Moment: Quotable Line
outsourcing thinking vs understanding
“You can outsource your thinking, but you can't outsource your understanding.”
outsourcing thinking vs understanding
“You can outsource your thinking, but you can't outsource your understanding.”
vibe coding vs agentic engineering
“I would say vibe coding is about raising the floor for everyone in terms of what they can do in software. So the floor rises, everyone can vibe code anything, and that's amazing, incredible. But then I would say agentic engineering is about preserving the quality bar of what existed before in professional software.”
Software 3.0 paradigm shift
“That app shouldn't exist. And yeah, the software 3.0 paradigm is a lot more kind of raw. It just— your neural network is doing more and more of the work, and your prompt or context is just the image, and the output is an image, and there's no need to have any of the app in between.”
AI capability inconsistency
“How is it possible that state-of-the-art Opus 4.7 will simultaneously refactor 100,000, like, codebase— a line codebase— or find zero-day vulnerabilities and yet tells me to walk to this car wash.”
RL data distribution circuits
“If you're in the circuits that were part of the RL, you fly. And if you're in the circuits that are out of the data distribution, you're going to struggle. And you have to kind of figure out which circuits you're in in your application.”
MenuGen user ID bug
“For MenuGen, you sign up with a Google account, but you purchase credits using a Stripe account, and both of them have email addresses. And my agent actually tries to basically— like when you purchase credits, it assigned it using the email address from Stripe to the Google email address. Like there wasn't a persistent user ID for people.”
chess data in GPT pretraining
“From GPT-3.5 to GPT-4, people noticed that chess improved a lot. And I think a lot of people thought, oh, well, it's just a progression of the capabilities. But actually, it's more that— I think this is public information. I think I saw it on the internet. A huge amount of data of chess made it into the pre-training set.”
automatable information processing beyond code
“It's not even— I think that's also an example of working in the old mindset because it's not just about programming and programming becoming faster. This is more general information processing that is automatable now. So it's not just even about code.”
agentic engineering hiring evaluation
“I would say that hiring has to look like, give me a really big project, and see someone implement that big project. Like, let's write, say, a Twitter clone for agents and then make it really good, make it really secure, and then have some agents simulate some activity on this Twitter. And then I'm going to use 10 Codex 5.4x high to try to break your website that you deployed.”
agent representation for people
“I do think we're going towards a world where there's agent representation for people and for organizations. And, you know, I'll have my agent talk to your agent to figure out some of the details of our meetings or things like that.”
agent-assisted spec design
“I think there's something more general here where you have to work with your agent to design a spec that is very detailed. And maybe it's basically the docs and then get the agents to write them. And you're in charge of the oversight and the top-level categories, but the agents are doing a lot of the under the hood.”