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...
How I use LLMs as a staff engineer in 2026
Read it on seangoedecke.com A bit over a year ago I wrote How I use LLMs as a staff engineer. Here’s a brief summary of what I used AI for last year: Smart...
DeepSeek-V4-Flash means LLM steering is interesting again
Read it on seangoedecke.com Ever since Golden Gate Claude I’ve been fascinated with “steering”: the idea that you can guide LLM outputs by directly...
AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem
Read it on seangoedecke.com This year Elon Musk has started banging the drum about building AI datacenters in space. As the only person who owns a successful...
Thinking Machines and interaction models
Read it on seangoedecke.com Thinking Machines just released Interaction Models. This is their first real AI model release1 after a year of work and two...
The left-wing case for AI
Read it on seangoedecke.com In Many anti-AI arguments are conservative arguments I argued that left-wing anti-AI sentiment1 is partly a backlash to two...
AI makes weak engineers less harmful
Read it on seangoedecke.com Like other kinds of puzzle-solving, software engineering ability is strongly heavy-tailed. The strongest engineers produce way...
Notes on incidents
Read it on seangoedecke.com Incidents are boring. Most of what you actually do during an incident is wait: for some other team to investigate, or for a...
Why hasn't longer-horizon training slowed AI progress?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Dwarkesh Patel1 recently posted an award for the best answers to four key questions about AI. It’s partly a challenge and partly...
Why I don't like the "staff engineer archetypes"
Read it on seangoedecke.com The most influential piece of writing about staff engineers in the last decade has to be Will Larson’s Staff engineer archetypes....
Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
Read it on seangoedecke.com I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall1. However, it seems pretty obvious...
Luddites and AI datacenters
Read it on seangoedecke.com Is it time to start burning down datacenters? Some people think so. An Indianapolis city council member had his house recently...
