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How I know I'm working with a strong engineer
There are many ways to judge engineers (lines of code written, how smart they sound, choice of IDE, what projects they’ve worked on). I…
Advice for prompting reasoning models
I’ve written about how prompting regular LLMs is not as important as people think. Reasoning models are different. When you’re using…
Weak engineering managers
In a previous post I made the point that having a weak manager - a manager without political clout - is really bad news if you’re an…
Using LLMs effectively isn't about prompting
When people talk about using language models effectively, they mainly talk about prompting: sharing great prompts, lists of tips for…
To avoid being replaced by LLMs, do what they can't
It’s a strange time to be a software engineer. Large language models are very good at writing code and rapidly getting better. Multiple…
Thinking like a LLM
Large language models have gotten much better at thinking in the past few years. Billions of dollars have been spent to study how they think…
Engineers who won’t commit
Some engineers think it’s a virtue to remain non-committal in technical discussions. Should our team build a new feature in an event-driven…
Good engineers are right, a lot
Amazon infamously has a leadership principle where they say “good leaders are right, a lot”. It’s unclear to me how useful it is about…
How I use LLMs as a staff engineer
Software engineers are deeply split on the subject of large language models. Many believe they’re the most transformative technology to ever…
Why does AI slop feel so bad to read?
I don’t like reading obviously AI-generated content on Twitter. There’s a derogatory term for it: AI “slop”, which means something like “AI…
Are DeepSeek's new models really that fast and cheap?
Everyone’s saying that DeepSeek’s latest models represent a significant improvement over the work from American AI labs. If they’re not…
Why AI labs offer so many different models
Major AI labs these days (i.e. early 2025) offer a wide variety of models. Some are faster and cheaper, some are smarter, and now some are…
What did DeepSeek figure out about reasoning with DeepSeek-R1?
The Chinese AI lab DeepSeek recently released their new reasoning model R1, which is supposedly (a) better than the current best reasoning…
Playing politics is how senior engineers protect their team
When I write about doing politically valuable work in big tech companies, I often get comments accusing me of trying to get ahead at the…
Working fast and slow
Some engineers work very consistently, putting in the same hours every day and getting out the same amount of work. I don’t. Some days I…
Why are big tech companies so slow?
Big tech companies spend a lot of time and money building things that a single, motivated engineer could build in a weekend. This fact…
Protecting your time from predators in large tech companies
If you’re a competent software engineer at a large tech company, your time is in very high demand. Lots of people will want you to do things…
Thinking clearly about software
You can go a long way as a software engineer without ever managing to think clearly. The feedback loop of writing and running code is so…
Giving pushback to leadership
Saying no to leadership is sometimes necessary when you’re at the helm of a project. Whether they’re proposing a timeline that can’t be…
Crushing JIRA tickets is a party trick, not a path to impact
Don’t be a JIRA ticket zombie! I think a common experience among ambitious juniors - certainly I did this once - is to get frustrated at the…