mid takes, you're safe here building https://nitter.cf/t.co/HvKcghlceK
Seattle, WA
Joined November 2016
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Theory of mind: “Other people have perspectives different from mine.” Naturally, I have constructed an elaborate model of what I would think if I were them.
Evan Reilly retweeted
human-in-the-loop
└ human-on-the-loop
└ human-near-the-loop
└ human-cc'd-on-the-loop
└ human-legally-liable-for-the-loop
Evan Reilly retweeted
I'm convinced that at this point, you could have an Opus 5.5 agent re-implement all of CPython probably within two weeks without any human input, against just the tests, and probably with full compatibility with including ABI, no GIL, a jit and probably beat it on all measurable metrics. It's completely crazy.
Evan Reilly retweeted
fun fact I never passed a coding interview
failed interviews at a dozen elite startups I won't name (for now)
finally at @attio they gave me a take-home instead – team said I was the only candidate who understood and implemented the spec 100%
lesson in there somewhere
I’ll absolutely fail any coding interview. Always have. But give me a problem and a model, not even a good one, and I’ll solve it. Pity companies haven’t caught up. The good news is, most of the market will end up like this as there are simply bigger problems so solve in a software stack, and this code nonsense is just a side effect.
Be real, you’re gonna pay most devs to talk to codex or Claude. How about you test them in the actual environment. But no. Let’s find the next leetcode
Evan Reilly retweeted
technical skills are, at their core, the result of figuring out how something ACTUALLY works.
"non-technical" domains can be quite technical. the best sales person is doing countless specific things right that makes them so good.
your ability to go deeply technical in one area means you can do it again, especially in the AI world where learning through metaphor had never been easier.
I see EVERYTHING through a systems lens with my industrial engineering background. everything is a factory to be optimized.
you can do way more than you realize if you let go of the idea that there are rigid paths in life you need to follow.
Evan Reilly retweeted
AI may well be able to write massive software projects “from scratch”, but that almost certainly isn’t the fastest / highest performance / highest security / most token efficient way to do things. Good building blocks matter.
In addition to RL’ing the agents on final task loss, we should try to get them to regularize the building blocks as well. What would the standard library look like that makes the agents most effective?
It is likely at the limit that it turns out to be some alien organization of code, but given the existing human-bias in training, I bet that in the near term it would be lovely code that old programmers would appreciate.
I suspect the same could be said for mathematics, but that is out of my lane.
Evan Reilly retweeted
One in 46 Taiwanese babies is born to a TSMC employee. The Taiwanese gene pool is being sexually selected for semiconductor proficiency.
re-reading gideon lewis-kraus’s feature story “sand castles” on @NewYorker.
so many great details. the AI supply chain becomes a breathing, moving, growing beast, something so visceral and material.
one detail i can’t stop thinking is: one in forty-six babies in taiwan is born to a tsmc employee (?!?!)
next year’s goal: convince a magazine or foundation to fund my tsmc tradwife story.
link: Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
Evan Reilly retweeted
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month.
I have a spicy, optimistic take - I think there's an opportunity for junior engineers: felixrieseberg.com/hunger-be…
Evan Reilly retweeted
Whether or not anyone builds it... everyone dies.
The future is uncertain. Your impact doesn't have to be.
Evan Reilly retweeted
The ability to build anything has come with a critical lesson:
Engineers have really, really bad ideas.
Evan Reilly retweeted
I'm not sure a lot of people understand what game coders actually do. We're not spending 9 hours a day finely hand crafting artisan software and expressing our inner dreams... 90% of the time we are fighting compilers and existing architecture, having to work out how undocumented code works, and tracking down obscure bugs and behavioural issues.
Most of game programming is just difficult, tedious, laborious grunt work, and the cognitive load we have to endure to get anything done is tiring and frustrating. No game coder is doing it for this 90% of the job.
We make games because the 10% that IS actually about making things fun and expressing ourselves is so incredibly rewarding it makes the other 90% bearable.
Now imagine if there was a tool, some kind of AI agent maybe, which could do most of the 90% grunt work for you, leaving you to just make all the decisions and express your creativity. How amazing would that be. How completely revolutionary would that be.
Evan Reilly retweeted
With Reddit banning open-source projects that have ANY AI contributions, here's a list of projects you can no longer discuss there:
Linux, Chromium, Firefox, WordPress, VS Code, Python, VLC, Blender, Git, Docker, LibreOffice, React, Node.js, PHP, TypeScript, Rust, Home Assistant, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, .NET, Angular, Go, Ruby on Rails, Ruby, PostgreSQL, Vim, nginx, Apache HTTP Server, FFmpeg, Redis, curl, OpenSSL, FreeBSD, Neovim, LLVM, GCC, systemd and QEMU
😂
Evan Reilly retweeted
Wake up.
Every profession deemed white-collar, the middle class dream, is about to be decimated by AI, at a much faster pace than anticipated, with monstrous social consequences.
I’m quantizing my ability to spell its actually extremely concerning
Everyone saying that taste™ is the moat needs to recognize that all the ux design we’re building for humans is just going to be obsoleted by agent to agent negotiation
