tl;dr:“The economics of being a founding engineer are peculiar. You're essentially taking a pay cut and accepting illiquid equity in exchange for a lottery ticket - but it's a lottery ticket where you get to thoroughly inspect the odds beforehand. While most founding engineers will end up with worthless equity, the ones who choose wisely and join the right startup at the right time can see returns that are simply impossible to achieve as an employee at a public company. It's a high-stakes game of calculated risk-taking, where thorough due diligence and strong conviction in your assessment can help tilt the odds in your favor.”
tl;dr:Have you ever been handed a new codebase at your job and been completely lost? I have. While LLMs have been generating code for months, the problem of reading, understanding and navigating existing large codebases remains unsolved. In this article, I explore why.