> “I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”
Well, then why the hell did you write it? For purely entertainment purposes? I mean, what.
EDIT: Oh, wow, just got to the prompt. Did he... did he just think LLMs were _magic_? "Level 1: Necessary consultants that can't be insourced" - how the hell is ChatGPT supposed to know what can and cannot be insourced?
> In late March, Lavingia published a version of the “munchable” script on his GitHub account to invite others to use and improve it, he told ProPublica. “It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script and anyone in the public could see that this is how the VA is thinking about cutting contracts.”
No, that would not have been 'cool', you idiot. Bloody hell.
afavour · 23h ago
IMO this is indicative of the kind of questions anyone with DOGE on their resume will need to answer at their next interview.
- why did you do it?
- why did you not quit as soon as you realized how dangerous this was going to be?
"I did what I did, I knew there were mistakes, I don't really know what was done with the output of my work and I never tried to find out" are absolutely disqualifying statements for anyone above associate level engineering.
andrewflnr · 16h ago
Employers inclined to ask those questions will more likely just toss any resumes mentioning DOGE at an earlier stage of filtering.
kjkjadksj · 20h ago
They will probably get a favorable role at a thiel or yc associated company
krapp · 23h ago
Incompetent and destructive as they are, DOGE only did what every company and startup in the world is trying to do, aggressively integrate AI in a way that radically upsets the societal paradigm and makes a ton of money. And much of tech buys into the politics and narrative. They're rock stars. They'll never even need to interview to find work, work will come to them.
afavour · 23h ago
> And much of tech buys into the politics and narrative.
While I agree I think that's a fatalist perspective. It's on all of us working in tech to push back on that. In the unlikely event that someone with DOGE on their resume comes across my desk I certainly will be.
And if folks are able to clear their mind of ideology, this is an account of someone that was straightforwardly bad at their job. It's rare to get such a confession from an applicant, we should use it!
mistrial9 · 22h ago
zero chance that "all of us working in tech" will push anything.. worse, aggressive opportunists know this very well
afavour · 22h ago
Again, back to that being a fatalist perspective. It won’t work so there’s no point in trying. IMO it’s always worth trying.
The opportunists are a minority and they should be ostracized. They’ll always hire each other of course but the reality, as we’re seeing, is that they aren’t actually very good at what they do. For years Musk was seen as an Iron Man genius but by any metric you choose DOGE has been an absolute failure.
neepi · 20h ago
Ego > engineering.
RickJWagner · 22h ago
I’d do it, gladly.
I worked on the Obamacare site after it rolled out, crashing. I gave it my best effort.
I’m in favor of progress and will work for the common good. I think that’s the best way.
delusional · 23h ago
> disqualifying statements for anyone above associate level engineering.
Only if you're an engineer. The Silicon Valley folks love this sort of lawless disregard for wider society.
afavour · 23h ago
I'm not even talking about the wider societal implications. I mean the job of being a software engineer, including in SV. "I knowingly wrote code riddled with mistakes and didn't ever look into how it's being used" is, IMO, disqualifying. The latter more than the former in many ways, being a good engineer above entry level is a lot more than just bashing out code, you need to be understanding the context in which your code operates.
It would be one thing if we were talking about a fresh out of college newbie. But Lavingia was employee #2 at Pinterest and founded Gumroad. It appears he learned absolutely nothing in either place.
delusional · 23h ago
Let me clarify. I agree with you. My point is rather that Silicon Valley bros WONT agree with us. To them it's fine actually if some veterans didn't get healthcare and die, because they don't matter in their grand scheme.
I believe, as a ground truth, that good engineering requires working in the real world. Silicon valley guys do not. They believe their responsibility start and end at the computer.
I understand this sounds extreme, I think so too, but it is the only explanation that explains their fascination with "long-termism". A philosophy that any harm now is justified if it has even a .1% chance of doing something very good in the long term.
xg15 · 22h ago
> A philosophy that any harm now is justified if it has even a .1% chance of doing something very good in the long term.
Even then, our descendants, who'd finally have the privilege to live in that faraway future that we sacrificed everything in the present for - they'd also be obligated to treat their present as a disposable resource in service of an even further away future.
If you took the "philosophy" at face value, it would actually guarantee that the entire future of humanity will be miserable. But we'll colonize space and number in the trillions. Yay...
collingreen · 21h ago
I live in Silicon Valley and I don't love lawless disregard for wider society.
nilamo · 23h ago
"I needed money." Why is that not a good enough answer?
mrybczyn · 23h ago
"I needed money." - Charles Ponzi
"I needed money." - Bernie Madoff
"I needed money." - Kenneth Lay
"I needed money." - Qusay Hussein
ndegruchy · 23h ago
Because he got paid $0. They hired him as an “intern” or volunteer.
morkalork · 23h ago
It's responsibility-washing. Like GP said, those answers are totally unacceptable coming from an engineering professional. Which is exactly why they took on interns to do it.
nilamo · 23h ago
Ah, then we got what we paid for.
rsynnott · 23h ago
Well:
(a) It doesn't appear to actually have come with a salary.
(b) Even if it paid, it slightly stretches credulity given his background that it was the only job that he could get.
nop_slide · 23h ago
> did he just think LLMs were _magic_?
If you happened to follow this particular developer, yes he does think they're magic.
zeta0134 · 23h ago
It doesn't even take very long messing around with the things to quickly realize how much smoke and mirrors is involved. Next time you get a good response from your favorite LLM, go ahead, hit "regenerate" a few times. Look at how different the responses can be, from the same initial prompt, with just a liiiiitle push in the RNG weights. Sometimes it's remarkably correct! Sometimes it's remarkably *incorrect* and confident about it. Which one did you get this time?
rsynnott · 22h ago
But, like, in this case, _even if the LLM was a superhuman AGI_, there is _still_ no way it could do what he wants based off the prompt he gave it because it simply would not have the sort of in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of the VA required to make these determinations.
Even if we waive the "LLMs are bit shit" stipulation, it still doesn't really help much.
lawn · 17h ago
To be fair, a superhuman AGI should've told him that what he's trying to do is impossible.
The only silver lining here is his transparency about being wrong -- and providing evidence of that publicly. Given DOGE's culture of prioritizing avoiding accountability and transparency measures like FOIA [1], it's almost sadly laudable.
But he still doesn't seem to get the seriousness of the situation, at all. Like, he's saying no-one should have used his stuff, but also "It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script".
For instance, imagine you have surgery, and die of a complication. Your relatives will feel very differently, and be in a very different legal situation, if the hospital's explanation is "surgeon was the bottom of their class" vs "yeah, we just handed a visiting 5 year old a scalpel to see what would happen". Neither are ideal, obviously, but the latter is _criminal_.
The idiot in the article is clearly closer to the 5 year old than the scraping-a-pass surgeon; he is simply not in any way a proper person to have been given the sort of access or authority he was, this would have been obvious to whoever gave it to him, and whoever gave it to him is at least morally culpable.
bilbo0s · 23h ago
I mean, hindsight is 20/20, but that's probably why it's a bad idea to give a gaggle-load of inexperienced tech sisses/bros the ability to do stuff like this.
Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. Drawdowns of the federal government should be measured and deliberate and done by grey haired people not given to rash action. Not by a kid with a python script he thinks is kind of cool.
davidcbc · 23h ago
A disaster was the expected outcome to anyone paying attention. We were screaming to the rooftops that this was going to end in disaster! Nobody should be playing the "shucks nobody realized this was going to be bad" card
rurp · 22h ago
Exactly! Many people on HN and elsewhere (including myself) could see that this was never a serious effort to make the government more efficient and called it out from the start. The evidence was overwhelming.
It was dismaying how many people took the Doge claims at face value, hopefully at least a few people will remember the chain of events and be more skeptical of these actors in the future.
roenxi · 23h ago
If anyone thinks drawdowns should be done of the US federal government they aren't anywhere near the levers of government. There hasn't been one of those in the best part of a century as I recall.
> Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome.
I doubt anyone with decision making power is surprised - the flow of events has been both predictable and predicted. Whatever the goals with DOGE were it wasn't spending cuts or finding efficiencies. The first is in opposition to the preferences of the US Republicans as expressed in their actual voting patterns and the second is largely irrelevant and they weren't set up to do that.
acdha · 20h ago
> There hasn't been one of those in the best part of a century as I recall.
That’s just saying your media diet doesn’t cover it. Agencies adjust all the time (every year has a new budget and priorities from Congress), and there was a big Clinton effort which cut hundreds of thousands of jobs and restructured agencies.
That tends not to get mentioned because it wasn’t disruptive – they actually took time to plan it – and because it happened under a Democratic president, the Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge it.
roenxi · 14h ago
And it had no impact [0]. Increases in US Federal spending look like a jump from 5% to 20% of GDP. "Cuts" look like a flat line at 20%. Although I don't know what the situation might have changed post-COVID (higher again).
If we're defining "drawdowns" to mean "hold steady" then sure, lots of those. If it means drawing spending down then there technically was one in the 1940s. The proper terms for what we're seeing are "reallocation" or "expansion" depending on the congress.
Take a closer look at that chart. Notice the pronounced downward trend on the blue line (federal) starting from a peak in 1992 and declining until the Bush administration unbalanced the budget? In 1998-2001, we had a budget surplus!
The big thing, of course, is that total spending is a crude metric lumping discretionary and mandatory spending together. Federal employment has been getting a lot of attention this year, but it's at historic lows and there's no real way to significantly lower total federal spending there without cutting social programs millions of people depend on.
roenxi · 10h ago
> Take a closer look at that chart. Notice the pronounced downward trend on the blue line (federal) starting from a peak in 1992...
So? That is noise on a flat line. A drawdown doesn't mean sticking to the consensus flat trend. The plan here seems to be a "drawdown" is something where I can say "spending will be about the same".
If I talk about increasing government spending I can point to spending growing from 3% -> 20% GDP with a really clear trend and level change. When we talk about drawdowns it is supposed to mean maintaining a trend at 20%? That isn't a drawdown. If that is a drawdowne then DOGE may turn out to have successfully drawn down US government spending! Even though spending seems to be going up.
throwaway173738 · 23h ago
A lot of us knew it was going to be a disaster before they started. There’s a reason bureaucrats do things in a measured way. So to say “in hindsight” belies the point.
garden_hermit · 22h ago
This disaster was exactly predicted by a ton of people, with foresight! To treat this as an unexpected outcome belies the exact lack of seriousness that characterized this whole ordeal
dylan604 · 23h ago
DOGE isn't SpaceX where getting it wrong is a chance to learn for the next iteration. These are human lives being affected by all of these mistakes that they are so nonchalantly making as if the humans are just NPCs in whatever game they are playing. Not only are these mistakes directly affecting humans with the loss of government jobs, they are also affecting citizens that depend on the services these employees worked. I don't care about your silver lining. The damage is done, and it is not easily unwound. All because they had no shits to give and too young to have the life experience to even come close to understanding just how damaging their decisions were.
TrapLord_Rhodo · 16h ago
I think you are misinterpreting the comment here.
>I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says.
Using this as a tool to signal can be a huge time saver. But not taking the code output as "truth" is what the engineer meant.
> It’s unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled.
This article, just like you, are taking all of these out of context.
>Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.
He's using LLM's as a potential flag, then you go and human review those contracts with lawyers, supply chain, business specialists, nurses on the ground, etc. etc.
Calling him an idiot for being transparent is a personal attack, and has no place here.
Directly from the github:
Tools I have written to do stuff more effectively at the VA. Code exists to make humans more efficient; not to replace them. All code leads to human review. Feedback appreciated!
thisisit · 2h ago
Spoken like a developer who doesn't understand how real world works.
> Using this as a tool to signal can be a huge time saver. But not taking the code output as "truth" is what the engineer meant.
Lavingia didn't provide any provable metric that this tool was going a "huge time saver". Additionally, if the output isn't the "truth", what can kind of time saving is expected? That a person needs to run the code, get result and then spend time analyzing results and cross verifying contracts again?
You know what will be a good time saver? Open the contracts and cross check it if it is valid. No AI slop required.
> This article, just like you, are taking all of these out of context.
Real people are impacted by VA contracts. If there is even 1 contract impacting even 100s of people that is enough damage. Saying that this is people taking things out of context shows your of empathy for other human beings, at least if they are not coders.
Because apparently Lavingia should get kudos for his transparency. But calling him an idiot for his lack of self-awareness that he had no clue about government contracts and should not be writing AI and creating this mess, all the while impacting people's life? Well we can't have that.
> He's using LLM's as a potential flag, then you go and human review those contracts with lawyers, supply chain, business specialists, nurses on the ground, etc. etc.
If human review is the point then start from there. Don't write AI slop, generate wrong result and then ask for human review.
To the larger point - Benjamin Franklin said - 'It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer'. In the same vein every well meaning contract/legislation which is helping 100s will have 10s exploiting the loophole. People like Lavingia and from DOGE seemed to have decided that rooting out those 10s is worth hurting the 100s. So, lets write an AI for that.
TrapLord_Rhodo · 1h ago
using an LLM is a very VERY small part of the code he published. 12 lines out of around 13k lines. You seem to be disagreeing with the concept, not the actual code. you prolly could have reviewed the code in the time it took you to google that ben franklin quote.
If you look at the code, he explicitly filters for sole source before he even sicks a LLM on it.
... and get paid to do it while sidelining anyone with actual experience in the sector/topic.
I called this when it started. They would come in, be totally ineffective to the point of breaking things, and then we would get a "shucks, sorry" later.
itsdrewmiller · 21h ago
He didn’t get paid.
rsynnott · 1d ago
I just can't believe how totally incompetent this whole thing is. Even for a Musk/Trump venture, I didn't expect quite this level of just complete nonsense.
eviks · 23h ago
Have you not followed the Twitter acquisition saga and the firing process that followed? It was the same thing
theGeatZhopa · 9h ago
thats the only reasonable way to do business. Its not a grocery store.
if you don't get enough money, you need to cut your fixed costs. So he did. After buying, a selection of highly competent individuals knowing their systems decided on the (future) tech-stack and on that what is not needed and what can be done recoded/rebuild to save money on tech-stack even more. And then you just don't need that much work force anymore.
rule no. 1 in business: If you pay, you decide.
rule no.2 in business: If you pay more than you earn: close the company.
key-insights:
- it wasn't musk alone to decide. He had twitter's qualified employees and system architects -> pick the most skilled ones
- it was a power meeting where the groups & members brainstormed excessively for longer then just 3 days in a row -> let them think about a better, simplified system design on a minimal viable tech-stack
- they were accompanied by qualified stuff from tesla to uncover blind spots in the design and to bring fresh ideas / integration-knowledge / synergies & work-force -> check & start building. pivot if neccessary
I really don't undersand, why arguments like yours are still & always brought up. Is it the lack of understanding how to do business? Is it pure "hate" & ad hominem @ musk, because it's musk? What is it that is strong enough to let one show absolute lack of either economical or technical thinking publicly? The -SANE- economical and technical mindset craves for Optimization of tech and fin. Thats the only differentiator to the competition: do it better, do it cheaper.
So why was it bad exactly?
eviks · 8h ago
You'll never understand why such questions are brought up because you're too deep into your own fiction. That's not what happened at all, and your primitive business rules aren't real either.
> if you don't get enough money, you need to cut your fixed costs.
No you don’t (in general), a common business model in tech is to spend investor’s money covering this deficit. Also another harder option is to get more money. Also, it wasn’t just fixed costs. And if you cut too deep and lose a lot of revenue as a result as with Twitter you’ll still not get enough money. "So he did"
Instead of all this "thinking hard about the stack" in reality here is how people got fired:
> it wasn't musk alone to decide
Unless it was, of course
- like Frohnhoefer without notice, without "brainstorming", by Musk alone, for daring to say the "technical stack" truth to ignorant power
- engineers were told today to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code, so they could show it to Elon Musk himself.
- or there was a guy who couldn’t even get info from the dedicated function for such stuff - HR - whether he was fired. That also had to be resolved by Musk in a Twitter exchange
> minimal viable tech-stack
How come you ignore that a huge portion of employees aren’t involved in any tech stack? Think 80% of employees were fired.
> After buying, a selection of highly competent individuals knowing their systems decided on
What’s your proof of competence? Like in this case: on paper, you could call this engineer competent "Lavingia has nearly 15 years of experience as a software engineer and entrepreneur", yet the work tells the opposite.
Or even if they were competent, if you give them just a week they’ll do the same happening in this story.
> - they were accompanied by qualified stuff from tesla to uncover blind spots in the design and to bring fresh ideas / integration-knowledge / synergies & work-force
These are just empty words, care to give specific examples of what fresh ideas/synergies and other work-force positive things this great process resulted in? Doge was also accompanied by "qualified stuff from tesla/twitter/etc", but instead of uncovering blind spots they were mostly acting blind.
> The -SANE- economical and technical mindset craves for Optimization of tech and fin.
> So why was it bad exactly?
Because you’re supposed to maximize revenue and profits, not minimize them?
> What is it that is strong enough to let one show absolute lack of either economical or technical thinking publicly?
You tell me, why do you do this?
SV_BubbleTime · 23h ago
I remember the follow up. That Twitter was doomed and Threads, then Bluesky were absolutely going to crush it.
Those were not only the popular takes here; but any claim otherwise was derided as harmful fiction.
And still is.
eviks · 22h ago
But with such fiction for a memory would you even believe this whole thing is totally incompetent?
nxobject · 1d ago
Imagine hiring a consultancy, and getting stuck with a team of people fresh out of college without any wisdom to guide them... I think that's what the American people got.
colejohnson66 · 1d ago
Not just "fresh out of college", but people who think AI can solve everything. COBOL too "ancient"? Just throw AI at it! Can't write code? Throw AI at it! He literally wrote an AI prompter using AI:
> Under a time crunch, Lavingia said he finished the first version of his contract-munching tool on his second day on the job — using AI to help write the code for him. He told ProPublica he then spent his first week downloading VA contracts to his laptop and analyzing them.
This is entry/junior-level levels of incompetence being given carte blanche access to production, but where "production" includes people's livelihoods.
ivape · 23h ago
Did you see how two billionaires "leaders" feuded yesterday over disagreements (one was the President of the US and the other was the world's richest man)? They were the ones behind DOGE. That was the leadership behind it. We are in the fucking Twilight Zone. It's surreal.
There was a epic book about the whole Iraq situation that had the most apt title:
FIASCO
Then there are these military terms:
FUBAR - Fucked up beyond all recognition
&
TARFU - Totally and Royally fucked up
&
SNAFU - Situation Normal: All fucked up
It's the people that have been to war that seem to have the words for what's going on, no one else.
mistrial9 · 22h ago
except VA is a byzantine hellhole of self-serving dysfunction. Your outrage is only partially appropriate. Anyone around the system knows this, but has various incentives whether they will say it.
Loughla · 22h ago
Maybe there's a balance between not doing anything about the problems in the VA and ignorantly breaking in in 48 hours?
FrustratedMonky · 23h ago
Maybe this engineer is just saying, like all big projects, there are mistakes, and there should be more vetting, debugging. It was rushed, so yes, there are mistakes, but not, "generally, all my stuff is bug ridden crap"
davidcbc · 23h ago
This isn't your typical SV startup. Move fast and break things works for garbage like Juicero or Uber for Dogs or whatever silly idea gets VC funding this week, it does not work when you're talking about the lives of millions of people
mdhb · 23h ago
But in this case it WAS all bug ridden crap. Casually rolling the dice with people’s lives like this means you probably won’t be able to live without some fear of people coming looking for you when this is all said and over.
Maybe they don’t realise it yet but their lives have just changed for the worse in a very significant and hard to reverse way. This is going to catch up with them on a reasonable timescale.
FrustratedMonky · 20h ago
I was making a comment on software projects, not a political statement. Thanks for the downvotes. Of course the situation is awful, but not every programmer gets to cherry pick the picture perfect project to work on.
The job market is difficult right now, so who wouldn't take this one? That's the more insidious message from capitalism, there are a lot of cogs in the machine that are fully aware they are cogs, but you still have to eat, so you keep doing cog like things.
mountainb · 23h ago
"That’s not possible — you have 90,000 contracts,” he said. “Unless you write some code. But even then it’s not really possible.”
This entirely possible with some lawyers, some business analysts, perhaps some hospital administrative consultants, and ordinary support staff. That team might even use LLMs in some capacity but not in the way described by the article. Reviewing 90,000 hospital and other service contracts sounds like just another project for a mid-sized or big law firm; or the government. That is how those contracts were created in the first place.
This is like the meme about someone's uncle talking about how there are these 90,000 contracts that no one knows how to review because we've forgotten how to do it. If there's something America still knows how to do it's how to review tens of thousands of turgid government contracts.
ianhawes · 23h ago
Not possible within the 30 day timeframe they were given.
mountainb · 22h ago
With the right teams and resources, this could be done in a shorter time. With that team and skillset there was no way to complete this in a way that did not result in a lot of contract liability to the government and other silliness.
quickthrowman · 20h ago
At 20 working days, that’s 4,500 contracts per day. How big of a team do you think it would take to review 4,500 contracts per day?
rsynnott · 19h ago
Quite a big team. However, not necessarily a difficult one to staff.
That said, the whole thing rests on completely artificial urgency; there's no reason that it had to be done in 30 days (and there _are_ sensible heuristic ways that it could be filtered down; for instance small contracts and those about to expire could be filtered out easily; the article mentions a $35k contract, which is definitely "not worth the bother" level).
"We have a completely artificial deadline, therefore we can't do this properly, therefore we should just do a completely nonsense thing" is not a reasonable approach to doing anything.
smackay · 23h ago
I'd be very interested in learning more about how DOGE got staffed.
If your goal was to dramatically cut government spending, then hiring bright, young people, with no prior experience, who axed first, and asked questions later would be the way to do it, otherwise you'd get bogged down in details since there was probably a good reason, at least initially for the said spending.
However, if you really, wanted to make a spectacular mess then hiring bright, young people, with no prior experience, who axed first, and asked questions later would be the way to do it.
Somebody, somewhere, thought this was a good approach. How could they not know it would turn into a massive clusterfuck. Hubris?
rsynnott · 22h ago
They seem to have gone for option 3, based on the article; hiring _staggeringly incompetent_ people with no prior experience. No-one bright would be saying, to paraphrase the article "no-one should have acted on the output of my shit software, but also it would have been cool if other federal departments had adopted my shit software".
(It's very characteristic of a certain type of AI booster, though; "it's fine as long as you don't use the results for anything, also you should buy more".)
crypto_throwa · 23h ago
I'm in a chat with one of the engineers on DOGE (young college dropout), and they're trying to recruit more young college dropouts to work on DOGE.
I would characterize some in this group as believing they're smarter than everyone else or anything that's been done before, so yes I think it's pure hubris.
There are a lot of bright people in the chat working on very important things, but they're not the ones joining DOGE.
polygotdomain · 23h ago
To start, it was clear that many were Musk fan boys. I don't think "bright" was a driving force, but "young, with no prior experience" would be great if you wanted people to make decisions that have the potential to negatively impact millions of lives. You need people with a lack of context to realize those are the stakes at hand. Since it was also clear they were going to "throw AI at it", I also doubt they were looking for anyone who acknowledged the shortcomings and pitfalls of an all AI approach.
I think this approach got them exactly what they wanted. Musk clearly wanted access to as much data as he could get his hands onto; legally or not. There were contracts and investigations into Musk's interest that he wanted control over, and got. Overall, chaos is not seen as an issue for those in this administration. The attitude from the top was clearly that these agencies and contractors "deserved it" for some reason, even though they have no idea what they really do or why they're doing it.
cwillu · 23h ago
Searching the page for “hiring bright, young people, with no prior experience, who axed first, and asked questions later” shows two results, was that intended?
smackay · 23h ago
Not at all, the slightly snarky wording, was typed on the spur of the moment. Incidentally, I tried the same terms on Google and the AI-powered answer was rather informative with the pros and cons of the approach. Indeed the cons seem to be playing out before our very eyes.
TrackerFF · 23h ago
Here's one guy that posted about his short stint with DOGE, when it was still in the planning stages
"When I got back home and regaled my friends with my mountain stories, one of my friends joked that I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt. So I reached out to some people and got in. After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very autistic smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work.
Working for DOGE for 4 weeks, remembering the power of urgency
Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups. I was immediately acquainted with the software, HR, and legal teams and went from 0 to 100 taking meetings and getting shit done. This was the day before Thanksgiving.
The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.
I learned about the power of urgency and having an undeniable mission. Not by reading it somewhere. By experiencing it. I came to realize how laughable my robotics stint had been in comparison. And I started to realize that, although the mission of DOGE is extremely important, it wasn’t the most important thing I needed to focus on with urgency for myself. I needed to get back to ambiguity, focus on my insecurities, and be ok with that for a while. DOGE wasn’t going to fix that.
So, after 4 intense and intoxicating weeks, I called off my plans to move to DC and embark on a journey to save our government with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And I booked a 1-way ticket to Hawaii."
rsynnott · 21h ago
> So, after 4 intense and intoxicating weeks, I called off my plans to move to DC and embark on a journey to save our government with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And I booked a 1-way ticket to Hawaii.
These aren't serious people.
davidcbc · 21h ago
> The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to
This kid needs to talk to more people
spaceisballer · 17h ago
You have to demonize the government in order to come in and start trashing the place. Obviously there is going to be some waste to trim. But instead they came in, asked zero questions and started arbitrarily cutting contracts and jobs. In the end all the cuts will just make the government dysfunctional and cost us more than it did before.
quickthrowman · 20h ago
I remember reading this when it was first posted and being amazed it wasn’t satire.
insane_dreamer · 20h ago
Serious amount of Kool-Aid being served up here.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 22h ago
All of these people sound like naive psychopaths.
antisthenes · 17h ago
Textbook narcissism and circumstantial privilege.
ivape · 21h ago
Dude, I could not even prompt an LLM to be that much of a douchebag. This is novel training data quite frankly. This reads like the developer version of a Blonde bimbo. The true story is probably the jackass is stimmed up and looks good on paper and caught a few lucky breaks that had a windfall.
antisthenes · 17h ago
Sounds like a micro-dosing narcissist nepo-baby who got rich working at a tech company and doesn't know what to do with themselves, because they assume everything in life is going to be so easy as to not worth doing seriously.
techpineapple · 18h ago
I imagine it was always a weird conflict of intentions.
On the one hand if you're really trying to disrupt an industry, you want to hire at least a good percentage of people who don't understand the industry, so they're not biased by the set of circumstances you may be trying to disrupt - and Thiel and Yarvin and maybe Vance and Elon certainly wanted to disrupt the government. Like Thiel and Yarvin probably don't want people who understand how to renegotiate government contracts, they just want people who know how to burn them to the ground.
But I imagine there were very few people in government, including some of the people "over" them like the senate and house wanted real disruption, and certainly most of the population didn't want real disruption, and Trump and his administration probably didn't want real disruption that would impact their popularity.
So it was probably doomed from the start.
xnx · 1d ago
This is all facilitated by congress and the president. Destruction under any pretense was the goal. They must all be voted out.
glookler · 23h ago
Voted out? Crimes have been committed and the President as dictator nonsense has to be cancelled so these people can all go to federal prison where white collar criminals belong.
masfuerte · 23h ago
But there is no way that is happening while they remain in power.
dylan604 · 23h ago
Even out of power, there's no way. SCOTUS said the prez is untouchable. The only hope is that a sweeping change in Congress happens with the mid-terms enough to be able to impeach and convict. But the likelihood of that can be summed up with "wish in one hand and shit in the other. see which fills up faster"
saubeidl · 20h ago
The second amendment was written to have a recourse in case of tyranny.
dylan604 · 20h ago
That's the nuclear option though. There should be plenty of more diplomatic ways before hit the big red button. Sadly, those options that we thought were there have been shown to only be a valid option if you have people with spine to stand up and utilize the options. Instead, we've seen where kowtowing has been the norm for so long that we seem to have lost our collective spine.
Watching the Obama admin capitulate to the then speaker preventing his nominee from moving forward was abysmal. There was no valid reasoning for it, but it laid the ground work for why the bench looks like it does. There are plenty of other prior examples of the spines of the minority being brow beat to the point that not allowing POTUS to move his nominee forward was a collective should shrug
mrguyorama · 17h ago
Why do you believe this?
The actual text is :
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Which was developed from the initial proposal of :
"A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the People, being the best security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person. "
It at no point made any mention of overthrowing the government or being a check on the power, which would be odd seeing as a significant point of every other part of the constitution is about addressing how powers check other powers.
Lots of the founders talked about private firearm ownership and advocated for it, but that's not what was voted on and ratified!. What was actually ratified was the above text. Some of them even advocated for using violence as a way to fix disagreements with your government, but that is clearly laid out in the constitution as treason.
Now sure you can do all sorts of stupid wrangling about punctuation to make the 2nd amendment say whatever you want but that's dumb and a dumb way to run a country.
The revolution was not fought with private firearms. The war of 1812 was not fought with private firearms. Washington himself raised up a militia to put down the whiskey rebellion, so it seems early US considered the 2nd amendment to be utilized by the state.
As well, there are no provisions in the constitution to leave the US. There are no provisions to overthrow the US. If something needs to fundamentally change, you amend the constitution or run a constitutional convention. These are steps that take huge consensus to change things, as was always intentional about the constitution. The constitution was not written to allow a small band of angry people to take up arms and overthrow their government. The founders knew this when they signed the Declaration of Independence, and knew they would hang if they lost. The constitution is clear that it has the same terms. Overthrowing the state is treason and is punished with execution and is not something that was designed in.
Which makes sense if you understand the context of the 13 colonies and the primary threat they faced apart from Britain: Native Americans.
The previous several decades of US history and some later ones involved a great deal of state governors pressing citizens into militias with the express purpose of going out and murdering Native Americans (usually because those Native Americans came and murdered a bunch of citizens, in a great big circle of violence). There was not a standing army to do that. So instead, the government could press citizens into militias and make them use their own weapons. The 2nd amendment establishes the precursor to the national guard.
Sure, the current Supreme Court would vehemently disagree with my interpretation, but I think it's long past time we acknowledge that they are just making it up as they go along and will warp the text to match. There's no consistency to their rulings anyway. The very fact that you can overturn a previous ruling by the court should be enough to demonstrate that even the court doesn't believe their own hype about deciding constitutionality.
I find this whole line of thought to be very similar to the claim that the constitution intended the federal government to be extremely weak, a loose federation of states. Which is funny, because the constitution was created (with zero authority by the way) explicitly to supersede the existing loose federation of states, because within just a couple decades it had proven entirely unworkable, fragile, feckless, and nearly killed our country in its crib. Granted, the constitution DID establish a weak federal government.
Weaker than a Monarchy.
joshstrange · 23h ago
> “I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”
Sahil Lavingia is a snake. I thought his blog post that was on HN a week or so ago displayed a frightening level of cognitive dissidence and now he wants to distance himself from it all. No way buddy, this will be a millstone hung around your neck. You encouraged this, you participated in this, you cheered this, you will live with the consequences.
mvid · 17h ago
He will probably become a Thiel fellow or raise from YC
TrackerFF · 23h ago
They also put a 23 year old to essentially greenlight or stop NSF grants.
I just don't understand how these people can do what they do? If I was a fresh college grad, and put in that position - to have the final say on whether experts in their fields can get grants, to conduct research on something I have no expertise in...I don't think I could do that job. I'd feel like the biggest empty suit in existence. Don't they feel any shame?
Or do they suffer from some superiority complex, where they think that whatever knowledge they have in AI/ML makes them the smartest person in the room?
EDIT: Reading through it, at least the guy acknowledges his errors.
kevin_thibedeau · 22h ago
> I just don't understand how these people can do what they do
It's narcissistic personality disorder. The 45th administration had a surfeit of responsible adults putting up guard rails to contain the future felon. This one has taken the Hitler youth approach to recruiting like-minded individuals with an inflated sense of their own competence. Minimal critical thinking skills and life experience are a checkbox in the hiring process.
insane_dreamer · 20h ago
> I don't think I could do that job. I'd feel like the biggest empty suit in existence.
You don't have that level of arrogance. But I've met people who do. They're the worst people to work with.
morkalork · 23h ago
There is a belief that by having grants address DEI and other issues, you're already putting them at the mercy of unqualified individuals and as such "what's good for the goose is good for the gander". Now of course there's some pretty big, atrocious, historical reasons why those parts of the grant application exist.
zenburnmyface · 23h ago
Lavingia should be ostracized from tech for this. What an embarrassment.
nop_slide · 23h ago
Relevant Github repo of the code he apparently used from the article:
Expected levels of YOLO incompetence, but still fascinating.
bix6 · 1d ago
This is honestly unbelievable. Sahil wrote code he knew was bad and it was used to terminate vital medical contracts… how is that not fraud against every person who pays taxes?
No comments yet
mhalle · 23h ago
His github repository also contains the code that prompts OpenAI to analyze and flag VA memos that might contradict hot button issues from Trump's Executive orders.
You are an AI assistant that analyzes internal government memos for compliance with 2025 Executive Orders. You identify references to DEI, gender identity, COVID policies, climate initiatives, and WHO partnerships that must be removed or modified according to new directives. Provide detailed analysis and be precise about what needs to be changed."
User prompt:
Based on this memo analysis, provide a detailed assessment of non-compliance with 2025 Executive Orders:
MEMO CONTENT:
{text[:10000]}
Rules for determining non-compliance:
1. DEI/DEIA Content:
- References to "diversity", "equity", "inclusion" in policy context
- Mentions of equity action plans
- References to Chief Diversity Officers or similar roles
- Performance criteria based on DEI targets
2. Gender Identity Content:
- References to gender identity or preferred pronouns
- Content about gender ideology or training
- Instructions to use non-binary pronouns
3. COVID Policy/Telework:
- COVID-19 vaccination requirements
- Pandemic-era remote work extensions
- Masking or testing policies that remain in effect
4. Climate/Environmental Content:
- References to climate resilience, zero-emission requirements
- Environmental justice language
- Sustainability criteria in purchasing/contracting
- Plastic straw bans or similar procurement restrictions
5. WHO Partnerships:
- References to World Health Organization partnerships
- Alignment with WHO protocols or frameworks
6. Other Key Areas:
- Affirmative action or racial/gender preferences in contracting
- $15 federal contractor minimum wage references
- Student loan forgiveness expansions
- Paper check disbursement references
[Edit: formatting.]
crawsome · 1d ago
"AI is the wrong tool to do this" someone said.
Different things need to be addressed, like how someone is able to act outside all three branches of government, and have enough power to destroy the lives of those who protected our country when we needed them most.
It should be crystal clear to even the most skeptical people should turn their opinion on how they bankrupt the poor and bail out the rich every single time.
liampulles · 22h ago
On the surface, the principle of using AI to filter down contracts for human review seems like a good thing, because it increases efficiency. Especially if it makes something previously infeasible and/or very expensive now doable and/or relatively cheap.
Where it would become bad for me is if the next step is taken to remove humans from the loop, or more simply if the AI is not tested for accuracy regularly and updated as the nature of the world changes. Unfortunately, I think the chance of these outcomes occurring is high.
I've worked with LLMs to aid humans in the domain of text review. I've encountered inexplicable inaccuracies that are very difficult to robustly remove from the system (you can patch one thing and then another pops up when you try some new data). I've found it very difficult to try and explain this issue to business people: I suggested that there needed to be humans in the loop, because it seemed like some level of inaccuracy is insoluble.
This is not ideal for the business, because obviously it hurts their ability to scale (reasonable). Also from the perspective of business people I've interacted with: AI is the greatest thing since the invention of the transistor, and its only a matter of time until these LLMs are perfectly intelligent (not reasonable), and vitally important that they get ahead of the curve before potential competitors do.
I can just see how this issue is going to lead to so many important aspects of our society being eaten up by imperfect software that we are forced to accept, because there are not competitors able to justify a less scalable and accurate alternative. I hope I'm wrong, but until then I hope people will flag this sort of shit when they see it.
insane_dreamer · 20h ago
Arrogance, inexperience, and haste, is a really bad combination when it comes to building fault-tolerant code. And when you're handling government systems, you need fault-tolerant code. This isn't some Tinder app.
Would you hire any ex-DOGE engineer? I ~~probably~~ would not.
RickJWagner · 22h ago
Glad to see AI being put to use with the big wheels of government. It’s inevitable, might as well start setting up best practices.
cavisne · 17h ago
Anyone who thinks the VA is well run should watch a few episodes of the “financial audit” YouTube channel. The most financially irresponsible people in the world (and generally bad people in general). Almost all are cashing a “disability” payment from the VA.
> “I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”
Well, then why the hell did you write it? For purely entertainment purposes? I mean, what.
EDIT: Oh, wow, just got to the prompt. Did he... did he just think LLMs were _magic_? "Level 1: Necessary consultants that can't be insourced" - how the hell is ChatGPT supposed to know what can and cannot be insourced?
> In late March, Lavingia published a version of the “munchable” script on his GitHub account to invite others to use and improve it, he told ProPublica. “It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script and anyone in the public could see that this is how the VA is thinking about cutting contracts.”
No, that would not have been 'cool', you idiot. Bloody hell.
- why did you do it?
- why did you not quit as soon as you realized how dangerous this was going to be?
"I did what I did, I knew there were mistakes, I don't really know what was done with the output of my work and I never tried to find out" are absolutely disqualifying statements for anyone above associate level engineering.
While I agree I think that's a fatalist perspective. It's on all of us working in tech to push back on that. In the unlikely event that someone with DOGE on their resume comes across my desk I certainly will be.
And if folks are able to clear their mind of ideology, this is an account of someone that was straightforwardly bad at their job. It's rare to get such a confession from an applicant, we should use it!
The opportunists are a minority and they should be ostracized. They’ll always hire each other of course but the reality, as we’re seeing, is that they aren’t actually very good at what they do. For years Musk was seen as an Iron Man genius but by any metric you choose DOGE has been an absolute failure.
I worked on the Obamacare site after it rolled out, crashing. I gave it my best effort.
I’m in favor of progress and will work for the common good. I think that’s the best way.
Only if you're an engineer. The Silicon Valley folks love this sort of lawless disregard for wider society.
It would be one thing if we were talking about a fresh out of college newbie. But Lavingia was employee #2 at Pinterest and founded Gumroad. It appears he learned absolutely nothing in either place.
I believe, as a ground truth, that good engineering requires working in the real world. Silicon valley guys do not. They believe their responsibility start and end at the computer.
I understand this sounds extreme, I think so too, but it is the only explanation that explains their fascination with "long-termism". A philosophy that any harm now is justified if it has even a .1% chance of doing something very good in the long term.
Even then, our descendants, who'd finally have the privilege to live in that faraway future that we sacrificed everything in the present for - they'd also be obligated to treat their present as a disposable resource in service of an even further away future.
If you took the "philosophy" at face value, it would actually guarantee that the entire future of humanity will be miserable. But we'll colonize space and number in the trillions. Yay...
(a) It doesn't appear to actually have come with a salary.
(b) Even if it paid, it slightly stretches credulity given his background that it was the only job that he could get.
If you happened to follow this particular developer, yes he does think they're magic.
Even if we waive the "LLMs are bit shit" stipulation, it still doesn't really help much.
(Not that an LLM will ever get there though.)
[1] https://www.cjr.org/feature-2/trump-100-legal-battle-for-dog...
For instance, imagine you have surgery, and die of a complication. Your relatives will feel very differently, and be in a very different legal situation, if the hospital's explanation is "surgeon was the bottom of their class" vs "yeah, we just handed a visiting 5 year old a scalpel to see what would happen". Neither are ideal, obviously, but the latter is _criminal_.
The idiot in the article is clearly closer to the 5 year old than the scraping-a-pass surgeon; he is simply not in any way a proper person to have been given the sort of access or authority he was, this would have been obvious to whoever gave it to him, and whoever gave it to him is at least morally culpable.
Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. Drawdowns of the federal government should be measured and deliberate and done by grey haired people not given to rash action. Not by a kid with a python script he thinks is kind of cool.
It was dismaying how many people took the Doge claims at face value, hopefully at least a few people will remember the chain of events and be more skeptical of these actors in the future.
> Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome.
I doubt anyone with decision making power is surprised - the flow of events has been both predictable and predicted. Whatever the goals with DOGE were it wasn't spending cuts or finding efficiencies. The first is in opposition to the preferences of the US Republicans as expressed in their actual voting patterns and the second is largely irrelevant and they weren't set up to do that.
That’s just saying your media diet doesn’t cover it. Agencies adjust all the time (every year has a new budget and priorities from Congress), and there was a big Clinton effort which cut hundreds of thousands of jobs and restructured agencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
That tends not to get mentioned because it wasn’t disruptive – they actually took time to plan it – and because it happened under a Democratic president, the Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge it.
If we're defining "drawdowns" to mean "hold steady" then sure, lots of those. If it means drawing spending down then there technically was one in the 1940s. The proper terms for what we're seeing are "reallocation" or "expansion" depending on the congress.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs... https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181
The big thing, of course, is that total spending is a crude metric lumping discretionary and mandatory spending together. Federal employment has been getting a lot of attention this year, but it's at historic lows and there's no real way to significantly lower total federal spending there without cutting social programs millions of people depend on.
So? That is noise on a flat line. A drawdown doesn't mean sticking to the consensus flat trend. The plan here seems to be a "drawdown" is something where I can say "spending will be about the same".
If I talk about increasing government spending I can point to spending growing from 3% -> 20% GDP with a really clear trend and level change. When we talk about drawdowns it is supposed to mean maintaining a trend at 20%? That isn't a drawdown. If that is a drawdowne then DOGE may turn out to have successfully drawn down US government spending! Even though spending seems to be going up.
>I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says.
Using this as a tool to signal can be a huge time saver. But not taking the code output as "truth" is what the engineer meant.
> It’s unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled.
This article, just like you, are taking all of these out of context.
>Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.
He's using LLM's as a potential flag, then you go and human review those contracts with lawyers, supply chain, business specialists, nurses on the ground, etc. etc.
Calling him an idiot for being transparent is a personal attack, and has no place here.
Directly from the github: Tools I have written to do stuff more effectively at the VA. Code exists to make humans more efficient; not to replace them. All code leads to human review. Feedback appreciated!
> Using this as a tool to signal can be a huge time saver. But not taking the code output as "truth" is what the engineer meant.
Lavingia didn't provide any provable metric that this tool was going a "huge time saver". Additionally, if the output isn't the "truth", what can kind of time saving is expected? That a person needs to run the code, get result and then spend time analyzing results and cross verifying contracts again?
You know what will be a good time saver? Open the contracts and cross check it if it is valid. No AI slop required.
> This article, just like you, are taking all of these out of context.
Real people are impacted by VA contracts. If there is even 1 contract impacting even 100s of people that is enough damage. Saying that this is people taking things out of context shows your of empathy for other human beings, at least if they are not coders.
Because apparently Lavingia should get kudos for his transparency. But calling him an idiot for his lack of self-awareness that he had no clue about government contracts and should not be writing AI and creating this mess, all the while impacting people's life? Well we can't have that.
> He's using LLM's as a potential flag, then you go and human review those contracts with lawyers, supply chain, business specialists, nurses on the ground, etc. etc.
If human review is the point then start from there. Don't write AI slop, generate wrong result and then ask for human review.
To the larger point - Benjamin Franklin said - 'It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer'. In the same vein every well meaning contract/legislation which is helping 100s will have 10s exploiting the loophole. People like Lavingia and from DOGE seemed to have decided that rooting out those 10s is worth hurting the 100s. So, lets write an AI for that.
If you look at the code, he explicitly filters for sole source before he even sicks a LLM on it.
Tell me what you know about far part 6
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made
I called this when it started. They would come in, be totally ineffective to the point of breaking things, and then we would get a "shucks, sorry" later.
rule no. 1 in business: If you pay, you decide.
rule no.2 in business: If you pay more than you earn: close the company.
key-insights:
- it wasn't musk alone to decide. He had twitter's qualified employees and system architects -> pick the most skilled ones
- it was a power meeting where the groups & members brainstormed excessively for longer then just 3 days in a row -> let them think about a better, simplified system design on a minimal viable tech-stack
- they were accompanied by qualified stuff from tesla to uncover blind spots in the design and to bring fresh ideas / integration-knowledge / synergies & work-force -> check & start building. pivot if neccessary
I really don't undersand, why arguments like yours are still & always brought up. Is it the lack of understanding how to do business? Is it pure "hate" & ad hominem @ musk, because it's musk? What is it that is strong enough to let one show absolute lack of either economical or technical thinking publicly? The -SANE- economical and technical mindset craves for Optimization of tech and fin. Thats the only differentiator to the competition: do it better, do it cheaper.
So why was it bad exactly?
> if you don't get enough money, you need to cut your fixed costs.
No you don’t (in general), a common business model in tech is to spend investor’s money covering this deficit. Also another harder option is to get more money. Also, it wasn’t just fixed costs. And if you cut too deep and lose a lot of revenue as a result as with Twitter you’ll still not get enough money. "So he did"
Instead of all this "thinking hard about the stack" in reality here is how people got fired:
> it wasn't musk alone to decide
Unless it was, of course
- like Frohnhoefer without notice, without "brainstorming", by Musk alone, for daring to say the "technical stack" truth to ignorant power
- engineers were told today to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code, so they could show it to Elon Musk himself.
- or there was a guy who couldn’t even get info from the dedicated function for such stuff - HR - whether he was fired. That also had to be resolved by Musk in a Twitter exchange
> minimal viable tech-stack
How come you ignore that a huge portion of employees aren’t involved in any tech stack? Think 80% of employees were fired.
> After buying, a selection of highly competent individuals knowing their systems decided on
What’s your proof of competence? Like in this case: on paper, you could call this engineer competent "Lavingia has nearly 15 years of experience as a software engineer and entrepreneur", yet the work tells the opposite.
Or even if they were competent, if you give them just a week they’ll do the same happening in this story.
> - they were accompanied by qualified stuff from tesla to uncover blind spots in the design and to bring fresh ideas / integration-knowledge / synergies & work-force
These are just empty words, care to give specific examples of what fresh ideas/synergies and other work-force positive things this great process resulted in? Doge was also accompanied by "qualified stuff from tesla/twitter/etc", but instead of uncovering blind spots they were mostly acting blind.
> The -SANE- economical and technical mindset craves for Optimization of tech and fin. > So why was it bad exactly?
Because you’re supposed to maximize revenue and profits, not minimize them?
> What is it that is strong enough to let one show absolute lack of either economical or technical thinking publicly?
You tell me, why do you do this?
Those were not only the popular takes here; but any claim otherwise was derided as harmful fiction.
And still is.
> Under a time crunch, Lavingia said he finished the first version of his contract-munching tool on his second day on the job — using AI to help write the code for him. He told ProPublica he then spent his first week downloading VA contracts to his laptop and analyzing them.
This is entry/junior-level levels of incompetence being given carte blanche access to production, but where "production" includes people's livelihoods.
There was a epic book about the whole Iraq situation that had the most apt title:
FIASCO
Then there are these military terms:
FUBAR - Fucked up beyond all recognition
&
TARFU - Totally and Royally fucked up
&
SNAFU - Situation Normal: All fucked up
It's the people that have been to war that seem to have the words for what's going on, no one else.
Maybe they don’t realise it yet but their lives have just changed for the worse in a very significant and hard to reverse way. This is going to catch up with them on a reasonable timescale.
The job market is difficult right now, so who wouldn't take this one? That's the more insidious message from capitalism, there are a lot of cogs in the machine that are fully aware they are cogs, but you still have to eat, so you keep doing cog like things.
This entirely possible with some lawyers, some business analysts, perhaps some hospital administrative consultants, and ordinary support staff. That team might even use LLMs in some capacity but not in the way described by the article. Reviewing 90,000 hospital and other service contracts sounds like just another project for a mid-sized or big law firm; or the government. That is how those contracts were created in the first place.
This is like the meme about someone's uncle talking about how there are these 90,000 contracts that no one knows how to review because we've forgotten how to do it. If there's something America still knows how to do it's how to review tens of thousands of turgid government contracts.
That said, the whole thing rests on completely artificial urgency; there's no reason that it had to be done in 30 days (and there _are_ sensible heuristic ways that it could be filtered down; for instance small contracts and those about to expire could be filtered out easily; the article mentions a $35k contract, which is definitely "not worth the bother" level).
"We have a completely artificial deadline, therefore we can't do this properly, therefore we should just do a completely nonsense thing" is not a reasonable approach to doing anything.
If your goal was to dramatically cut government spending, then hiring bright, young people, with no prior experience, who axed first, and asked questions later would be the way to do it, otherwise you'd get bogged down in details since there was probably a good reason, at least initially for the said spending.
However, if you really, wanted to make a spectacular mess then hiring bright, young people, with no prior experience, who axed first, and asked questions later would be the way to do it.
Somebody, somewhere, thought this was a good approach. How could they not know it would turn into a massive clusterfuck. Hubris?
(It's very characteristic of a certain type of AI booster, though; "it's fine as long as you don't use the results for anything, also you should buy more".)
I would characterize some in this group as believing they're smarter than everyone else or anything that's been done before, so yes I think it's pure hubris.
There are a lot of bright people in the chat working on very important things, but they're not the ones joining DOGE.
I think this approach got them exactly what they wanted. Musk clearly wanted access to as much data as he could get his hands onto; legally or not. There were contracts and investigations into Musk's interest that he wanted control over, and got. Overall, chaos is not seen as an issue for those in this administration. The attitude from the top was clearly that these agencies and contractors "deserved it" for some reason, even though they have no idea what they really do or why they're doing it.
https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579873
"When I got back home and regaled my friends with my mountain stories, one of my friends joked that I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt. So I reached out to some people and got in. After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very autistic smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work.
Working for DOGE for 4 weeks, remembering the power of urgency
Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups. I was immediately acquainted with the software, HR, and legal teams and went from 0 to 100 taking meetings and getting shit done. This was the day before Thanksgiving.
The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.
I learned about the power of urgency and having an undeniable mission. Not by reading it somewhere. By experiencing it. I came to realize how laughable my robotics stint had been in comparison. And I started to realize that, although the mission of DOGE is extremely important, it wasn’t the most important thing I needed to focus on with urgency for myself. I needed to get back to ambiguity, focus on my insecurities, and be ok with that for a while. DOGE wasn’t going to fix that.
So, after 4 intense and intoxicating weeks, I called off my plans to move to DC and embark on a journey to save our government with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And I booked a 1-way ticket to Hawaii."
These aren't serious people.
This kid needs to talk to more people
On the one hand if you're really trying to disrupt an industry, you want to hire at least a good percentage of people who don't understand the industry, so they're not biased by the set of circumstances you may be trying to disrupt - and Thiel and Yarvin and maybe Vance and Elon certainly wanted to disrupt the government. Like Thiel and Yarvin probably don't want people who understand how to renegotiate government contracts, they just want people who know how to burn them to the ground.
But I imagine there were very few people in government, including some of the people "over" them like the senate and house wanted real disruption, and certainly most of the population didn't want real disruption, and Trump and his administration probably didn't want real disruption that would impact their popularity.
So it was probably doomed from the start.
Watching the Obama admin capitulate to the then speaker preventing his nominee from moving forward was abysmal. There was no valid reasoning for it, but it laid the ground work for why the bench looks like it does. There are plenty of other prior examples of the spines of the minority being brow beat to the point that not allowing POTUS to move his nominee forward was a collective should shrug
The actual text is :
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Which was developed from the initial proposal of :
"A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the People, being the best security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person. "
It at no point made any mention of overthrowing the government or being a check on the power, which would be odd seeing as a significant point of every other part of the constitution is about addressing how powers check other powers.
Lots of the founders talked about private firearm ownership and advocated for it, but that's not what was voted on and ratified!. What was actually ratified was the above text. Some of them even advocated for using violence as a way to fix disagreements with your government, but that is clearly laid out in the constitution as treason.
Now sure you can do all sorts of stupid wrangling about punctuation to make the 2nd amendment say whatever you want but that's dumb and a dumb way to run a country.
The revolution was not fought with private firearms. The war of 1812 was not fought with private firearms. Washington himself raised up a militia to put down the whiskey rebellion, so it seems early US considered the 2nd amendment to be utilized by the state.
As well, there are no provisions in the constitution to leave the US. There are no provisions to overthrow the US. If something needs to fundamentally change, you amend the constitution or run a constitutional convention. These are steps that take huge consensus to change things, as was always intentional about the constitution. The constitution was not written to allow a small band of angry people to take up arms and overthrow their government. The founders knew this when they signed the Declaration of Independence, and knew they would hang if they lost. The constitution is clear that it has the same terms. Overthrowing the state is treason and is punished with execution and is not something that was designed in.
Which makes sense if you understand the context of the 13 colonies and the primary threat they faced apart from Britain: Native Americans.
The previous several decades of US history and some later ones involved a great deal of state governors pressing citizens into militias with the express purpose of going out and murdering Native Americans (usually because those Native Americans came and murdered a bunch of citizens, in a great big circle of violence). There was not a standing army to do that. So instead, the government could press citizens into militias and make them use their own weapons. The 2nd amendment establishes the precursor to the national guard.
Sure, the current Supreme Court would vehemently disagree with my interpretation, but I think it's long past time we acknowledge that they are just making it up as they go along and will warp the text to match. There's no consistency to their rulings anyway. The very fact that you can overturn a previous ruling by the court should be enough to demonstrate that even the court doesn't believe their own hype about deciding constitutionality.
I find this whole line of thought to be very similar to the claim that the constitution intended the federal government to be extremely weak, a loose federation of states. Which is funny, because the constitution was created (with zero authority by the way) explicitly to supersede the existing loose federation of states, because within just a couple decades it had proven entirely unworkable, fragile, feckless, and nearly killed our country in its crib. Granted, the constitution DID establish a weak federal government.
Weaker than a Monarchy.
Sahil Lavingia is a snake. I thought his blog post that was on HN a week or so ago displayed a frightening level of cognitive dissidence and now he wants to distance himself from it all. No way buddy, this will be a millstone hung around your neck. You encouraged this, you participated in this, you cheered this, you will live with the consequences.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/02/a-23-year-old-crypto-bro...
I just don't understand how these people can do what they do? If I was a fresh college grad, and put in that position - to have the final say on whether experts in their fields can get grants, to conduct research on something I have no expertise in...I don't think I could do that job. I'd feel like the biggest empty suit in existence. Don't they feel any shame?
Or do they suffer from some superiority complex, where they think that whatever knowledge they have in AI/ML makes them the smartest person in the room?
EDIT: Reading through it, at least the guy acknowledges his errors.
It's narcissistic personality disorder. The 45th administration had a surfeit of responsible adults putting up guard rails to contain the future felon. This one has taken the Hitler youth approach to recruiting like-minded individuals with an inflated sense of their own competence. Minimal critical thinking skills and life experience are a checkbox in the hiring process.
You don't have that level of arrogance. But I've met people who do. They're the worst people to work with.
https://github.com/slavingia/va
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https://github.com/slavingia/va/blob/main/eos/analyze_eos.py
System prompt:
User prompt: [Edit: formatting.]Different things need to be addressed, like how someone is able to act outside all three branches of government, and have enough power to destroy the lives of those who protected our country when we needed them most.
It should be crystal clear to even the most skeptical people should turn their opinion on how they bankrupt the poor and bail out the rich every single time.
Where it would become bad for me is if the next step is taken to remove humans from the loop, or more simply if the AI is not tested for accuracy regularly and updated as the nature of the world changes. Unfortunately, I think the chance of these outcomes occurring is high.
I've worked with LLMs to aid humans in the domain of text review. I've encountered inexplicable inaccuracies that are very difficult to robustly remove from the system (you can patch one thing and then another pops up when you try some new data). I've found it very difficult to try and explain this issue to business people: I suggested that there needed to be humans in the loop, because it seemed like some level of inaccuracy is insoluble.
This is not ideal for the business, because obviously it hurts their ability to scale (reasonable). Also from the perspective of business people I've interacted with: AI is the greatest thing since the invention of the transistor, and its only a matter of time until these LLMs are perfectly intelligent (not reasonable), and vitally important that they get ahead of the curve before potential competitors do.
I can just see how this issue is going to lead to so many important aspects of our society being eaten up by imperfect software that we are forced to accept, because there are not competitors able to justify a less scalable and accurate alternative. I hope I'm wrong, but until then I hope people will flag this sort of shit when they see it.
Would you hire any ex-DOGE engineer? I ~~probably~~ would not.