Chapter 4 of NASA’s Systems Engineering Handbook doubles as an *extremely* high-quality prompting guide for AI.
It’s a “How to work effectively with coding agents” masterclass in disguise.
Handbook below.
Here is one more Limbo story, the most mind-blowing so far.
After the announcement, we started receiving a large number of contributions from a man named Preston Thorpe (user PThorpe92).
All of them high quality contributions, implementing SQLite functions, fixing the io_uring event loop, getting us closer to supporting extensions, etc.
I came to learn that Preston is, in fact, in jail. He was jailed for non-violent drug offenses (I will link his story below), and is one of the first people in the United States to be granted permission to use the internet.
Most people in this situation, as he describes himself, are blemished for life, and will forever be going in and out of the system with no hope. But not Preston.
He went from a hopeless future to a top contributor on the open contribution evolution of SQLite (in rust!), and demonstrated for the whole world that he is capable of greatness.
Yesterday he sent me a message, with a screenshot of his name on the top contributors of the project and a red line over his name, saying
"I'll tell you what man, I don't think I've ever been so proud of something in my whole life"
Preston does not have access to X in prison, so likely he will not read this. But if you do: no, man. *We* are proud of you.
We are proud of the example that you are setting, the path that you are offering to other people in your situation, and you are a part of the reason we have decided to change our entire company strategy to make sure we have the resources needed to make sure this project succeeds and is ready to replace SQLite in production ASAP.
I'll leave his links below 👇
It was really valuable for me to stay at a single company long enough to live with the consequences of my own engineering decisions. To come face-to-face with my own technical debt.
It takes a few years for this to play out but IMO it's an important part of engineering growth.
“Greatness does not come out of intelligence, it comes from character. Character is not formed out of smart people: it is formed out of people who have suffered.”
— Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang