Impact, agency, and taste

Looking ahead to the future of programming that increasingly involves LLMs, it’s becoming clear that the most important thing for software engineers to cultivate is taste. As I discuss in GenAI is not a silver bullet, training great software designers will continue to be the essential challenge o...

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Surely you can be serious

I am a self-confessed productivity junkie. I hate wasting time. And if you scroll through social media, or even my blog posts, you might think that the typical research or learning process is just a happy, monotonic hill climb, capped off with regular announcements of new discoveries or gained expertise. But what if the most important lessons emerge not from unencumbered progress, but rather from seemingly aimless pursuits and the frustration of doing things badly? This post is a tribute to all those times we got stuck and emerged with nothing to show for it, because those “unproductive” moments lead to some of the most important lessons we can ever learn.

A colleague recently said something that’s been rattling around in my head: “AI gives you speed, but it doesn’t give you direction.” And the more I use these tools, the more I think that undersells the danger. I have been wondering how to think about AIs (or genies) and how computers are like bicycles for the mind, as Steve Jobs put it, and I think these tools take it further. They are more like motorcycles for the mind. They go really fast, and you better not treat them like a bike, because you need to know what you’re doing. How to handle that thing. You need to make sure you don’t try to go too fast too soon, or for too long, because you’ll get speed blind and… things will happen.

Reflections on Ben Kuhn’s “Impact, agency, and taste”.