Posts
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...Everything Else Is a Task
I’ve been talking to my LLMs a lot. I spin up an agent, we collaborate, and generally come out the other side with something useful. Over the course of hundreds — thousands? — of these conversations, my practices have oscillated. Sometimes I’m very precise, and I cut to the core. I know what I need, and I’m able to ask for it. Other times, I’m all over the place, and I prompt like a stream of consciousness. While the stream of consciousness can be helpful to root out the core, I ultimately get something faster when I’m precise. And I tend to be most precise when I know what’s the context and what’s the task.
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Loops
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my first programming lessons. I must have been 8 or 9, and I had picked up a VisualBasic textbook that was wedged firmly in the family bookshelf. The first exercise was programming a dot to move one space on a board on the screen. It was fascinating and wildly rewarding, but as you know, this story isn’t about moving that dot one space. This story is about the next lesson — how to move that dot again and again and again in just a couple more lines of code.
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Everything is Text...
I’ve been writing code with LLMs for nearly two years. I’ve tried all sorts of tools, pushed tools through every workflow. But the breakthrough wasn’t a new app or model or even a better prompt — it was the humble markdown file. Plain, portable markdown text. With LLMs, the game is in how you get your context to the model. And the more you treat as text, the more you unlock.
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You Are a Prism
In his seminal High Output Management, Andy Grove captures a key management role: filtering information. Managers do this in two directions. As a manager, you take in organizational context and distill it down to the key pieces your team needs to be successful. Similarly, you take all the information your team is creating and distill it for leadership, your manager, and your peers. You filter information, sharpen it, and pass it along.
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Start with Your Feet and Look to the Horizon
Having mentored and managed numerous Engineering Managers, I’ve often seen them navigating new, sometimes overwhelming, leadership challenges. Whether they’re onboarding onto an unfamiliar team, building a new team from scratch, or leading through significant changes like a shift in scope or a key team member leaving, the uncertainty can be daunting.