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AL Andrew Lisowski Andrew Lisowski Senior software engineer at Snowflake and co-founder of Graze and Cocore, who has also built tools including Kich, Kikbak and Standard Reader.

“Everybody's accusing everybody else of slop right now. But I don't think you'd accuse them of slop if you saw their month-long chat with AI that probed the depths of mathematics.”

devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“Everybody's accusing everybody else of slop right now. But I don't think you'd accuse them of slop if you saw their month-long chat with AI that probed the depths of mathematics.” — Andrew Lisowski, devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development

Context

Andrew was talking about a developer who spent a month using LLMs to explore and prove mathematical theorems. He suggests that publishing the full agent sessions behind such work would change how people judge it.

Transcript

devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development Around 40:17 into the episode
Andrew Lisowski

Yeah.

Tarun Sachdeva

…be, there's, there, there's so much nuance to these things. And you kind of have to, you have to like think of a task as not just a singular, like, I did this, I pushed this much code, this is how much it costs. It's like, there's a lot more in the middle there that you, you, you have to consider.

Andrew Lisowski

Yeah, just on time savings alone. Like if I prompted $400 away, but I saved three months of my own life like going down different paths and finding like the dead ends. Like it's kind of hard to quantify that upfront. There's a lot of, yeah.

Tarun Sachdeva

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This is also why we. We intentionally chose to not surface token counts in the product as a default thing, right? Like tokens are not something we are overly fixated on as a product. We are very much of like a tool to help developers collaborate with each other in this new…

Andrew Lisowski

Yeah. Recently, Dan Abramov, a famous React guy, took a detour for a month to go into mathematics and prove like theorems and stuff. And talking about this makes me think that that type of work really fits to this model too, because he spent a month prompting LLMs and probing the depths of them and…

Tarun Sachdeva

Yeah, exactly. And those conversations are some of the most interesting. You know, we have some really interesting ones on our that are shared publicly as well. And I think that, you know, your point here is exactly very astute is that agents are the primary interface to really all knowledge work.…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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