Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
01:40:30 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:40:30] S0: My framing of this is typically, you know how you ship your org chart? This is... I forget what the name of this principle is. Conway's Law, you ship your org chart, you buy your org chart. Like when you start a startup or you make a tool, who in the company is your... Are you best friends for? And if it's for everyone, it's for no one. That's interesting. That is interesting. So so, like, a conscious part of Latent Space and a... And AIE is, like, okay, there's this category of software engineer that really, really, really cares a lot about AI. Is it gonna make it their day job? Let's only make it for them. Right. Right. Right. Right. [01:41:09] S1: Not a not a bundling of engineering. Never gonna be the dev, everyone. [01:41:13] S0: Yeah. Look, we talk about databases. Yeah. Talk about security, but, like, there's an AI angle to it. Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. We'll see. That makes sense. Cool. Software factory. [01:41:23] S1: One thing I'll just, like, shout out as well, related to the to the point is, I think role of the future that is increasingly important, platform engineer. I think this is, like, a huge one. [01:41:33] S0: You know... Okay. More lore. Temporal, my job before all this, I would have, yeah. So we wanted to own platform engineer. If I hadn't started, yeah, yeah, I would have done platform engineer. Mhmm. Mhmm. Because that is the role that decide... That decides all of this mission critical stuff, and then the kids over in applications can do whatever they want on top of our platform. But but, you know, the big boys do platform.
01:41:33 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[01:41:33] S0: You know... Okay. More lore. Temporal, my job before all this, I would have, yeah. So we wanted to own platform engineer. If I hadn't started, yeah, yeah, I would have done platform engineer. Mhmm. Mhmm. Because that is the role that decide... That decides all of this mission critical stuff, and then the kids over in applications can do whatever they want on top of our platform. But but, you know, the big boys do platform. [01:41:55] S1: Yeah. And I think in the modern day, they own they own cloud, they own dev x, they own security, psych ops. So I think it's it's all of the things. [01:42:02] S0: Like, everything where you can actually, like, lose the company or, like, or make or break, like, yeah, platform guys. And then product guys can do, you know, adjust the CSS. [01:42:14] S1: That's saying, you're starting a fight here. I mean, I'm not the CSS adjuster, but I appreciate everyone. [01:42:22] S2: I mean, it's fun a time. What's the future? I feel like all the guys can adjust all the things.
01:42:22 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[01:42:22] S2: I mean, it's fun a time. What's the future? I feel like all the guys can adjust all the things. [01:42:27] S1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a few aspects here. Okay, so there's little bit of spillover from the previous week. So yeah, coding agents, big teams, some of the concepts, but then, you know, we'll touch on the software factory. I want people to really start thinking about this world of this machine that builds the machine, and where, if at all, are people still in the loop there. Today, I think the answer is some combination of intent kind of review, or maybe the places, like, intent where you're defining the specs and what needs to be built, and review where you're doing some amount of your own checking of the system. And of course, also... This is, I think, that bottleneck is gonna be loosened up before even the intent piece does, but for now, are the two toe points, I think, in a fully automated system. So yeah, I just wanna get people exposed to that. For one of the USS partners, actually, WARP, they're doing this thing as part of their contribution to the USS program, where they're gonna essentially make a version of WARP that is running for the factory, and students will just be building the factory, contributing to the factory, and keep [01:43:23] S0: it running. Like, work in [01:43:24] S1: our factory. Work in our factory. Exactly. And so that's gonna be one of the ways... And then they're gonna, yeah, find things that they find that are interesting there and pull it back in.
01:43:24 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[01:43:24] S1: our factory. Work in our factory. Exactly. And so that's gonna be one of the ways... And then they're gonna, yeah, find things that they find that are interesting there and pull it back in. [01:43:30] S0: This is one of those things where, like, I'm not sure, Obviously, factory itself is very, very keen on this. [01:43:35] S1: Yeah. I [01:43:36] S0: feel like everyone wants to build their own. [01:43:38] S1: Yeah. I I think that's... That is... It it is a good question. And I think they're, you of course, entitled to kind of try and sell the products they do. I think it's a hard system to own its entirety. It's a it's a lot. It's a lot. [01:43:52] S0: Decide everything for me, please.
01:43:52 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[01:43:52] S0: Decide everything for me, please. [01:43:53] S1: Yeah. It is a lot. And and I'm I'm trying to... You know, I haven't, like, gone too deep in understanding, like, the... How they approach their GTM here, but I suspect you would have to do it piecemeal. Right? You would have to be like, hey, we first are your coding agent. Oh, then also... Like, you basically land and expand. Right? I mean, we talked about this bundling and unbundling piece. You don't start by saying, here's your whole factory. There's no way you could get, like, a Ford on board with that. You know what I mean? Where you're gonna go on and just plop the whole thing on their desk. That's at least how I would think about it, is you first be their coding agent of choice. You build up some background agent for them, you own some of their SRE pieces, and then you're like, well, now we can just weave it all together if you define everything in code or something like that. Like, you know, configs. [01:44:32] S2: There's a fun blog post on this from OpenAI. Had My buddy Ryan. We had Ryan on the podcast. Basically they spent five months making an internal tool with zero lines of manually written code. They kind of walk through one, it's called harness engineering. So you can learn harness engineering, but the learnings of there was kind of a slump or slower at first, and then you offload and you had peer review. It's at this point it's from February, but it's a vision of a software factory, right? Like you are full sending, letting agents fully write everything and how to do that well.
01:44:32 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[01:44:32] S2: There's a fun blog post on this from OpenAI. Had My buddy Ryan. We had Ryan on the podcast. Basically they spent five months making an internal tool with zero lines of manually written code. They kind of walk through one, it's called harness engineering. So you can learn harness engineering, but the learnings of there was kind of a slump or slower at first, and then you offload and you had peer review. It's at this point it's from February, but it's a vision of a software factory, right? Like you are full sending, letting agents fully write everything and how to do that well. [01:45:10] S1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, some version of this is gonna exist. To Swig's point, I do wonder about the the sales piece here, like the actual business of this. That's an interesting question. From a principles perspective, I think this is the the... This is one version of the future. And then beyond that, I think there's gonna be some amount of dabbling into and speaking about, like, okay, what does it mean to... Yeah, what does it mean to be a developer in in the future? Right? Like, are we... People talk about taste. People talk about, like, you know, understanding of systems and architecture and and, yeah, like, software taste. I wanna, like, go a little bit deeper here on maybe starting to, like, at least put some answers to the question around this. [01:45:47] S0: Yeah. So this is your answer to where where AI software engineering goes next.