Oddur Magnusson

I love compression. There is something satisfying about applying math to data to shrink it and make systems faster and more efficient. Seed is a massively multiplayer online game. MMOs have a particular relationship with bandwidth. Thousands of players sharing a world means the server is constantly pushing state updates to every connected client, and every client is sending commands back. That volume of small, frequent messages adds up fast. On top of that, every game update means every player needs to download new content. At scale, both of these become real constraints on the player experience. ...

I’ve been spending most of my time in agent-driven development lately, and the biggest insight I keep coming back to is this: the person in the driving seat matters more, not less. The barrier to generating code with agents is basically zero. But agents will optimize for the path of least resistance, and the result will be mediocre. The engineers who have internalized best practices over years of building real systems, who know what good looks like, are the ones who can direct agents past that. The experience to know when code is merely working versus actually well-built is what separates useful agent output from slop. ...