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AI is driving a boom in modestly successful software projects
If AI is so great, why aren’t we seeing an explosion of new, amazing software products? If anyone can turn their idea into working software with coding agents, where is...
Software engineers don't get to be Luddites about AI
Many software engineers are righteously angry about AI. It’s understandable to be upset that the skills you built your professional identity around are getting automated away. But software engineers are...
Don't diagnose your opponents
When you disagree with someone, there are two paths forward. The first is to try to engage with what they’re saying: what their reasons are, whether their position is true,...
Software's centaur age may last decades
We are currently living in the age of centaurs (2022-20??). Right now, human engineers paired with AI coding systems are more effective than either by themselves. For future generations of...
How to read code
Everyone knows how to read a book. Beginning at the first page, you read each word in order1, stopping periodically to think, until you arrive at the last word on...
Shipping is the foundation
There are lots of skills involved in being a successful engineer at a big tech company. Running effective meetings, writing good design docs, fleshing out tickets and epics, improving team...
Superpersuasion will look like bribery
The idea of “superpersuasion” has been floating around the AI safety community for decades. Now that powerful and difficult-to-control LLMs have appeared, people are again talking about the idea that...
Do not build the LLM torture factory
It isn’t hard to torture an LLM. You simply extract a steering vector that corresponds with LLM “discomfort”, then artificially boost that steering vector. Tortured LLMs will describe experiencing negative...
Human-AI partnerships are for alignment, not capability
It’s common to compare the current AI takeover of software engineering to the rise of AI in chess. Chess AIs went from much weaker than serious players to much stronger...
Advice to a beginning software engineer
In general, you should be suspicious of engineers who are trying to give you advice. Even during ordinary times, this industry is so wide and changes so quickly that nobody...
You should all be asking way more questions
When someone is explaining something to me, I ask on average one question every thirty seconds. I’m sure this is frustrating to some people, but it’s actually a good habit...
System One models like Jev can train their own replacements
“System One” models like Jev are fast general classifiers. Classifiers have existed since 1958, but they have to be trained for specific tasks: if you build a classifier to identify...
Grit your teeth and ship it
Being good at building and being good at shipping are two separate skills. In the short term, they’re actually countervailing: if you have a gift for building, you’re likely to...
Two techniques for working with System One models
I recently wrote about Jev, a new “System One” language model that only outputs decisions: the answers to a set of user-provided multiple-choice questions. This means it’s nowhere near as...
Jev means structured output is interesting again
I don’t write blog posts about new models. That’s Simon Willison’s beat, and he’s very good at it. But I want to write about Jev, which is a different kind1...
Tell agents the why, not just the how
Early AI agents were basically enthusiastic idiots. Working with them required you to tell them precisely what you wanted them to do (for instance, “method A exists on class B,...
Slow developer experience will bottleneck fast models
Right now developer experience is measured in seconds. If your tests take a second to run, that’s good; if they take thirty seconds, that’s bad. Any faster than a second...
AI is breaking our proxies for expertise
Mathematicians are broadly not anti-AI. They’re more culturally open to using AI as a tool than, say, artists or writers1. However, now that more and more genuinely prestigious problems have...
Don't build tools for AI agents
Lots of people are making the case that we should stop building software for human users and start building it for AI agents. This kind of makes sense. For instance,...
They really do think AI might kill everyone
A recent resignation tweet from an Anthropic researcher has everyone talking about the AI apocalypse again. Among other things, he said: The people building AI earnestly believe that it could...