System One models like Jev can train their own replacements
Read it on seangoedecke.com “System One” models like Jev are fast general classifiers. Classifiers have existed since 1958, but they have to be trained for...
Grit your teeth and ship it
Read it on seangoedecke.com Being good at building and being good at shipping are two separate skills. In the short term, they’re actually countervailing: if...
Two techniques for working with System One models
Read it on seangoedecke.com I recently wrote about Jev, a new “System One” language model that only outputs decisions: the answers to a set of user-provided...
Jev means structured output is interesting again
Read it on seangoedecke.com 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,...
Tell agents the why, not just the how
Read it on seangoedecke.com Early AI agents were basically enthusiastic idiots. Working with them required you to tell them precisely what you wanted them to...
Slow developer experience will bottleneck fast models
Read it on seangoedecke.com Right now developer experience is measured in seconds. If your tests take a second to run, that’s good; if they take thirty...
AI is breaking our proxies for expertise
Read it on seangoedecke.com Mathematicians are broadly not anti-AI. They’re more culturally open to using AI as a tool than, say, artists or writers1....
Don't build tools for AI agents
Read it on seangoedecke.com Lots of people are making the case that we should stop building software for human users and start building it for AI agents....
They really do think AI might kill everyone
Read it on seangoedecke.com A recent resignation tweet from an Anthropic researcher has everyone talking about the AI apocalypse again. Among other things,...
Why we should anthropomorphize AI agents
Read it on seangoedecke.com Just over a year ago I wrote Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs. Now it’s a hot topic again, driven by Dwarkesh Patel’s...
Automatically detecting AI text in my browser
Read it on seangoedecke.com Automated AI text detection is currently an underserved niche. The only game in town is Pangram, which does an excellent job but...
Radical responsibility means treating people like tools
Read it on seangoedecke.com A lot of people think that good leadership requires radical responsibility. Conscious Leadership defines it like this: Taking...
How to protect yourself from workslop
Read it on seangoedecke.com “Workslop” is when your colleagues or bosses communicate with you by pasting big chunks of AI-generated text. The core problem...
You have to beat the models at something
Read it on seangoedecke.com In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their...
Selling out
Read it on seangoedecke.com In 1973, Tom Lehrer famously sang that “selling out is easy to do”. That may have been true in the seventies, but it’s not true...
You should never be angry at work
Read it on seangoedecke.com I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies1. There are many ways to be successful, and every...
Readers can't identify watermarked AI text
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the last few weeks, I’ve been complaining that everyone is wrong about AI watermarking: it isn’t really anti-consumer and it...
Good writing is obvious, not original
Read it on seangoedecke.com When you write, you should try to say things that are obviously true, and spend very little time worrying about whether you’re...
Help peer
Read it on seangoedecke.com One of the most influential 20th century pieces of writing about AI is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. Although there are many...
AI text watermarking is not a big deal
Read it on seangoedecke.com People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude...
