Will Larson

CTO at @imprintpayments. Wrote some books.

[Will Larson @Lethain]

A lot of folks want a map to Staff Engineer, and just as many Staff Engineers want to better understand their role. Towards that end, I'm working on a small project to collect folks' stories of reaching and operating as staff-plus engineers

https://t.co/CYUB736RJJ

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@gauravahuja @ImprintPayments @rabois @Fanatics @bookingcom @Shell 🙏🙏🙏

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@leinwand @webflow Thank you sir! They were extremely helpful!

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@SierraPlatform @ImprintPayments 💙💙💙

[Sierra @SierraPlatform]

The traditional way to make AI legible to bank auditors: decision trees.

The problem: decision trees make terrible experiences.

@Lethain and @ImprintPayments built an agent that reasons — then made that legible to regulators. Behind the build: https://t.co/XzPDfNUoBI

[Will Larson @Lethain]

Does X have a diff search index archive for really old stuff on eg s3 or smthg? So many question

[Will Larson @Lethain]

My X search results are all from 2011 now, but it did reveal that someone shared one of my posts to @jeff_weinstein in 2011 which is very Small World

[Will Larson @Lethain]

In the year 2081, everybody was finally equal—and not just before God and the law. They were equal in focus, equal in productivity, and above all, equal in their inability to finish anything.

This equality was enforced by the relentless supervision of Claude.

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@rcolidba @somi_ai Hi Rob!

[Will Larson @Lethain]

Wrote up a series of nine short posts on interesting problems we encountered while building an internal agent framework (virtual files, compaction, LLM vs code-driven workflows, etc)

https://t.co/OlXrYWUDhI

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

I get asked every now and then: "how do I become more influential, as a dev/eng leader, better known online?" Either for themselves, or to help put their company on the map.

The single best thoughts on this come from @Lethain, from this article: https://t.co/aisA1d145X

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@zebriez I wrote about this topic a while ago. It’s particularly aggregating to see someone else remix your work into greater visibility, but I’ve slowly convinced myself I’m playing a different game than they are 😅

https://t.co/SxCnRp5Sa1

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@tonkapark Yup I believe. At minimum a variety of learning contexts seem to improve retention over any one

[Will Larson @Lethain]

Is fascinating watching our 5yo learn math from an iPad app, just shockingly quickly. But then also not be able to reproduce any of the concepts on paper 😅

Will keep iterating to figure out how to get concepts to transfer or if somehow the ideas aren’t actually landing.

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@tonkapark It’s pretty interactive with variety of games but then eventually turns into typing numbers via keyboard. It also has a lot of “help me” tools which avoid frustration but…

To your point, it’s a very diff interface, so I get why it’ll take some practice to make it transfer.

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@AntarYaami Yeah for sure, he’s def not at that level yet but can see him getting there over time. Makes you appreciate how hard eg adding numbers is if you don’t know a bunch of double and little tricks etc

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@isaacinthesky Freemium is ~shareware for SaaS

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@mlanett 💯💯💯

[Will Larson @Lethain]

The agentic passive voice: any sentence in the active voice, where the actor is a model, is actually in the passive voice.

Example: Claude messed up my code.
Example: Codex wrote some bad tests.

The passive voice is unclear, please avoid it.

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@PranjalDaga1 Congrats!

[davidnoelromas @davidnoelromas]

Ok here we go!!

StaffEng, AI edition, with @voidfiles and yours truly.

Sign up for our listening tour and to nominate guests! (Link in thread)

[Will Larson @Lethain]

@joshua_hornby @DanielNealAdler Ty!