Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:05:25 · S2
[00:05:25] S2: You said you're passionate about education. I feel like students in that phase of being in college are in a pretty interesting spot. Any advice and any take? Should people study computer science right now? Is Claude Code and Codex all we need? Like, I wanna hear your thoughts.
00:05:44 · Mihail Eric
[00:05:44] S1: Yeah. There's a lot of anxiety from students, as you can probably imagine. And I think a lot of what I'm trying to communicate this time around is that the anxiety, a lot of it still is here, and there was anxiety last year as well. But I want to make the case that a well trained AI native engineer, and I know that's like a buzzy but let's see. We'll dive into maybe what aspects that are most interesting. A well trained AI native engineer can be some of the most useful assets, like any company around. And so, this is the first week of class, actually. And like week one, first election, like, I really believe that every company needs you, but the floor is much higher. Right? So you're entering as, like, your first job out of school, but it's not sufficient to just be, like, a, you know, an L three and, like, a Google term, if you're gonna use, like, that that kind of leveling system there. It's like you have to generally be better than, you know, almost at the senior level going to this. So, like, what what can we... How do we get there more quickly? Right? And so, I'm trying to say that there is still a core bit of, like, foundational software engineering that is important to have. Some of these core values of of sort of how software systems are built and the trade offs of those systems. But then beyond that, we go and, you know, that's where I think you as a human should still be valuable rather than... And the rest of the implementation details, you can kind of defer more often.
00:07:02 · Shawn Wang, S2, Mihail Eric
[00:07:02] S0: Yeah. This is something I've said before, which is is almost like the controverse... I I... It's it's like the kind of thing you say to be spicy, but I almost... Like, I I do generally kind of believe it, which is most students are cooked. Some of them are gonna be super valuable. I I don't think it's a very popular thing. Stanford's... Some of... Some these kids are gonna be fine. Right? They're they're from Stanford. But, like, what happens to, like, the rest of America? Right. Right. That that is a [00:07:28] S2: normal a situation, because I feel like a lot of education is slow to move. Like I'm even curious on how do you determine where do you put the end date to curriculum in a course on that? [00:07:39] S0: Oh my God. [00:07:40] S2: You're teaching a Stanford modern software law. Like that's changing everything. [00:07:43] S0: You cheat, You just get the people from the coding agents to come and speak, right? [00:07:48] S1: Oh, Like, yeah, have them be the... Yeah. That's a funny... We [00:07:51] S2: all have guest lecturers.
00:07:51 · S2, Mihail Eric
[00:07:51] S2: all have guest lecturers. [00:07:52] S1: Well, yeah. I mean, that was... Okay. So so on on the guest lecturer's point, I think that was... I mean, that was also last year. That was also the case. So so that was by design because I... Look. I I came in. Right? And I'm saying, I'm a practitioner, as as you pointed out, Swyx. Like, I'm a practitioner. I do this thing on my on my, you know, my day to day. I design these systems. You know, we build we build these things in Monaco and have seen that many times before. And so that that being said, I don't wanna claim that I have all the answers today. And that would be that would be, like, very, you know, a lot of hubris to to make that claim. So the structure of the class was always, here's one practitioner's sort of aggregated set of insights from working in the field, from, like, talking to a lot of people in the field. But then there's people that are, like, literally on the frontier, you know, seeing things even beyond that, and invite them to sort of put their their their proposals forward, their view of the world forward. And that's why the guest does [00:08:45] S2: this I think it's really impactful for students to see big names, people actually doing it, like hear from them directly, be able to like ask them, of course, you know, they want to intern, they want to get jobs. It's good to have guest lecturers.
00:08:45 · S2, Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[00:08:45] S2: this I think it's really impactful for students to see big names, people actually doing it, like hear from them directly, be able to like ask them, of course, you know, they want to intern, they want to get jobs. It's good to have guest lecturers. [00:08:58] S0: No, I think what he's saying... So, okay, I'll sort of rephrase it. We've also interviewed Anj, who teaches the Coachella course, which is here's all the names. It's only the names. Whereas, he's actually also producing... Here's Claude Code in 200 lines of code. Right? Which is... No one's telling you to do that. No one's going come and see you to do that. But, yeah, when you want to teach fundamentals in a framework that you can use and working understanding [00:09:24] S1: That's right. [00:09:24] S0: This is the kind of thing you do.
00:09:24 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[00:09:24] S0: This is the kind of thing you do. [00:09:25] S1: That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And and I... But I do think that there's a balance for for this kind of material, to to your point, is that there is a... You can't... It's not a 100% solidified. I mean, by design... And by design, it's a feature and maybe a bug of some some kind, but a a big portion of the curriculum did change from last year. Right? And so there's like a dynamism to the whole development of the curriculum, but I'm trying to at least put forth that there are some things that I believe are kind of sticking around, and yes, prompting coding agents, they've gotten smarter. What does that mean in terms of the new ways of dealing with them? But then still, Boris is also gonna know something that I don't know. Right? So let's let's have let's have him also come [00:09:59] S0: to the [00:09:59] S1: table and and share his learnings. [00:10:01] S2: One of the fun things I noticed this time around is a good bit of the portion is on open source contributions. What's the thinking behind that? You have people...