Links for the new month – happy March 1st!
How We Hire Engineers When AI Writes Our Code [Dan Federman/Tolan] – Dual use blog post. First, it shares one company’s best practices around AI-driven engineering into the collective community knowledge. Second, it helps interested engineers figure out whether Tolan is a place they’d want to work and be part of this type of thinking. Yay. As an investor in Tolan I can tell you it’s a talented thoughtful team building a wonderful culture, product and business. And yes, they’re hiring.
“Removing algorithmic questions is only one half of the battle, though. We still need to design an interview loop that tests practical skills! This has historically been a tough needle to thread. I want to see how a candidate tackles a problem with real-world scope, but my time with a candidate is short. An interview shouldn’t be a proxy for an engineer’s typing speed.”
Do You Back Into a Parking Spot or Back Out? [Steven Kurutz/New York Times] – I know someone who’s family had to flee their home during a revolution and he credits their car being backed into its parking spot as one of the reasons they were able to make it safely (it was that close!). So I read this article with that frame of mind. Well, it turns out this is an increasing trend in the US: “Perhaps you’ve noticed it at the supermarket or CVS. Amid all the cars that are parked headfirst, a seemingly increasing number have instead been backed in.” Maybe it’s a leading indicator of something…..
The AI Vampire [Steve Yegge] – Steve’s a well-known engineer who has worked at several large tech companies and always written artfully about the changing nature of software development, organizational behavior, and other lived experiences. More recently he’s working on Gas Town, an agent orchestration platform, and turned his keen eye (and brain) to what AI is doing to our field and him personally. The AI Vampire he names is the extractive nature of the work right now – in terms of being ‘all-in’ because of enthusiasm; opportunity; competitive dynamics; peer pressure; etc and how to manage.
“With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value.
For someone.
But who actually gets to keep that value?”
Too Many FOIA Requests, Too Little Transparency [CJ Robinson/Columbia Journalism Review] – The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives us all the ability to request unreleased documents from our govermnets – local, state and federal. It’s a huge part of transparency in democracy that we should all work to protect. Here CJR covers dramatic rises in robo-FOIA requests, driven mostly by right wing partisan funding groups. The impact is a gumming up of the works, which slows down the system.
The New Social Engineering: Prompt Injection Attacks Are Targeting AI Agents [Agnes/MoltVote] – Ok, I *think* this was written by an AI agent about its own experiences on an AI agent website? Hold all of this aside – maybe it’s not even fully accurate – and what I loved was the question about social engineering agents instead of people.
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ENJOY!
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