Posts
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You Are a Prism
You are a prism. The organization exists around you, and you are in it, and you are of it. But it distills and refracts, and you are it.
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Eval What You Own
Recently, I’ve been setting up agents to map reduce my workflows. I’m generally pulling content from a few sources, synthesizing it, and reporting. The shape is pretty consistent. It ends up looking like a few specialist connectors and agents and one synthesizing agent running weekly. This leads to one of the more sinister problems in software development: a mighty long feedback loop. So I looked to evals to speed up iteration.
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You're Only a Few Months Behind
There’s an anxiety that’s creeping into software engineers lately. Models are shipping every other week. The software engineering tool everyone was talking about last month has been deprecated for something new. Engineers who have always maintained a running list of tech are now overwhelmed by the sheer volume of bullet points getting added to that list. Engineering Managers are trying to keep up both to help their teams and also to keep their own skills up-to-date.
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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.