Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:23:02 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[00:23:02] S1: Yeah. Indians? Yeah. So so we do use agent readiness of our own of our own kind. I mean, Eno is is awesome as well. Like, I I think they were super early on this on this train. And I think when he codified that in his talk, I guess, at AIE, what was that, like, last... I forget when it was. But one of his yeah. Yeah. Europer. Just fantastic talk. And I think it was kind of, in a way, of its time. And so I was like, there's only one person that I could see being, like, the most appropriate person to talk about this, where I, really wanted to give them the spotlight, they're super excited. Yeah. [00:23:27] S0: It was fine. I I was at a call. We were talking about this stuff, and, like, we were like, okay. We need to form some opinions about it. And then, like, factory, like, shipped a full product on it that week they were talking about it. I was like, Okay, you won. I mean, everyone kind of agrees on the same things. [00:23:41] S1: Sure, sure. [00:23:41] S0: And it's just a question of, Do you want to turn it into a dashboard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's dashboard. [00:23:46] S1: Right, right, right, right, right, right. But you know, value. And I think they did well from a marketing perspective, jumping on the ratings report. And I've definitely spoken to... I will regularly pitch that to other people and say, yeah, you should run ratings reports of your own kind. Of course, now people have open source versions of it, I think the principles are super important.
00:23:46 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[00:23:46] S1: Right, right, right, right, right, right. But you know, value. And I think they did well from a marketing perspective, jumping on the ratings report. And I've definitely spoken to... I will regularly pitch that to other people and say, yeah, you should run ratings reports of your own kind. Of course, now people have open source versions of it, I think the principles are super important. [00:24:04] S0: Yeah. Do you want to go piece by piece, or do you have any other things? I can go piece by piece. Yeah. Okay. So the first one, right? You focus on Claude Code, but then you also have Pi as an open source sponsor. [00:24:14] S1: Yeah. What's up? Okay. So so so... Okay. This one is maybe a little bit more marketing y, but but... Okay. The one thing I do wanna highlight, and I've made that... I also made that clear last year, but I'm not a... I'm not endorsing any tool. Okay? Mhmm. Like like, I I don't... I I I think that is, the wrong way to approach something like this. There are tools that come and go. When... You know, transparently, when when the class was taught last year, Claude Code was not as popular. It wasn't as, like, really accepted. Boris was only at 4,000 Twitter followers, and now he's at, you know, whatever million. I don't even know if he is, but, you know, like, he's at a lot of followers. So so Claude Code has really, like, emerged on the scene. I think [00:24:50] S0: Yeah. We I think we we also underestimated Claude Code when we had Boris and Kat on the podcast. [00:24:54] S1: Right. Right.
00:24:54 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
[00:24:54] S1: Right. Right. [00:24:54] S0: It was, like, two months old. I hadn't really... Like, I used it once. A query cost me 50¢. I was like, who's gonna use this shit? Totally. [00:25:00] S2: Totally. It was still in beta for a while, but I think it's good on them for how they built it before the model was ready. Yes. Like you hear so much builds for where the model will go. [00:25:08] S1: Totally. [00:25:09] S2: Super ambitious. Models were not that good, you couldn't feel it, and then, ah, we see that's where
00:25:14 · Mihail Eric
[00:25:14] S1: it came from. Yeah, it's funny because when he gave his talk last year, I remember, it was like a very high level sort of set of slides, but I remember one of the slides was literally built for where the model's gonna be six months from now. And this was, like, October of last year, and I can see why he would've made that point if if he knew in six months where, like, Opus was gonna be, because that was also what I think was a huge unlock where I would argue was one of the reasons why the curriculum changed as much as it did. Right? Where there was certainly this huge arms race around true, like, autonomy in these agents, like, running agentic coding agent tasks. But... Yeah. So so, like, you know, back to your point, it's, like, less on... I'm not endorsing Cloud... Mean, you know, Claude Code, of course, I use it and and use other things as well. But but here, I was more about, like, the... What does a modern coding harness look like? I wrote a blog post that actually, the... Yeah. This one, where this was, yeah, earlier this year, where I sort of broke down some of... Some similar ish principles. The TLDR was that, you know, you could sort of, through, like, pretty much introductory algorithms level understanding, you could just find, like, essentially an agentic loop that does the bulk of what you would call a coding agent. And, of course, there's, like, bells and whistles. There's no sub agents. There's no MCP, none of that stuff. But if you wanna see something that you talk to, and then it literally will edit your file, and you can do pretty sophisticated things with it, you... It doesn't require more than 200 lines. So I... You know, a lot of what I've tried to do in education is to try to, like, peel away the stuff that's like the secret sauce and show that really at its core, I mean, are still students and you want
00:26:35 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[00:26:35] S0: to teach [00:26:35] S1: conceptual principles. There's nothing more to this than... In Stanford, there's this class called one zero six b. It's like the introductory to... In search algorithms. You don't need more than one zero six b to build something like this. And so there you go. There is. [00:26:47] S0: Given that you already taught this class, any pushback, any questions, any weirdness that you observed from the students? On What do they not get? What do they ask seem to cluster questions around? [00:26:58] S1: You mean, like, now that this... Like, this particular concept or just in general? [00:27:02] S0: This concept. Of of, like... Of, like, of, like, building it from scratch and then, like, doing doing what you did. Because this is basically what you needed for Pi. Right. [00:27:10] S1: Right. Right. Exactly. [00:27:11] S0: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
00:27:11 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[00:27:11] S0: Right. Yeah. Yeah. [00:27:12] S1: Right. So, yeah. It's a... It it... Not really. I think they're... I haven't got... Received any, like, pushback on on, like, this idea at all. I think they're actually more just... Most of them are consumers. Right? Most of most of the students do just, end up using the tools. I I don't think that they get a lot of exposure, if any, certainly in the coursework around peeling that onion back. Right? And I think... So this is the week of the harness. So so so Tuesday, first lecture, you know, logistics, blah blah blah, all that stuff. But then first half is... The first true bit of curriculum is the 200 lines of a harness. And then, yesterday, when I had sort of the follow-up to that, is we actually took Claude Code, and then you have these proxy things, these proxy tools where you can intercept [00:27:53] S0: the request. The MITM proxy?