Readit NewsThe book has been seen as the authoritative source on the topic, so people were hesitant to write anything else. At the same time, the book borders on impenetrable.
Anyone who has worked in a presidential administration (or a congressional office) can tell you that a leader is effective if and only if they have staff that believes in their message and agenda, and that is willing and able to execute on that agenda.
The practical reality here is that charisma isn't just a way of gaming the "getting elected" part of the job, it's also a requirement to be effective at the job.
This is something I wanted but I couldn't figure out a way to do it in a way that's meaningful. Authors like Simon Willison publish frequently, so even though he has a lot of high-scoring posts, he has a lot of low-to-no-scoring posts too. It feels unfair to penalize people who publish frequently just because not every post is a homerun.
I'm open to suggestions!
I'm almost positive Paul Graham would be #1.
To take an example from the article: code re-use. When I'm writing code, I subconsciously have a mental inventory of what code is already there, and I'm subconsciously asking myself "hey, is this new task super similar to something that we already have working (and tested!) code for?". I haven't looked into the details of the initial prompt that a coding agent gets, but my intuition is that an addition to the prompt instructing the agent to keep an inventory of what's in the codebase, and when planning out a new batch of code, check the requirements of the new tasks against what's already there.
Yes, this adds a bunch of compute cycles to the planning process, but we should be honest and say "that's just the price of an agent writing code". Better planning > ability to fix things.
Is that how you actually use llms? Like a Google search box?
"Answer as if you're a senior software engineer giving advice to a less experienced software engineer. I'm looking for a Rust crate to access PostgreSQL with Apache Arrow support. How should I proceed? What are the pluses and minuses of my various options?"
I would perhaps perhaps articulate it as:
you find your tribe by hoisting a flag and seeing who rallies around.
choose action over perfection - you'll be happier in the long run.
so: write on the internet.