71–80 of 124 posts
He says "engineers" but he means code monkeys. Actual engineering is all about learning from past failures
The current world conceptions of engineers are that they're the negative ones, the naysayers.
Seems like this could be categorized as yet another reason why software developers are not engineers.
Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.
It's even funnier when you realize that not too long ago a decent chunk of the software industry did have to deal with the realities of having to press CDs, print boxes and ship them to retailers in time for the holiday season. The idea that you can ship a half-baked product directly to your end users, charge for it and promise it will get better over time (but only if you manage to secure enough VC funding in the me…
He says "engineers" but he means code monkeys. Actual engineering is all about learning from past failures
This is why we do not have any real engineers at the helm of any nation, state, multi-national enterprise or anything really . The current world conceptions of engineers are that they're the negative ones, the naysayers .
I'm a hands on engineering leader for a team of about 20 engineers and I've been spending the past 6 months trying to get my team to understand just this. On Friday we had a coffee hour to share how we've been working recently and they all seemed perplexed at the workflows I've been adopting. It seems natural to me as someone who's been a manager for some time now, but very alien to all those who've never gone down t…
The model output is fairly uniform because the models are fairly uniform, but the input is how I understand the prompter’s theory of mind for the LLM.
The higher fidelity the theory of mind, the more productive the resulting conversation is. Basic things, like knowing what the model is even aware of.
It’s okay at subjective product judgements with limited context, and so the best engineers make the most important decisions themselves, constraining the model’s solution space to something looking like success.
Maintaining consistent progress towards a common goal with a bunch of different perspectives is the job.
Matches my experience. Like 90% of the work is the spec.
Except instead of weeks researching its like a few hours talking with an agent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why we do not have any real engineers at the helm of any nation, state, multi-national enterprise or anything really . The current world conceptions of engineers are that they're the negative ones, the naysayers .
Aren't there a lot of engineers/scientists near the top of the CCP?
> We even reinvented bus stops.
Unless I am mistaken, buses do not descend in a lift and travel underground. It's pure fantasy of course, but no we didn't somehow forget buses exist and reinvent bus stops.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what was the path that the engineers have been taking? The limiting communication between agents to my mind is obvious to anyone who hasn't swallowed orthodoxy Agile development completely whole. And in my experience the people who have, are rarely the devs. Context switching, between agents, people or whoever, require ramp up time to relearn context. It's always slower and more expensive, other pot…
> obvious to anyone who hasn't swallowed orthodoxy Agile development completely whole. What? One of the first principles in doing Lean and Agile correctly is limiting Work in Progress and avoiding context switching whenever possible.
Everywhere I've worked claims to be doing Agile, but none of them have ever done anything to avoid context switching or limiting work in progress