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Understanding is the new bottleneck

geoffreylitt.com

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Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#161

Post by mindwok »

madrox wrote: post #82

I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck. It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program ma…

Aren't you just taking the same dismissive attitude towards management and doing it to engineers?

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#162

Post by mindwok »

euthymiclabs wrote: post #2

"I read the code." -Mitchell Hashimoto Great code needs great understanding and agents need excellent guidance. Even in my current solo-dev work, I can't imagine making a production commit I haven't read until I understand it. I own the consequences of my code; that's a responsibility AI agents can't take.

Conversely I'm a solo-dev and I ship a lot of slop I don't even look at. Granted my work is just basic CRUD apps, and I focus my efforts on validating important consequences (like does this break accounting invariants or something)

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#163

Post by RealWed6 »

_ink_ wrote: post #146
madrox wrote: post #82

I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck. It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program ma…

What book would you recommend?

[flagged]

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#164

Post by galaxyLogic »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #125
361994752 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked on both sides, so I know they’re actually very different. As a manager, the first thing you do is get to know your people. Some of them will be very strong and trustworthy. You give them the hardest work, and you ask them the least. That’s how you scale your team’s scope without getting overburdened. And that’s why teams have key people. But when you work with LLMs, you still need to understand most of th…

This doesn't change the fact that those soft skills are necessary to use LLMs effectively. You need a mixture of hard and soft skills. Engineers who have avoided learning the soft skills are going to have a harder time adjusting.

But if you are managing AI agents you dont' need "soft skills" do you? You don't need to be especially nice to the AI, or symphatize with it, or have fun with it to build trust,

I would imagine that managing a team of AI-agents is totally different from managing a team of people.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#165

Post by odshoifsdhfs »

fn-mote wrote: post #87
odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped posting here because of AI scrapping, but fucking hell I had to login to comment. I has this stupid same shit done in a PR just a few weeks ago. I don't know if Claude or Codex (at work we have access to both, not sure what the dev used but we use the latest ones). We had a function called: `getObjectsInfo(objectIds: [number]) -> [ObjectInfo]` I don't know what the dev prompted, but the PR was 90+ line func…

Does submitting this kind of PR count against their promotion or productivity? Is there any way it could? Love to hear from companies making progress on this front.

I don't know if it is related to promotion, but last few months there has been a push to use more and more AI in everything. As I said in a different comment, I know for a fact that part of the investment they got was contigent on part of it being used on AI.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#166

Post by simianwords »

361994752 wrote: post #134
taneq wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re still responsible for what you and the team ship if the team is human. Trusting your people just means you’re willing to take the fall if they mess up.

Yes. That is what trust means. And being able to trust the right folks makes a good manager.

And being able to trust the agent when you can makes a good engineer

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#167

Post by chris_armstrong »

simianwords wrote: post #159
chris_armstrong wrote: post #154

A small bone to pick, but describing an AI that is operating autonomously as creative seems wrong - at best, this process is accretive , because the AI is adding and adding, but has no ability or incentive to shape its output toward something a human would find of value. Value is subjective (individual), changing over time. An AI doesn't know when it needs to be taking away - removal is a key part of the creative pro…

No incentive? Do you not know how RL is done?

Reinforced continuously toward a fixed goal is not an incentive, it doesn’t lead to a creative process

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#168

Post by simianwords »

kazinator wrote: post #100
notnaut wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a massive improvement. “I don’t know, maybe these other smarter more expensive models with more recent training data might… here are some questions you could ask them:…”

Simply those first three words out of an LLM would be a massive improvement: "I don't know". "I am not sure". "My confidence in the following answer is low due to a lack of reliable information in my training and online sources ..."

You do know it can already do that?

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#169

Post by ilitirit »

I guess it depends on the context and environment, right? In many corporates, the bottleneck for me has always been specs and testing. I have daily examples. I had to explain it to leadership like this: "There are far more ways things can go wrong than right".

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#170

Post by t_mahmood »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #125
361994752 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked on both sides, so I know they’re actually very different. As a manager, the first thing you do is get to know your people. Some of them will be very strong and trustworthy. You give them the hardest work, and you ask them the least. That’s how you scale your team’s scope without getting overburdened. And that’s why teams have key people. But when you work with LLMs, you still need to understand most of th…

This doesn't change the fact that those soft skills are necessary to use LLMs effectively. You need a mixture of hard and soft skills. Engineers who have avoided learning the soft skills are going to have a harder time adjusting.

LLM doesn't need soft skills, but just knowing how to write a prompt to get the correct percentage values in a RAG and get the result close to your expectations out. Well it might be different based on the training data, which ai company, and how much you're paying.

People are different, they will be sometime affected by their emotional situation, surrounding, no matter how much they're being paid, You need to understand their mental situation, did he got scolded by the upper management today? He might not be on his best of his capacity right now. Or they might've pulled an all nighter and really not in their best position.

If someone going to treat people like an LLM, definitely is not going to have good time

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