From "AI mid-life crisis" to the "time of my life" | Steve Yegge (Sourcegraph)
From "AI mid-life crisis" to the "time of my life" | Steve Yegge (Sourcegraph)
Writing "The Death of the Junior Developer", "AI Midlife Crisis", and building Cody at Sourcegraph
A Silicon Valley veteran and known for his writings like "The Death of the Junior Developer", Steve Yegge joins the show to chat about his "AI Midlife Crisis", the unique writing process he employs, and building the future of coding assistants.
Ronak & Guang’s Picks
#1 Even Great Writing Can Take a Long Time to Get Recognized.
Steve's tech rants journey began as an early engineer at Amazon. Upon accumulating many posts there, he published them online after leaving for Google.
Instant success?
Nope. “Nothing happened for six months.”
“So actually, my biggest piece of advice to you is, if you're going to write something big, write it. But then don't expect anything to happen for a few months. It takes time for people to absorb.”
“Six months later, on the nose, all of a sudden, people started walking up to me at Google, going, ‘Yo, I read your blog.’ And I'm like, ‘Well, which one?’ And they'd name one. ‘Oh, okay, weird.’ And then somebody else the same day would be like, ‘I read your blog.’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah, which one?’ And they named a different one. And I'm like, ‘What's happening?’”
“Right. And it was that somebody had found them, and they made Hacker News, and people were reading all of them, all the old Amazon rants. So at that point, I guess I'll keep going.”
#2 The Key to Perseverance in Writing? Get Pissed.
Given that writing on the internet can feel like shouting into the void sometimes, we were curious about what kept Steve going during the many dry spells he's mentioned.
“What keeps me going is I eventually get pissed off enough about something. And I'm like, all right, I'm riled. And that's what I know: I'm going to write that. It's going to be good, right?”
“Because I'm heated, right? But I'm also kind of snarky. So then the jokes start flying, right? Because I've seen it. And so that's the formula, right? You think about it, you let it rattle around, you let it bake. And then at some point, you get yourself worked up until you're in LLM generation mode, and you whip the whole thing out at once.”
Segments:
(00:00:00) The AI Midlife Crisis
(00:04:53) The power of rants
(00:09:55) “You gotta be able to make yourself laugh”
(00:11:46) Steve's writing process
(00:14:10) “I published them… and nothing happened for six months”
(00:17:30) Key to perseverance in writing? Get pissed.
(00:23:24) Writing in one sitting
(00:29:05) The AI Midlife Crisis
(00:35:04) Management to IC
(00:38:35) The acceleration and evolution of programming
(00:41:43) Picking up new skills in a new domain
(00:43:40) The power of prompt engineering
(00:47:27) Secondary hashing
(00:50:47) The importance of context in coding assistants
(00:53:56) “The future of coding assistants is chat”
(00:57:15) The importance of platforms in coding assistants
(01:02:30) The nefarious T-word in AI
(01:06:32) The death of the junior developer and its consequences
(01:09:35) The future of code understanding and semantic indexing
(01:13:15) The power of context in AI platforms
(01:16:21) Surprising capabilities of LLMs
(01:21:04) Transferable skills in AI product development
(01:23:53) Mental health and the innovator's dilemma
Show Notes:
The Death of the Junior Developer: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/the-death-of-the-junior-developer
Steve’s blog rants:
Steve’s medium posts:
Sourcegraph’s blog: https://sourcegraph.com/blog
Steve on twitter: https://x.com/steve_yegge
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Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en