Biggest ways working in big tech (instagram) has changed in practice in the last 12 months:
- Nearly no handwritten code. i haven't written a single line by hand since March and have shipped features to 100 million+ users.
- Human code review has become rare to non-existent. mainly because it's impossible to keep up. i predict in 2 years we'll look at python the way we look at assembly today.
- Little time on roadmap prioritization. why choose the *best 5* of the 10 projects when you can test all 10 and 3 more you didn't think of before.
- Meeting time has significantly reduced. the opportunity cost of useless meetings is way higher than before.
curious if this matches what others are seeing. will share next what hasn't changed or got worse.
Using "think" to describe what an LLM does reminds me of the 16th century, when astronomers didn't really believe in the heliocentric model, but used it for calculations anyway because the math was simpler. We'll start by calling it thinking, then gradually acknowledge it is.
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.