Afzal

Likes building good software

[Afzal @afmd97]

@pushmeet I don't know how I feel about doing 3 PhDs to even ask a question on an advance topic in biology

[Afzal @afmd97]

@pushmeet while I can personally get behind the idea of becoming architects of questions, its not very clear to me how one becomes an architect of questions in the age of AI

we are talking about very deep and specific questions, an how does one even come up with those?

[Afzal @afmd97]

@dillon_mulroy yeah we went to back taking 4 days to do a simple change across 3 repos and testing? no thanks, I would rather spend time thinking about design and software maintenance instead of doing trivial tasks where I don't learn anything

[Afzal @afmd97]

@ayman__ali13 @botirkhaltaevv @rosstaylor90 @GenReasoning signed up - coming from manni but should be worth it!

[Afzal @afmd97]

@morgallant tbf this is also a blog type of question, might need a much bigger answer… if you ever write it, send it my way

[Afzal @afmd97]

@morgallant also, as a sys engineer.. what kinds of tasks do you let Claude Code/Cursor drive and which ones do you do yourself from scratch

[Afzal @afmd97]

@Sirupsen @samlambert for coding ofc… maybe one for next episode ?

[Afzal @afmd97]

@Sirupsen @samlambert would have liked to get your opinions on how are you using AI tools without atrophying any of your engineering skills

[Afzal @afmd97]

@thegeeknarrator @richardartoul @addyosmani @turbopuffer get @richardartoul in the episode too

we need to hear about variety of experiences from seasoned engineers and a find a way forward but only from people who are actively thinking about it and try to find new techniques

[Afzal @afmd97]

@thegeeknarrator @richardartoul @addyosmani pls try to get people
from the core engineering @turbopuffer team to talk about it

ideally engineers who have thought hard about using coding tools without losing system thinking skills…

they should have a working framework, if not get someone else

[Afzal @afmd97]

@thegeeknarrator @richardartoul @addyosmani I didn’t mean a coding SDK but more of a thinking framework. For example, after using these tools for a month I realised I atrophied my thinking skills, so then I went back to handcraft. These days I am mostly hybrid

But would love to know what other people do

episode idea?

[Afzal @afmd97]

@thegeeknarrator @richardartoul What we really need is a better framework on how to use these tools + preserve our cognitive capabilities to code

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Never gamble

[📹 jeremytanmagic]

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I answer about a dozen or so emails every week from students and early stage founders. One of the most common red flags I see are people who want to be a founder for the sake of it and are chasing ideas or guessing. It's so common I have a canned response. Here it is:

(Starting the canned response here)

I’m sorry to say it sounds like you’re searching for an idea. Or, you have a solution in need of a problem. Or, you just like the idea of being a founder (for whatever reason).

This isn’t what you want to hear, but go get a job and work for awhile. If you have a solution that needs market validation, then work in the industry that you think that market exists. Immerse yourself in some industry, it really doesn’t matter what one, because they’re all so filled with problems that need to be solved that you can choose anything.

It only takes one or two years.

Then your problem isn’t going to be wondering “is this a good idea?” “What is a good idea?” Etc. The problem is going to be: which of these 10 obviously good ideas won’t be solved unless I do it, and which do I want to spend the next 10 years of my life working on? That’s the real hard question.

Remember, the key questions a VC is going to ask you and you should ask yourself is: “Why this? Why now? Why you?” You should have full confidence in all of them. The easy part is confidence in all of them. Then the hard part is executing fast enough and hoping the market moves with you with external factors that are mostly out of your control. :)

Don’t search for an idea. Let one come to you. Go get a job.

I’m sorry to tell you that, but it’s the advice I think you need to hear. Like I said, it won’t take long, one or two years or so. But that one or two years of working is going to save you more years of your life most likely wasting your time on the easy part (finding the idea). Plus, you’ll get paid for it.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Steve Jobs on what John Sculley didn’t understand about building great products

“One of the things that really hurt Apple was, after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease—I’ve seen other people get it too—is the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work.”

But that’s never the case. As Steve explains, a product idea never turns out as originally conceived because you learn a lot from the details of building it, and there are always tradeoffs you have to make.

“There’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product… and it’s that process that is the magic.”

He compares a team working hard on something they’re passionate about to a rock tumbler:

“It's through the team--through a group of incredibly talented people--bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together... they polish each other and polish the ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones.”

[Qian Li @qianl_cs]

New Screaming in the Cloud episode! Corey Quinn and our CEO @jedberg "chat about Jeremy's "build for three" rule, a plan for scale without going crazy, why he set Reddit's servers to Arizona time to dodge daylight saving time, and how DBOS makes your app as tough as your data."

Check it out here: https://t.co/bQIFZXowpO

[Afzal @afmd97]

hey @GeminiApp why don't you support projects on your App yet? every other major provider like Claude and ChatGPT supports it. You guys should be cloning these apps, and yet...

[Afzal @afmd97]

@hsu_steve do you recommend any books on this topic ?

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Warren Buffett: "There's a lot of interest in investing and people are going to yak about it all the time. In the end, what counts is buying a good business at a decent price and then forgetting about it for a long, long, long time. Some people can do it and some people can't."