Letters
AI Skills Are Redefining What Makes a Great Developer: The job market for software developers requires knowing how to use AI
There is significant unmet demand for developers who understand AI.
Technical Insights
Letters
Agents Running in Parallel Get There Faster: Parallel agents can accelerate AI systems as test-time compute scales up.
Parallel agents are emerging as an important new direction for scaling up AI. AI capabilities have scaled with more training data, training-time compute, and test-time compute.
Letters
Meet The New Breed of GenAI Application Engineers: A new breed of software engineers is building more powerful applications faster than ever, thanks to generative AI. Here’s how to identify them in job interviews.
There’s a new breed of GenAI Application Engineers who can build more-powerful applications faster than was possible before, thanks to generative AI.
Letters
How to Become a Multilingual Coder: AI makes it easy to code in any programming language — especially if you know just one.
Even though I’m a much better Python than JavaScript developer, with AI assistance, I’ve been writing a lot of JavaScript code recently.
Letters
We Iterate on Models. We Can Iterate on Evals, Too: Building automated evals doesn’t need to be a huge investment. Start with a few quick-and-dirty examples and iterate!
I’ve noticed that many GenAI application projects put in automated evaluations (evals) of the system’s output probably later — and rely on humans to manually examine and judge outputs longer — than they should.
Letters
The Benefits of Lazy Prompting: You don’t always need to provide context when prompting a large language model. A quick prompt can be enough.
Contrary to standard prompting advice that you should give LLMs the context they need to succeed, I find it’s sometimes faster to be lazy and dash off a quick, imprecise prompt and see what happens.
Letters
When to Fine-Tune — and When Not To: Many teams that fine-tune their models would be better off prompting or using agentic workflows. Here's how to decide.
Fine-tuning small language models has been gaining traction over the past half year.
Letters
Learn the Language of Software: AI won’t kill programming. There has never been a better time to start coding.
Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it.
Letters
Wait Your Turn! Conversation by Voice Versus Text: Text interactions require taking turns, but voices may interrupt or overlap. Here’s how AI is evolving for voice interactions.
Continuing our discussion on the Voice Stack, I’d like to explore an area that today’s voice-based systems mostly struggle with: Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and the turn-taking paradigm of communication.
Letters
What I’ve Learned Building Voice Applications: Best practices for building apps based on AI’s evolving voice-in, voice-out stack
The Voice Stack is improving rapidly. Systems that interact with users via speaking and listening will drive many new applications.
Letters
The Difference Between “AI Safety” and “Responsible AI”: Talk about “AI safety” obscures an important point; AI isn't inherently unsafe. Instead, let’s talk about “responsible AI.”
At the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris this week, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said, “I’m not here to talk about AI safety.
Letters
Three Takeaways from DeepSeek’s Big Week: Innvations by China’s AI powerhouse DeepSeek highlight major shifts in the international scene
The buzz over DeepSeek this week crystallized, for many people, a few important trends that have been happening in plain sight.