Deploying real AI in our messy physical world.
The hard part is ground truth, and ground truth clocks in with the crew. - One year ago, Andrew didn’t have the words. Not in the fake-humble way. He’s the CEO of the operations company we’re forward-deployed with, and back then, literally: ontology was jargon, observability was a software team’s problem, and AI inside a residential energy contractor sounded like a demo from another universe....
The cleanest number in our dataset was a lie, and only the operator who owns the loop knew why. - There’s a field in a public solar dataset that flags whether a system is a lease instead of a purchase. For our operations company it reads a clean, machine-precise zero. The data says, flatly, that the company has never once done a lease. It does. All the time. Here’s the...
Our CEO went forward-deployed into the ontology. The wonder and the friction, honestly. - “Why are French restaurants so good? Because the waiter is part of the kitchen: he knows the food, the technique, the method, not just the path from the pass to the table.” — the question Alex Karp asked Shyam Sankar in 2006, which named the forward-deployed engineer a year later...
Quality used to come from approvals. Now it comes from correction. - The peaceful era is over. Last weekend, our operations company’s CEO built a thirteen-week cash forecast. Supplier statements, work orders, reservation orders, PM overrides, account-by-account Monte Carlo. No analytics team. No quarter-long project. The speed isn’t the story. The story is what stopped being necessary. For…
What happens when the forward-deployed engineer is the CEO himself. - Seven a.m. Tuesday. Andrew, the CEO of the operations company we’re forward-deployed with, is at his desk, running a forecast iteration on a cost model he wrote himself. By the time most of his team has logged on, he’s already cycled through three or four iterations and pinged his sales...
Reasoning gets cheaper. Capture compounds. - By the end of the Palantir kickoff build week I’d figured out where the leverage actually is in a vertical AI build. Not the model. Not the agents on top. The graph underneath — and the loop that thickens it. Day two. The night before, I’d wired up a Salesforce...
Fat skills, one per work function. - Alex Lieberman thinks someone is about to build a world-class brain for enterprises and make a stupid amount of money. He’s right about the money. I think he’s wrong about what you’re buying. The argument goes: code is easy for AI because context lives in the repo. Knowledge work is...
How we use Claude Code to personalize onboarding from a living knowledge base - Last week I wrote about keeping our company’s brain in a git repo. A couple founder friends DM’d me after: “this sounds great, how do I get this started for my team?” Honestly that’s the harder question. Here’s where I landed. Onboarding is a lossy compression problem. Company has N...
ARKS, AI agents, and what happens when your company's knowledge lives in plain markdown - +----------------------------------------------------------+ | We put our entire company's brain in a git repo | | | | I'm not sure it's the right move but I think | | something interesting is happening | +----------------------------------------------------------+ OK so this is maybe a weird one but I’ve…
Sharing initial experiments with generative models and their challenges in developer workflows - This article accompanies the talk at the Developer Experience Summit (August 2023). 🤖 Github Action Code Review: Install link. Currently supports models from OpenAI, Anthropic, plug-and-play with your own LLM! 💬 Example Code Review: 🎞️ Slides (soon) 💡 Abstract In this talk, I will delve into the…
Humans, AI and the Art of Collaboration - This article accompanies the talk at CraftConf 2023 (link). 🎞️ Slides 💡 Abstract In this talk, I will explore the potential of integrating large language models and generative artificial intelligence (AI) agents into our work processes. Specifically, we’ll examine how natural language interactions with AI-powered agents, including APIs and…
Examples from Human-computer Collaboration - Many of today’s headlines are dominated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT. The last few months have represented a clear sea change in public belief in the power of the large language model (LLM). I’ll share some of my own experiments and where I believe this technology is going. Generated...
Applying Friction for Developer Productivity - This article accompanies the talk and shares a preview of references for the Slack engineering blog article on how Slack implemented circuit breakers in internal tooling. 🎉🍿 Here from Craft Conference? Tweet and say hi! 💡 Abstract After months of similar cascading incidents, Frank Chen shares how Slack engineers increased...
How Slack Transformed Their CI With Tracing - This article compiles resources on how Slack solved problems using tracing. I’ve given this talk a few times and hoped to share references and links for folk to get started in this space. 💡 Abstract Traditional monitoring tools like logs and metrics were necessary but not sufficient to debug how...
The 24 books that I recommend to software developers - Learning software development is a fundamental skill in today’s world. I hoped to share a list of books for understanding and growing in software development. I have shared parts of this list with team members who join my team or who I mentor. I grouped these books by area of...
Actionable knowledge from my journey to join a Goenka meditation workshop - I recently joined a 10 day meditation workshop after procrastinating for years, despite “knowing” of meditation’s benefits. Every one’s path to meditation is different. This article is my [meanering] story to deepen my practice and how I came to join a workshop. I am sharing my story so that others...
A Six Month Experiment - Haley and I have been using Slack as a primary way to communicate in the past 6 months, and its been an authenticity and delight creating relationship hack. via giphy Problem: Getting in sync was hard Before Slack, my girlfriend and I used a combination of iMessage / SMS and...
Many apps get deleted. How can you make sure your app doesn’t get deleted? This essay shares patterns and antipatterns for product design - Notice how many the apps on your phone don’t get used. 80% of the apps on your phone get used less than once per week This is why I absolutely love it when I can delete phone apps. Minimizing the amount of apps I have on the iOS home screen...
Lessons from the Web Lead of an Amazon Web Service - My friends love learning. This guide is an amalgamation of emails I have sent friends and things I have picked up in my journey to learn web development [1]. By the end of this guide you’ll be able to answer the following questions: “How might I build a personal website...
Building a System that Lasts - This article is about the steps I’ve taken to iterate upon my writing workflow. I’m writing this partially as documentation of how to structure a writing project in the same way as a software project. This workflow is one under development. I have had problems with writing cadence and writing...