> Then my mom wrote the following: “be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here! Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least.”
I'm lucky to have parents with strong values. My whole life they've given me advice, on the small stuff and the big decisions. I didn't always want to hear it when I was younger, but now in my late thirties, I'm really glad they kept sharing it. In hidhsight I can see the life-experience / wisdom in it, and how it's helped and shaped me.
I get what he's pointing at: building teaches you things the spec can't, and iteration often reveals the real problem.
That said, the framing feels a bit too poetic for engineering. Software isn't only craft, it's also operations, risk, time, budget, compliance, incident response, and maintenance by people who weren't in the room for the "lump of clay" moment. Those constraints don't make the work less human; they just mean "authentic creation" isn't the goal by itself.
For me the takeaway is: pursue excellence, but treat learning as a means to reliability and outcomes. Tools (including LLMs) are fine with guardrails, clear constraints up front and rigorous review/testing after, so we ship systems we can reason about, operate, and evolve (not just artefacts that feel handcrafted).
> That said, the framing feels a bit too poetic for engineering.
I wholeheartedly disagree but I tend to believe that's going to be highly dependent on what type of developer a person is. One who leans towards the craftsmanship side or one who leans towards the deliverables side. It will also be impacted by the type of development they are exposed to. Are they in an environment where they can even have a "lump of clay" moment or is all their time spent on systems that are too old/archaic/complex/whatever to ever really absorb the essence of the problem the code is addressing?
The OP's quote is exactly how I feel about software. I often don't know exactly what I'm going to build. I start with a general idea and it morphs towards excellence by the iteration. My idea changes, and is sharpened, as it repeatedly runs into reality. And by that I mean, it's sharpened as I write and refactor the code.
I personally don't have the same ability to do that with code review because the amount of time I spend reviewing/absorbing the solution isn't sufficient to really get to know the problem space or the code.
Totally fair. A real strategy should start with investor context. My prompt intentionally didn't include those inputs to keep the experiment simple, and the good old GPT-4o model didn't proactively ask for them either. In an actual financial planning conversation, those constraints would be front and center and the portfolio could look materially different.
That's a fair point regarding pure content absorption, especially given that many classes do suffer from poor didactics. However, the university's value proposition often lies elsewhere: access to professors researching innovations (not yet indexed by LLMs), physical labs for hands-on experience that you can't simulate, and the crucial peer networking with future colleagues. These human and physical elements, along with the soft skills developed through technical debate, are hard to replace. But for standard theory taught by uninspired lecturers, I agree that the textbook plus LLM approach is arguably superior.
That's my experience too. Agent coding works really well for existing codebases that are well-structured and organized. If your codebase is mostly spaghetti—without clear boundaries and no clear architecture in place—then agents won't be of much help. They'll also suffer working in those codebases and produce mediocre results.
Regarding building apps and systems from scratch with agents, I also find it more challenging. You can make it work, but you'll have to provide much more "spec" to the agent to get a good result (and "good" here is subjective). Agents excel at tasks with a narrower scope and clear objectives.
The best use case for coding agents is tasks that you'd be comfortable coding yourself, where you can write clear instructions about what you expect, and you can review the result (and even make minor adjustments if necessary before shipping it). This is where I see clear efficiency gains.
Sharing mine: https://thomasvilhena.com/
— writing on engineering, lessons from building a company as a technical co-founder, and whatever I’m currently curious about.
I shortened a link and when trying to access it in Chrome I get a red screen with this message:
Dangerous site
Attackers on the site you tried visiting might trick you into installing software or revealing things like your passwords, phone, or credit card numbers. Chrome strongly recommends going back to safety.
I was going to mention the same thing, also the page is clearly designed by a woman. Never mind that neither Sundar nor Satya are not white, or that many VPs in the Big Tech world are women. OP seems to have a very distorted view of the corporate world and has villified the white alpha male in her mind.
Explanation for non-native speakers (like me) who didn't know the rule:
The words "how" and "like" clash because "How" already implies manner or appearance, making the addition of "like" (which serves a similar function with "what") superfluous.
In this case. It's hard to make a firm rule because you can construct sentences with both words in them that aren't wrong-sounding, because the same word can be used in subtly grammatically different ways.
A good rule of thumb is to phrase the sentence as a question and see if it sounds correct. "What does it look like?" is fine. "How does it look?" is fine. "How does it look like?" does not. In the question "Like how?", "like" is more akin to "I said, like, what do you want me to do?" - I'm no linguist, but they do have a term for that use.
Hah, this reminds me of the Isaac Asimov story about catching Nazi spies inflitrating the US...
Given Americans' general indifference to perfect grammer, if it "sounds" right they usually don't make a fuss. So they might have learned something new as well.
I haven’t read the Asimov story, but it was probably based on this true event:
As a result, U.S. troops began asking other soldiers questions that they felt only Americans would know the answers to in order to flush out the German infiltrators, which included naming state capitals, sports and trivia questions related to the U.S., etc. This practice resulted in Brigadier General Bruce C. Clarke being held at gunpoint for some time after he incorrectly said the Chicago Cubs were in the American League[7][8][9][10] and a captain spending a week in detention after he was caught wearing German boots. General Omar Bradley was repeatedly stopped in his staff car by checkpoint guards who seemed to enjoy asking him such questions. The Skorzeny commando paranoia also contributed to numerous instances of mistaken identity. All over the Ardennes, U.S. soldiers attempted to persuade suspicious U.S. military policemen that they were genuine GIs.
Ugh, I'd fail any questions based on US sports. And, these days, 30 years removed high school civics, I'd likely miss some of the state capitals as well.
This is how it actually works. The brain machine learns from available data and sorts out which is correct. "Sounds right" is the output from that neural network. The "rules" are then derived from what some set of people think sounds right.
Hi, American here and "how" + "to look like" makes my teeth itch. However, people generally find grammar corrections to be needlessly pedantic when the erroneous grammar does not impede comprehension, so I've personally decided to choose my grammatical battles and simply fume about people talking about "how something looks like" in private instead.
I generally also choose to keep such complaints private, and I'm not sure what whim motivated me to speak up this time. Rather to my surprise, this trivial gripe has been voted up more than almost anything else I've written here over the last sixteen years. It would seem that there actually is, in some contexts, somehow, at least some appetite for grammatical pedantry!
Language is tricky. One of the trickiest things! There's so much tied up in it, objective and subjective. It's a simple tool. It's an academic object. It's a well-defined spec. It's a living ambiguous blob. But it's also one of the biggest pieces of one's culture. There's a reason the French are so possessive of their language where it lives in cultural exclaves. There's a reason the Irish have laws to keep their native language alive.
I can see at least two grammatical errors in your first two sentences.
Imagine being a grammar pedant and missing a comma before the conjunction linking two independent clauses.
It's more of an emotional reaction to the life-changing impact of $9 million, expressed that way, rather than a literal feeling to be taken word for word.
I'm lucky to have parents with strong values. My whole life they've given me advice, on the small stuff and the big decisions. I didn't always want to hear it when I was younger, but now in my late thirties, I'm really glad they kept sharing it. In hidhsight I can see the life-experience / wisdom in it, and how it's helped and shaped me.
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