Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
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.
01:51:03 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[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. [01:51:41] S1: Yeah. And I think the the 100% agree with all that. I I mean, first, to your point that are a lot of companies still in the prompt ChatGPT or some version of, you know, ChatGPT? Maybe they just got a cursor license and are just now getting people onboarded. That is way more true than we believe, certainly here in the Valley. That is... Can I can say 100% confidence? But, yes, I think for the students being exposed to this, it's just at a certain point, this... The fact that they know this and are on the edge is what will eventually allow them to also be some of the more interesting and more valuable contributors when they go to maybe places where... That maybe aren't up to snuff in terms of being on the frontier. [01:52:16] S0: Yeah. One of the... This this kind of progression type talk, still very influential, about a year old Steve Yegge Mhmm. Talking about the the levels of psychosis. He's all the way through level 10 now [01:52:27] S2: where he's
01:52:27 · S2, Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:52:27] S2: where he's [01:52:27] S0: he's he's given up and he's moved to a a farm. But... Yeah. Like, you want you want... Sorry. I'm I'm making fun of him. He built Gastown. [01:52:36] S1: Yeah. I remember. [01:52:36] S0: Yeah. All these things, moved to Gas City. Now he's burned down the city and said, I'm building my game. I'm... No more Gastown. [01:52:43] S1: I thought I thought that... I mean, I I remember talking to him at at the Engineer Fair earlier this year. And wasn't he... His whole, like, thing, like, the only useful thing that was built at Gastown was Gastown. Yeah. [01:52:53] S0: Yeah. Okay. Right. With with that, that's a horrible failure. Horrible. [01:52:56] S1: Totally. Totally. [01:52:58] S0: And and so, like, people should be aware that, like, psychosis is real. And you... If you're not holding yourself accountable to delivering real products, you're just screwing along with LMs. [01:53:08] S1: Yeah. This is like a... Maybe, I mean, relevant to... But I wonder how much of... I mean, played a little bit with Gastown. Very involved system. Maybe a little ahead of time. But I'd also wonder if they were, like, bottlenecked a little bit by the by the marketing, and that it was a very difficult thing to grok from a terminology perspective. There's just a lot going on. [01:53:24] S0: It made sense to him. [01:53:25] S2: I think the Gastown marketing also is one of the things that propelled it. Right? Like, what was right before Gastown? There were like... [01:53:35] S1: Like, yeah. His... Yeah. [01:53:36] S2: Beats. Yeah. Did. Unless you're
01:53:36 · S2, Shawn Wang
[01:53:36] S2: Beats. Yeah. Did. Unless you're [01:53:37] S0: talking with someone else. No. [01:53:38] S2: No. There were like... There was a whole open claw. There was something else and there was Gastown. And the whole manifesto also really helped spur it into the conceptual. The people that would never use Gastown but learned about Gastown because you can read the manifesto. Like, there... There's a marketing angle to it.