Jane Street's head of technology just explained the full spectrum of how fast their trading decisions are made.
the fastest systems turn around a packet in under 100 nanoseconds. at that speed, if you attached an oscilloscope to the wire going in and the wire going out, you'd see the response start to leave before the incoming packet has finished arriving.
at that speed, you can't use a CPU. you can't use any programming language. you're on an FPGA direct wired to the network. and the decisions you're making are incredibly simple. because you literally can't compute anything complex in that time.
but here's the part most people miss: that's just one end of the spectrum.
Jane Street runs an ensemble of systems operating at every timescale simultaneously. some decisions happen in nanoseconds. some in microseconds. some in milliseconds. some take hours or a full day.
"the right way to build an optimal trading strategy is an ensemble approach. for some decisions you're making very simple decisions very quickly. for others, you're operating at the scale of microseconds, milliseconds. and in some cases, if you can get that decision turned around in an hour, that's totally fine."
the faster you need to respond, the simpler the decision has to be. the slower you can afford to go, the smarter the model can be.
this is why "Jane Street is just a speed game" is wrong. speed is one dimension. intelligence is the other.
Based on the quote below from their post, I'd say this means there will be more software created, not less. Much more than before. And, that'll require engineers.
> But AI has collapsed the cost of producing software by 10-100x, and that changes everything.
AI has stopped being a feature and started being the foundation.
We're excited about a new wave of startups rebuilding software, services, and silicon— and pushing AI into the physical world.
https://t.co/QCIz6DnQnN
I’m starting to think software engineering won’t die, it will just expand in role responsibilities as coding shrinks.
You will be a software engineer + security engineer + data engineer + AI/BI engineer all rolled into a single role. That is a minimal expectation.
I am monitoring the ongoing Ngogo Chimp Civil War in Kibale National Park. Chimp Group Center appears to be on the verge of routing. They've retreated from the Primate Lodge and their Alpha Male, Morton, appears to be heavily wounded or perhaps KIA.
There have been over 1.4 million total 10-game spans by players in NBA history, including playoffs.
In none of them did a player have as many points, rebounds and assists as Nikola Jokić during the @nuggets' current 10-game winning streak (252 points, 145 rebounds, 127 assists).
Agentic coding is actually very cool reminder for people that software engineering is less about the actual "typing of the code" and more about the "design", "product" and "debugging". Lot's of debugging.