Joy & Curiosity #104

Friends (and foes, of course)! No intro this week, for I do need to clean up the aftermath of a Halloween party and sneaking into my office and saying “I have to write my newsletter, people are waiting for it” can only work for so long. So, without further ado: here’s a bag of links to things that spark joy or feed my sense of curiosity.

• We don’t usually hire, but now we are: we’re looking for exceptional engineers to join Amp Labs in Sydney. I asked Oz, who is part of Amp Labs, what it’s like working there and he said: “It's honestly the most fun I've ever had. The problems are big and hairy and frankly feel impossible some times... unless, maybe, we point the agent in just the right way? I wanted to work with exceptional people, and to test the limits of this new way of working in highly consequential ways, and that's exactly what's happening here!”
• New Raising An Agent! This is, in a way, a follow-up to the previous episode about the Company of the Future. We respond to a lot of the questions we received since publishing that one: “How do you avoid slop if everyone can push to main? How do you do big architectural changes if you don’t have PRs or RFCs? What do you think about unit tests? And can’t you only do all of this because you have so many tokens and are only 21 people?” It’s all in there. Plus a bit where I explain that I count pizzas in pizzas (that’s right). Someone said it might be the best episode so far.
• “Our companies made strange bedfellows.” from building slack: Salesforce - Part one and two. I can’t believe someone finally did it and wrote an honest account about what an acquisition of this magnitude looks like from the inside. If you ever worked at a startup, I think you’ll enjoy reading this.
• You need to read this one. Yes, it’s long. But still, if you’re even the tiniest bit interested in computers and engineering, or writing, you need to read this: Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificient Things We’ve Ever Made. There are so many things to quote. Here’s one: “The spell hasn’t been broken. The phone in your pocket is several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the computers used for the Apollo mission. One AirPod could easily calculate a path to the moon. A car-key fob would suffice. An electric toothbrush. There are Rolls-Royces that we do, in fact, routinely throw away. The Apollo mission’s chips were less powerful than those currently inside a digital pregnancy test. We squander moon-landing capability to display a plus sign.” Or this: “ASML runs on the belief that if you recruit people who don’t know enough to recognize that the job before them is hopeless, they might surprise you.” Or this: “The collaboration produced mirrors that are the smoothest man-made objects in the known universe. If you blew one up to the size of the planet, the highest mountain would have the elevation of a face-down playing card.” Okay, I’ll stop there. Read it!
• Wow: “A senior colleague hears I’m not happy with my team fit and asks me to go on a walk. I know him a bit from a past life - one of the kindest and most civic-minded people I’ve met. He says he might be starting a new special team that will train dangerous bio and cyber and nuclear models and show scary demos to governments in order to get them to take AI risk seriously. I politely decline.”
• There are some interesting, or: fascinating?, snippets in there: Why Is Tech Billionaire Marc Andreessen So Mad?
• Karri Saarinen’s wrote Someone behind the software. I love this: “So eventually the products develops a character through what its makers pay attention to, what they decide not to do and what they keep working on after it technically works. I sometimes think of this as the soul of a product. You feel that someone cares about how the whole thing comes together.” I wrote something with a similar tiltle — Someone on the Other End — three years ago and, comparing the two, it’s funny how it’s the same sentiment at heart, but mine is more about software developed by a single person and Karri’s is about much more than yet. And this here is a very hard problem: “Recently, many products are starting to feel messy to me, including products from very successful companies. There seems to be more thought going into what the technology can do and what can be added than the form it should take. The product changes are primarily additive, not improving the core problem.”
• The Mythical Man-Month in the age of AI. Very interesting thought! I was working on something yesterday, a new big feature, and I had 8 agents running at the same time, doing different things. At multiple times they blocked each other. “Oh I can’t do this yet because we need to wait for X to land.” So that is a thing, but I wonder how much it matters in practice. Agents aren’t humans. Infinite patience combined with ability to react in milliseconds and to run on a schedule and to never tire — those might make a difference.
• Beautiful little piece by Phil Eaton about leaving New York: “I think mostly I learned not to wait around for other people to do the stuff I thought was obvious to do. Which can be especially scary in New York since there are so many people so much smarter and farther along than you. It turns out there's just very few people, experienced or not, who want to write or organize. And the smarter and more experienced people are often happy enough that someone else roped them in to speak, or that someone wrote about something they just haven't yet gotten to. Whatever the case, I've always shown up as ‘here to learn’ and I think it resonated with folks both more and less experienced than me.”
• Prestructured WYSIWYG. Made me wonder whether that is the reason (or one of them, at least) why I like Apple Notes so much.
• How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World. I’m not sure how much of this is true. Meaning: would I say the same things after observing the same things? But it’s certainly very interesting and there are some thought-provoking lines in there: “So what do five people do? It’s a very different job now. Last year, and even earlier this year, each of our engineers owned a system and understood it deeply. Today they’re closer to paratroopers. Wherever we land, there are two new jobs. The second is entropy, asking the models for things they wouldn't have suggested on their own. Ambition is one kind. Creative entropy is another.” Entropy!
• Felix Rieseberg at Anthropic killed the coding interview for his team: “This month, I laid the traditional coding interview to rest. As a hiring manager at Anthropic, I stopped asking candidates to do them.”
• Attention is all you have: “When you let someone else dictate what appears on your screen, it’s the same as giving them the key to your brain.” Yes. Words affect you, even if you don’t agree with them. Spend all day with people who are cynical, snarky, gossipy and you’ll end up more negative than at the start of the day. Mute and ignore as much as you can. Be conscious of what you let hit your eyeballs and into your ears.
• The CEO of Proton, in a memo to the company: “The second reason we have not been able to take full advantage of the Al revolution is that we have been almost completely stuck at phase 1 — using LLMs to speed up tasks as part of existing workflows. But writing code is not the only part of the software development lifecycle, and what happens when you eliminate a bottleneck? Another takes it is place. Maybe it is the speed and capacity of the Cl. Maybe it is design, approvals, specifications, and code reviews (yes, we need to and will get to a point where most human code review will end). Maybe the workflow does not change much but LLMs allow us to finally invest in automation which was cost-prohibitive before. If we do not look at all of our processes holistically and ruthlessly eliminate bottlenecks, we will not achieve our full potential. Often eliminating these bottlenecks will not only involve optimization of parts of our existing workflows but reworking and rethinking them altogether. This is phase 2, and we need to get there now.” Yes, 100%. Rethink everything. I opened that article to read the memo and only then did I read the surrounding the text and wow, I was pretty surprised by the employees reactions, calling the memo “fear-based”, for example. Sure, CEO seems harsh. But also: the memo is at least a year too late and if even then employees don’t get it then, well, I guess you need to be direct?
• “A comprehensive database of Cormac McCarthy’s personal library. Browse records for each of his approximately 20,000 books”
• Simon Willison on the October inflection point for games: “The thing I find both exciting and shameful about this is that I have got interesting results from so little creative input. The projects I’ve described here are loosely ordered by how much effort I’ve put into them. Not a single project represents more than four hours of my work (plus many more hours of Claude Code churning away by itself). Now imagine what could be achieved by anyone who takes this seriously, invests significant creative time, applies better taste in game design, and then playtests and iterates on the result until it’s as good as they can make it.”
• "code used to arrive one drop at a time. soon, if not already, code will be written as if it were a continuous stream, like a violent river twisting and turning as it pleases."
• I really, really, really enjoyed listening to Robert Caro on the Dwarkesh podcast. I recommend first listening/watching this short video essay he published a day before.
• “When I was running travel at The Daily Beast, I created a series on underrated destinations called It’s Still a Big World. when I wrote one about Boise back in 2018, I got a screed from a local. I’m paraphrasing, but the man essentially told me go f*ck myself for trying to ruin his nice small city with obnoxious out of towners. I thought he was nuts then. Now, I think he was prescient.”
• Sean Goedecke: “Writing is no longer evidence of anything. LLM-produced writing makes evidence of compliance even more vacuous than it already is. It totally destroys evidence of effort: if you need a hundred-page report, you can generate one with an hour and a few dollars in inference tokens. Evidence of learning is likewise broken, since I can produce a detailed status report full of information that never passed through my mind at all (and certainly was never retained).” That’s the main point but I found the other explanations of when writing was evidence enlightening too.

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