needed, and also make heavy use of temp directories. LLMs are more than happy to produce ad-hoc memories/summaries/context docs that I can then point a session to, but I can be selective and intentional about it.
I like that memoryfield is portable, intentional and composable. I'm not convinced that sharing memoryfields between users will be practical, but I keep isolated virtual environments for absolutely everything. I like the idea of being able to intentionally bring collections of managed context around with me. There are other ways to do that, but will keep an eye on this.