Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:43:41 · Mihail Eric, S2, Shawn Wang
[00:43:41] S1: Right. Right. Oh, interesting. As in you're saying, like, even the slop is it's still in the language of the agents. So the slop means something. It's like, yeah. Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Got it. [00:43:49] S2: It's fun. Everyone has their own version. Use first, there's very easy to like vibe check a skill, right? You just call it, run it a few times. And distill these preferences into a skill that's like, this is what I like, this is he doesn't like. Mhmm. And it it adjusts over time and then, you know, [00:44:05] S0: it So gets the problem is that... Yeah. Yeah. You're calling it, but the the actual... The worst part is when a skill triggers when you're not expecting it to. Like, you wrote it one time to fix the thing, and then, like, now you're working on a completely different thing, and it triggers. Why? Because it's badly written because the trigger says, like, oh, you call me whenever blah blah blah happens. Totally. And you're like, okay. Read's good. And then you do a different project and triggers and you're like, oh, what [00:44:29] S2: the hell is happening? There's like a few people that are just like, okay, I have a bunch of skills and I keep adding on sometimes. I know some people like Eugene Yan, they are pretty particular about how many skills they have. They prune them. If not used, they clean them every few weeks. [00:44:45] S1: Yeah.
00:44:45 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
[00:44:45] S1: Yeah. [00:44:46] S0: Yes. So, yeah, this is like a huge problem if you're sort of in that skills world. I think this is actually why I suspect there are good... There are very smart people at OpenAI and and Anthropic that want skills to die, which is not a popular statement. No. Now they they won't say this publicly, but it just feels sloppy. This feels sloppy. I I know it's... Yeah. I I can see my own skills people being sloppy. It doesn't feel AI peeled. [00:45:14] S1: Right. Right? [00:45:14] S0: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not it's not what AGI was supposed to look like, which is... It's like everyone having a giant bunch of markdown files. [00:45:21] S2: I mean, I [00:45:21] S1: think part of it is like There's a gardening problem, yeah, in some sense. [00:45:25] S2: A lot of people actually don't look at their markdown files, right? Like the UX of it, of just chatting what you want, creating a skill in chat, using it, seeing output. There's a of value you can get without ever looking at your markdown. Don't over complicate it at some level for yourself. You can get a lot of value. If you do stuff repeatedly, just be like, look at the last five times we did this, make me a skill, and you can iterate it with chat. There's a good side of it as well, right?
00:45:25 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[00:45:25] S2: A lot of people actually don't look at their markdown files, right? Like the UX of it, of just chatting what you want, creating a skill in chat, using it, seeing output. There's a of value you can get without ever looking at your markdown. Don't over complicate it at some level for yourself. You can get a lot of value. If you do stuff repeatedly, just be like, look at the last five times we did this, make me a skill, and you can iterate it with chat. There's a good side of it as well, right? [00:45:54] S1: There's another thing. There's, I guess, another way to look at it as well, because there's a, there's the use of the skill as just procedure that the agent kind of runs whenever to do a code review or whatever. But then, in the case of something like Devin, right, where we've codified skills as a way of representing our best practices, right, and then making... And exposing that to the agent, the code review system, to then, you know, institute the APIs the way that we like to define them, institute kind of the service level boundaries the way we define them. That's like an alternative way of sort of representing, like, org level knowledge, and maybe not so much this, like, arbitrary thing you want the agent to do so you don't have to write the prompt each time. And so I like that. I feel like that positioning might... That purpose might exist longer than just, you know, [00:46:40] S0: these kind of random procedures. I just Googled Monaco AI skills, and it's giving me the the the country. [00:46:48] S2: Hey, maybe the country.
00:46:48 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[00:46:48] S2: Hey, maybe the country. [00:46:49] S1: One day, one day. We're gonna beat them at AEO, [00:46:52] S0: that's for sure. Can you just buy the country? Well, here's the thing. Okay. [00:46:55] S1: On this, we we, we're about to buy... No. We're not about to buy the country. But but but, you know, we we did, we dug into a little bit of flack when we, bought the monaco.com domain. I will say that. We did get sued by them. What? Yeah. There's there's like a whole public there's a whole public thing about this where... Yeah. So they didn't like that, but but here we are. And we won. We won. [00:47:17] S2: So... Okay. And we're keeping it in. I was about to say this is spicy, but you won. [00:47:22] S1: Yeah. Yeah. No. No. It's... [00:47:23] S2: Is see that why flags flying around? [00:47:27] S1: Because it's [00:47:28] S0: like a victory. It's because [00:47:29] S1: it's a victory. It's our victory. That's funny. [00:47:31] S0: For for [00:47:31] S2: those that are in SF, just look up and, you [00:47:35] S0: know, you'll be fine. So for for those who are on audio, we're we're showing this on YouTube. It's... You fly a plane around. I think you're still one of the few that actually do this on a regular basis. Sam Blond came up with it, $6,000 a day. I don't necessarily think it directly causes me to Google what Monaco is, but all of Monaco's ads are just Monaco dollar sign. [00:47:59] S2: We stand for starts money. [00:48:03] S0: The conversation, but the whole point of the ad is what the hell is Monaco?
00:48:03 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[00:48:03] S0: The conversation, but the whole point of the ad is what the hell is Monaco? [00:48:07] S1: Yeah. And and, you know, you you could you could argue, like, that's a debate to be had. But but in some sense, like, what is the purpose of marketing if not to, like, get attention? Right? And and, maybe there's a one level beyond this, which is if somebody... So, you know, I'll I'll go to events and people are like, oh, you guys are the ones with the planes. You guys are the ones with, like, the big number on the billboard, blah blah blah, a 193, you know, million, whatever it is. And and that... But they're like, but what do you do? And then... But that's that's... But that's... But maybe that's the whole point. Right? Is that I just needed someone to come and use it as an icebreaker. [00:48:35] S2: I will say it's what I said as you walked in as well. I was like, oh, the planes. [00:48:40] S1: You got it. And now I know, do guys do? Well well, let [00:48:42] S0: me tell [00:48:42] S1: you about what we do. [00:48:43] S0: So and so, you know, as someone who's been in those meetings deciding what we do on the the Devin billboards, we spend so much time on the words, and maybe we should just be like, Devin. [00:48:53] S1: I think we do that. It's just so fucking dumb. [00:48:55] S0: But like, okay. You know? Look, look,
00:48:55 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[00:48:55] S0: But like, okay. You know? Look, look, [00:48:59] S1: I I think Sam had another post, this past week where he was just talking about, like... I mean, Sam is effectively like our our, you know, marketing sort of mastermind here. And, yeah, I think there's a bit of history behind by the planes as well, but but the TLDR is that his whole shtick is like, I don't have all the answers. You just gotta try things. I think a lot of this we just try things. And and if it sticks, great. If it... Like, did we know this was gonna blow up as much as it did? I mean, not really. But but now that it did, it's... Get an idea. [00:49:24] S0: Yeah. It's And minimalist, start small, go high, instead of start big, go small. Way easier to start small, go big. [00:49:31] S1: Yeah, exactly. [00:49:32] S2: Also, you know, it's 6 ks a day. Like it's very much just try things. Think people [00:49:38] S1: Cheaper than a billboard. Cheaper than a billboard for sure. [00:49:40] S2: Yeah. And it's fun. Not much harm done. [00:49:43] S1: But the kind of simplicity here that's worth mentioning is then when we're trying to like one up the plane, we're like, you know what's better than one plane? Two planes. Two planes? [00:49:53] S0: What? Mine might went to rocket. [00:49:56] S1: Well, okay. I I also have [00:49:57] S2: to say I've seen the I've last [00:49:58] S1: had that idea. I I would like for that for that to happen as well at some point, but, we'll see. [00:50:03] S2: This is the next SpaceX launch. We just see Monaco. You go. Go. There