tl;dr:“It’s a strange time to be a software engineer. Large language models are very good at writing code and rapidly getting better. Multiple multi-billion dollar attempts are currently being made to develop a pure-AI software engineer. The rough strategy - put a reasoning model in a loop with tools - is well-known and (in my view) seems likely to work. What should we software engineers do to prepare for what’s coming down the line?”
tl;dr:“It’s a strange time to be a software engineer. Large language models are very good at writing code and rapidly getting better. Multiple multi-billion dollar attempts are currently being made to develop a pure-AI software engineer. The rough strategy - put a reasoning model in a loop with tools - is well-known and (in my view) seems likely to work. What should we software engineers do to prepare for what’s coming down the line?”
tl;dr:“Some engineers think it’s a virtue to remain non-committal in technical discussions. Should our team build a new feature in an event-driven or synchronous way? Well, it depends: there are many strong technical reasons on each side, so it’s better to keep an open mind and not come down on either side. This strategy is fine when you’re a junior engineer, but at some point you’ll be the person in the room with the most context (or technical skill, or institutional power). At that point, you need to take a position, whether you feel particularly confident or not.”
tl;dr:“Personally, I feel like I get a lot of value from AI. I think many of the people who don’t feel this way are “holding it wrong”: i.e. they’re not using language models in the most helpful ways. In this post, I’m going to list a bunch of ways I regularly use AI in my day-to-day as a staff engineer.”
tl;dr:“Personally, I feel like I get a lot of value from AI. I think many of the people who don’t feel this way are “holding it wrong”: i.e. they’re not using language models in the most helpful ways. In this post, I’m going to list a bunch of ways I regularly use AI in my day-to-day as a staff engineer.”
tl;dr:“Some engineers work very consistently, putting in the same hours every day and getting out the same amount of work. I don’t. Some days I only have a few hours of focused work in me, while on other days I feel like I can go on almost indefinitely. I used to feel like this was a problem - that I was either overworking or slacking off - but now I lean into it. Instead of trying to push harder on slack days and pull back on focus days, I accept that I’ll be much more productive on some days than others. There are serious advantages to this working style.”
tl;dr:“Some engineers work very consistently, putting in the same hours every day and getting out the same amount of work. I don’t. Some days I only have a few hours of focused work in me, while on other days I feel like I can go on almost indefinitely. I used to feel like this was a problem - that I was either overworking or slacking off - but now I lean into it. Instead of trying to push harder on slack days and pull back on focus days, I accept that I’ll be much more productive on some days than others. There are serious advantages to this working style.”
tl;dr:“If you’re a competent software engineer at a large tech company, your time is in very high demand. Lots of people will want you to do things1. You should be very selective about how you handle these requests, and definitely avoid saying yes to everyone.”
tl;dr:“Pushing back against leadership has high stakes. Doing it well can actually build your leadership team’s trust in you, even though you’re telling them something they don’t want to hear. Doing it very badly can have serious repercussions for the success of the project or your own career.”
tl;dr:“What defines a strong engineer is the ability to do tasks that weaker engineers can’t, even with near-unlimited time. But what are the concrete skills or traits that make up that ability? What is it about strong engineers that makes them able to do a much wider range of tasks? In order of importance, I think it’s self-belief, pragmatism, speed, and technical ability.” Sean elaborates on these qualities.