Fast and slow ways to improve your reputation
Read it on seangoedecke.com or switch to weekly emails here To get a good reputation in tech companies, you need to work on important projects. However, you...
Elegance and intelligence are anticorrelated
Read it on seangoedecke.com or switch to weekly emails here Elegance and intelligence can have a surprisingly negative correlation. Intelligent people...
You can just ask AI to do things
Read it on seangoedecke.com One of the most important skills in working with AI is agency: being willing to try new and ambitious things. This is true for...
Getting good at AI takes time and practice
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many people think1 that getting “good at AI” is trivial. Sure, with some early models there were tricks you had to learn,2 but...
Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many people are saying that AI will make software faster by rewriting it in faster languages, but this isn’t generally true. Most...
Regular people support scientific fields for technology, not art
Read it on seangoedecke.com Some people think that LLMs should not be used in technical fields like programming or mathematics, because those fields are...
Don't anthropomorphize big tech companies
Read it on seangoedecke.com Bryan Cantrill has a great line from a talk where he cautions against anthropomorphizing1 Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. I think it’s...
What requirements don't you have?
Read it on seangoedecke.com When designing software, the requirements you don’t have are as important as the requirements you do. Identifying what you can...
Writing is no longer proof of work
Read it on seangoedecke.com Tech companies structurally depend on writing to serve as evidence, in the same way that Bitcoin depends on proof-of-work...
AI is driving a boom in modestly successful software projects
Read it on seangoedecke.com If AI is so great, why aren’t we seeing an explosion of new, amazing software products? If anyone can turn their idea into...
Software engineers don't get to be Luddites about AI
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many software engineers are righteously angry about AI. It’s understandable to be upset that the skills you built your...
Don't diagnose your opponents
Read it on seangoedecke.com When you disagree with someone, there are two paths forward. The first is to try to engage with what they’re saying: what their...
Software's centaur age may last decades
Read it on seangoedecke.com We are currently living in the age of centaurs (2022-20??). Right now, human engineers paired with AI coding systems are more...
How to read code
Read it on seangoedecke.com Everyone knows how to read a book. Beginning at the first page, you read each word in order1, stopping periodically to think,...
Shipping is the foundation
Read it on seangoedecke.com There are lots of skills involved in being a successful engineer at a big tech company. Running effective meetings, writing good...
Superpersuasion will look like bribery
Read it on seangoedecke.com The idea of “superpersuasion” has been floating around the AI safety community for decades. Now that powerful and difficult-to-...
Do not build the LLM torture factory
Read it on seangoedecke.com It isn’t hard to torture an LLM. You simply extract a steering vector that corresponds with LLM “discomfort”, then artificially...
Human-AI partnerships are for alignment, not capability
Read it on seangoedecke.com It’s common to compare the current AI takeover of software engineering to the rise of AI in chess. Chess AIs went from much...
Advice to a beginning software engineer
Read it on seangoedecke.com In general, you should be suspicious of engineers who are trying to give you advice. Even during ordinary times, this industry is...
You should all be asking way more questions
Read it on seangoedecke.com When someone is explaining something to me, I ask on average one question every thirty seconds. I’m sure this is frustrating to...
