Michael Truel
speaker
75 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Michael Truel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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This is a little different, I think, than where some people are jumping to in this space, where I think one idea that's captivated people is, can you talk to your computer? Can you have it build software for you as if you're talking to an engineering department or an engineer over Slack? And can it just be this sort of isolated text box? And part of the reason we're not excited about that
is some of the stuff we've talked about with latency. But then a big reason we're not excited about that is because that comes with giving up a lot of control. It's much harder to be really specific when you're talking in the text box.
And if you're necessarily just going to communicate with a thing like you would be communicating with an engineering department, you're actually abdicating tons and tons of really important decisions to this bot. And this kind of gets at fundamentally what engineering is.
I think that some people who are a little bit more removed from engineering might think of it as, you know, the spec is completely written out and then the engineers just come and they just implement. And it's just about making the thing happen in code and making the thing exist. But I think a lot of the best engineering, the engineering we enjoy,
involves tons of tiny micro decisions about what exactly you're building and about really hard trade-offs between, you know, speed and cost and just all the other things involved in a system.
And we want, as long as humans are actually the ones making, you know, designing the software and the ones specifying what they want to be built, and it's not just like company run by all AIs, we think you'll really want the human in a driver's seat. dictating these decisions. And so the jury's still out on kind of what that looks like.
I think that one weird idea for what that could look like is it could look like you can control the level of abstraction you view a codebase at. And you can point at specific parts of a codebase that maybe you digest a codebase by looking at it in the form of pseudocode. And you can actually edit that pseudo code too, and then have changes get me down at the sort of formal programming level.
And you keep the, like, you know, you can gesture at any piece of logic in your software component of programming. You keep the inflow text editing component of programming. You keep the control of, you can even go down into the code. You can go at higher levels of abstraction while also giving you these big productivity gains.
And there are a lot of details to figure out there that's sort of like a fuzzy idea. Time will tell if it actually works. But these principles of control and speed in the human and the driver's seat, we think are really important.
We think for some things, like Arvid mentioned before, for some styles of programming, you can kind of hand it off chatbot style, you know, if you have a bug that's really well specified. But that's not most of programming. And that's also not most of the programming we think a lot of people value.
I actually think this is a really, really exciting time to be building software. Like, we remember what programming was like in, you know, 2013, 2012, whatever it was. And there was just so much more cruft and boilerplate and, you know... looking up something really gnarly. That stuff still exists. It's definitely not at zero. But programming today is way more fun than back then.
We're really getting down to the delight concentration. All the things that really draw people to programming, for instance, this element of being able to build things really fast and speed and also individual control, all those are just being turned up a ton. Um, and so I think it's just gonna be, I think it's gonna be a really, really fun time for people who build software.
Um, I think that the skills will probably change too. I, I think that people's taste in creative ideas will be magnified and it will be less about maybe less a little bit about boilerplate text editing, maybe even a little bit less about carefulness, which I think is really important today. If you're a programmer, I think it'll be a lot more fun. What do you guys think?
Objective-C.
Thanks for having us. Thank you.
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