LLMs reward expertise
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope...
AIs might escape containment by releasing themselves as open-weight models
Read it on seangoedecke.com Before large language models, people who worried about AI safety often talked about the “boxing problem”. It goes like this....
Impro is a handbook for running a cult
Read it on seangoedecke.com Here’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro: Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed...
Overtraining as the path to human-like AI
Read it on seangoedecke.com The anonymous blogger Gwern recently completed a thirteen thousand word post called Human-like Neural Nets by Catapulting, in...
What does "playing politics" mean for software engineers?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Software engineers are often told to “start playing politics”, but most engineers have no idea what that means. Their reference...
In defense of not understanding your codebase
Read it on seangoedecke.com As a software engineer, how well do you have to understand your own codebase? My guess is that people who work on small codebases...
Blog about things you don't understand yet
Read it on seangoedecke.com Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I...
C2PA only works if everything is signed
Read it on seangoedecke.com The European Union AI Act is Europe’s attempt to comprehensively regulate AI usage. A big part of that is the requirement that...
Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove
Read it on seangoedecke.com The European Union AI Act will begin to be enforceable in August 2026, one month from now1. One of the biggest new requirements...
Saying the obvious thing
Read it on seangoedecke.com Stating the obvious is surprisingly useful. Most of your knowledge lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, so it’s...
AI inference is obviously profitable
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many people claim that AI inference is unprofitable to serve, and thus must be subsidized by an ocean of dumb money from...
AI GPUs probably live longer than three years
Read it on seangoedecke.com People who think current AI use is unsustainable often rely on the claim that inference GPUs only last “three years at the most”...
Working with product managers
Read it on seangoedecke.com The relationship engineers have with product management is more dysfunctional than with any other part of the company. There’s no...
Doing nothing at work
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working...
Anti-AI nostalgia and the cult of the past
Read it on seangoedecke.com Programmers were better back in the day, weren’t they? Back when we had real programmers. Not just people who got paid to write...
Weird projects I shipped with AI
Read it on seangoedecke.com Where are all the AI-generated projects? This is a common question from AI skeptics: if LLMs are so good at writing code, where...
Build agents, not pipelines
Read it on seangoedecke.com There are only two ways to use LLMs in a computer program: as part of a pipeline, or as an agent. In other words, either you...
The famous o3 "GeoGuessr" prompt did not work
Read it on seangoedecke.com In April last year, Kelsey Piper discovered that OpenAI’s o3 model was surprisingly good at figuring out where a photo was taken...
Prompts are technical debt too
Read it on seangoedecke.com It’s common and correct to say that “all code is technical debt”. Adding code is a necessary evil for developing new features:...
The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
Read it on seangoedecke.com The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to...
