Anthropic just dropped the best blog on how to do software engg interviews in an AI world.
It explains
1. How AI easily beat humans in their old interview problem
2. Why they still need SWEs when AI can do most things
3. How to design interviews AI can't beat (make them weirder)
They also open source the old interview question with the exact results you need to get a job at Anthropic!
Walking is really good for you compared to other forms of exercise. And you don't have to do all that much to get most of the benefit. (via @EricTopol)
if you've never *started* a software company from scratch & taken it from zero to launch, then you have no idea how painful that is.
simply working at even early companies does not count.
you can only really advise founders if you've played this role before.
An OpenAI researcher said: inside OpenAI, researchers will be replaced by AI first, infra engineers second, and sales last.
Sounds counterintuitive, but it might actually happen. Ideas are cheap. Most research is idea generation + experiments, which AI can mostly do (top researchers excluded).
AI infra code is the foundation that researchers use to run experiments. The codebase is huge, out-of-distribution in the training data, and bugs are common.
Sales is pure human psychology: human nature, trust, incentives, and emotions. That’s the final boss for AI.
Got upgraded on my flight to SF this morning and everyone in 1st class had their laptops out, using Claude Cowork.
I looked back into the rest of the plane - everyone was on Netflix.
Was just a very interesting observation.
Just met a guy who canceled a $549M/year Salesforce contract because his CFO opened Claude and typed "build me customer support. make no mistakes" and went to lunch.
He came back and 14,000 employees had been laid off by the legal team.
~2% of the tech workers in the Bay Area made $10M+ in the AI boom (2021-now).
The Bay has ~500k workers according to BLS and estimates show ~6k-21k have made 8 figs in the last 5yrs (pretax, incl illiquid), a ~1-4% range.
The Valley just creates an insane amount of wealth.
productivity guys will obsess over hours worked as an explanation for greatness because it’s an input you can control. just do 996 just do 996
but its simply just God through you and there’s nothing you can do, your work is either in line with the divine or not and thats it
Across the developed world, business has been getting more concentrated.
The biggest companies do larger shares of sales, they earn larger shares of all the income, and they account for more of the equity capital:
But they aren't employing larger shares of the workforce:
Neither I nor the founder I met with today had eaten yet, so I did office hours in the kitchen while making us lunch. It was just like old times, chopping onions while trying to figure out what their fundraising strategy should be.
i’m very excited for the openai hardware thing because this is basically jony ive���s first real new product without jobs hovering over it or apple’s immune system throttling it (apple watch was legit tbf).
this is a clean experiment on how much of the magic was the psychotic opinionated editor (jobs) vs. the immaculate taste & form giving machine (ive).
either we learn that legendary editors are irreplaceable or we get something genuinely new & ground breaking. either way, the world deserves it. good on openai & sama for lavishly funding it without restriction.
biggest sign of PMF is how many users would crashout if they could no longer use the product
for me, this is:
- the internet
- food/water
- emirates
- x
- signal/tg/slack
- delivery
- helius, solana, zcash
- claude code
it’s kind of tragic that you’re not really supposed to meet people at work anymore. you don’t meet people out & about either because everyone’s already sealed into their groups. most people don’t meet anyone in school either, it’s too early, too transient, & often too online.
so where exactly are people supposed to meet anyone?
work used to be *the* mating market. not in a creepy way, just structurally. proximity + humor+ repeated interaction + shared stress = attachment. this is literally how humans have paired forever. farms, villages, factories, & offices. romance is downstream of time together.
the me too movement pretty much completely killed it, what a tragedy.