Playing with Fire in AI Coding

Key Takeaways

It can be very scary to use a coding agent because if you are an engineer and you're asked to make a change and you don't know how to make the change and then you ask an agent to do it, it's you know really you know >> with fire. >> Yeah, you're playing with fire. And so kind of a prerequisite to making changes is generally understanding the system like what is the impact of your changes and so that also is kind of where um documentation or just knowledge um becomes more important. But for humans just like understand like what is the impact of this change? Where should it change? So then you can actually like review um and be a sort of co-pilot for the coding agent. So incredible about the ways that they consume information because that lines up with everything. And it it's funny how making the link so giving them almost like grounding them in code gives them a better chance of success. and then throwing as much information at them as possible really lines up with yeah like give all the context you can and they can sus out what is actually important for them. Now this feels like a perfect segue into the quality of knowledge and how you're thinking about making knowledge higher quality in general because as I was mentioning before we hit record again was I love documentation. I'm a huge fan of trying to write. I think a writing helps you clarify your thoughts. It helps you get down the most important stuff that you want to then take forward. But what I've noticed is you have to constantly be updating docs as things change. And you also have to recognize that a lot of things are just going to not be relevant after a certain amount of time and you kind of need to know which ones are relevant in those moments of time. So, how does that knowing that like if I look through my notion, which is where I keep all of my documentation for the community and all of that stuff, if I look through that, I'm not going to say like 80% is obsolete, but it's not it's definitely a majority is obsolete. And that's because like every podcast that we've had for the last 5 years, you know, I have a notion page on them. I'm not using those anymore, but they're there and maybe they can be referenced. Maybe it can be something. Or there's like strategy documents that I've written up in 2022 and those are not relevant. Or like reflection documents. All of this stuff feels like it would muddy up the waters on documentation. And if you want the highest quality documentation for your business, how do you think about like keeping it high quality? So I think you're not alone in that you know 80% of your notion is stale. Uh I think that's probably the norm and you know you know what's the the saying is like the instant you write docs they're stale. And I think that's really true. I think the way we think about it and I think generally is like a good framing is you want to like lean on humans on for what they're good at and then AI for what they're good at. And humans are really good about knowing what is actually important. Um so I think like you know writing is still a very useful and important exercise of like um you usually as like an expert on some do topic or having just done research like know what are the things that someone in the future need to know and sort of like maybe the story that you want to tell around it and you know AI can help you write but at the end of the day like you know your the nuggets of you know expertise or like knowledge that you as the expert like put into it like That's what's really really important to have the human in the loop behind. [Music]