Stefan Theard

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[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

sparring shows the highest ROI up front, you can noticeably improve day over day for months (sometimes years) just sparring with light instruction on technical details

after a while sparring you plateau, now you have to understand why parts of your game are not effective and then incorporate that understanding into your sparring

all arts are martial arts

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

Indeed, early in one’s career, taking a course to learn how to build successful products is not a good use of time.

But after 10-20 years, *if* one wants to be world-class at *building successful products*, just shipping more provides zero returns on the learning one now needs.

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

@mitchellh posthog comes to mind, the non technical people not running a harness all use the chatbox. I almost never use the chatbox. the only time I use it is if I want to share the chat thread to a non technical person

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

if you're using LLMs for anything and you don't have it in your nature to be extremely skeptical of the outputs, good luck

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

this has been hackily solved for me for ~6 months and its based on the engineer, their experience, my trust level of them, and my understanding of the problem they're working on

there's a "stamp after a quick glance" threshold at some intersection of those things.

I will never trust some (juniors, people who are still learning, non-technical folks, etc.) enough to have zero other human beings review their code, but I think 6 months or a year from now its possible that there are many engineers I would have that trust with.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

One thing I am hearing that is top of mind for many eng leaders

"What are we doing to deal with this ongoing increase in code review load?!"

Everyone is seeing it, no one seeing a solution, but lots of experiments from better tooling to starting to admit code review wont scale

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

if someone is important to you, you'll give them your attention

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

"I want to have a podcast with awesome guests nobody knows about but I do, and I value them greatly.. but I don't want to record it"

"you mean you want to have long conversations with your friends?"

"yes"

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

at this point half of my net worth is in codex resets

[Tibo @thsottiaux]

Embarrassment of riches. But looks like we might hit 9M soon. Should we reset the ChatGPT Work and Codex usage again or give it some space?

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

@signulll it’s because intellectuals are parrots, zero substance

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

nothing grants more leverage than understanding systems and the minds operating within them

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

@Merridew__ does she have a paid newsletter?

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

@startupoppa let nikita cooooook, this site is actually usable now

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

@TasneemNabi oh shit this timeline/algo change is actually working, this is the content I am here for

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

this is the most common fault of software engineers using these tools too, don't think you're different just because you have a comp sci degree

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

A lot of people are using AI to automate shit they shouldn't have been doing to begin with.

Now you're just wasting tokens instead of time.

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

its not new, this is something @steipete has been doing with agents for over a year "close the loop" is his direct quote from a long ass time ago

and its something that every engineer has been doing themselves to build software since the dawn of time. its just a feedback loop

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

What is "loop engineering" to you, anyway?

Been looking into this, and also experimenting myself... and I'm not (yet?) buying that it's a new paradigm. But I might just be missing something.

Can you share "loops" you regularly use?

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

@TasneemNabi wise

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

@bubbleboi adverse selection means only dumb people you send offers to will accept, nobody you want to hire would ever take this deal

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

out of 28k likes less than 28 understand

[Naval @naval]

You won’t get rich just working hard, but if you don’t work hard, you won’t get rich.

[Stefan Theard @stefantheard]

@anuatluru I don’t have 250M but I will happily wire you 0.01% of that no questions asked lol