Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
01:46:53 · Shawn Wang, S2
[01:46:53] S0: Yeah. I will say that in the chair before you, we just had Anthropics head of products and head of engineering for the And engineering I was like, When your jobs gonna come by? And they're like, Not yet. And so if Anthropic's not there yet, you should not feel like it's imminent. Good, good, good. Did they say how long or are they just not yet? Not yet, but who knows? Definitely... There was definitely a lot of like, okay. Well, yeah, I'm doing her job. She's doing my job. Like, yeah. Yeah. I think it's [01:47:27] S2: also interesting perspective for students. Right? You said there's a lot of sophomore undergrads. Like, you got two, three years to go to plan out what you wanna be doing. There's different ways to look at it from that, right? You're not straight in industry.
01:47:27 · S2, Shawn Wang
[01:47:27] S2: also interesting perspective for students. Right? You said there's a lot of sophomore undergrads. Like, you got two, three years to go to plan out what you wanna be doing. There's different ways to look at it from that, right? You're not straight in industry. [01:47:39] S0: The thing that I care... I'm thinking a lot about is, well, so one part of this discussion that resonates more with me is the loop stuff Mhmm. Where, like, okay, you you started writing prompts. Now you no longer write prompts. You write prompts. They write prompts. That's right. Right? And then you then you just keep going up. And I I think to me, the sort of recursive concentric circles nature going outward, but also going inward is something that builds the factory. I think you build up to the factory, not build down. That's right. But I think a lot of people will eventually start building down. Like you start from the top level, like what is my goal? And then you figure out the systems. That currently creates a ton of slop and you should not do that. But someday you will. Yeah. So instead of, so that will be my question to prompt you is do we... What is the sort of prime question that people exist to solve? Like, that is your thing, right? So let's say an engineer today, you are measured by your PR merge rate, PR contribution rate. Well, two years from now, that's gonna be ridiculous. Okay. Well, what's your main thing? I don't know. Money? People always go to money too quickly. It's something in between money and
01:47:39 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:47:39] S0: The thing that I care... I'm thinking a lot about is, well, so one part of this discussion that resonates more with me is the loop stuff Mhmm. Where, like, okay, you you started writing prompts. Now you no longer write prompts. You write prompts. They write prompts. That's right. Right? And then you then you just keep going up. And I I think to me, the sort of recursive concentric circles nature going outward, but also going inward is something that builds the factory. I think you build up to the factory, not build down. That's right. But I think a lot of people will eventually start building down. Like you start from the top level, like what is my goal? And then you figure out the systems. That currently creates a ton of slop and you should not do that. But someday you will. Yeah. So instead of, so that will be my question to prompt you is do we... What is the sort of prime question that people exist to solve? Like, that is your thing, right? So let's say an engineer today, you are measured by your PR merge rate, PR contribution rate. Well, two years from now, that's gonna be ridiculous. Okay. Well, what's your main thing? I don't know. Money? People always go to money too quickly. It's something in between money and [01:48:58] S1: PRs. Customer satisfaction, CSAT scores from your features. [01:49:02] S0: Even that's like a product decision, not really a code decision. Right? Like, I don't know. Like, I
01:49:02 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:49:02] S0: Even that's like a product decision, not really a code decision. Right? Like, I don't know. Like, I [01:49:07] S1: But if the engineering is evolving into, like, more of a PM engineer, like, product engineers, you know, hybrid, then they... Then I think that's... You know, that's my answer to the question of, like, what does the role evolve into? I think it goes without to say that I would today recommend to students spend more time thinking about holistic systems, not just your, like, single part of the the engineering puzzle, but how that ties in with... And, you know, and this is, like, practice ends up happening. Like, students for their capstone projects, I encourage them to go out and, like... In fact, what I give them as the seed of ideas for final projects is, like, the the YC request for startups. I'm almost like, go build a company. Like, you know what I mean? Like, go go build something interesting. [01:49:43] S0: What would people build faster?
01:49:43 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:49:43] S0: What would people build faster? [01:49:45] S1: I mean, a variety of things. Like, someone was like, someone came in the e department, was in the e school and e... Was studying EE, and they were like... They built effectively a translator for, like, parsing of, like, manuals to... That have, like, like, memory addresses in in C and then converting that into, like, like code that they could then, like, interpret and even, like, visualize. So so stuff stuff that is specific to their their use case. Someone was, like, a designer and is now actually at Vercel, and she, like, had, you know, like, take a picture of my, like, design notebook and generate me an app based on what I I take a picture of. Right? So literally, was like, for her demo, was like, here you go. Snaps a picture of, like, some random, like, scribbles that she was doing, and she got a fully fleshed out Vercel app. And from that... And I think because of that, probably got a job at Vercel doing that... Doing doing some version of this. [01:50:26] S0: Oh, nice. That's a high bar, actually. Vercel, very known for their design engineers. [01:50:31] S1: Yeah. Yeah. And I think she's now working on Eve, if I remember. [01:50:35] S0: Ah, no Eve in your [01:50:37] S1: Eve Eve is an OSS... Or, like, OSS partner. I mean, like, like, they... One of the the ways Vercel is partnering with us is that they are having students build with Eve.
01:50:37 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
[01:50:37] S1: Eve Eve is an OSS... Or, like, OSS partner. I mean, like, like, they... One of the the ways Vercel is partnering with us is that they are having students build with Eve. [01:50:45] S0: Yeah. So the... This is the concept of meta harnesses. Right? Right. Harnesses of harnesses. You can always go one level deeper. But I I I do think, like, it makes sense, at least for me, in the same way that model routers wrap model APIs. You you need to wrap harnesses as well. If you're gonna That makes sense. Between them. [01:51:02] S1: Agree. Agree. [01:51:03] S2: I think at some level students should also stay grounded and like, there's a lot of stuff happening at the edge. There's also a lot of companies that are still like single call tsetsepticeye production, playing around, haven't tried it. There is a lot of that. So there's still time for what to work. I think your point on taste is good, have taste, try stuff like whether each company has their own version of a software factory, you're building tools to help companies do it, staying on top of it, actually using the tools playing with it, like, you'll you'll figure it out along the way, you know.