Author: David Dworetzky
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Management Style: Standard-Bearer
One of the common questions that is asked of Engineering managers as they go through the gauntlet of an interview process, or even just reflecting on their impact in an organization is “What is your leadership style?”. This is such a tricky question because the Engineering Manager role is demanding: you have to be a…
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We’re all AI Engineers now.
On non-determinism in Software Engineering. This year we’ve seen the rise of the term “AI Engineer” in job openings. How does this differ from Machine Learning Engineering, which is a combination of Model Training, Inference Optimization and traditional distributed systems engineering skills? The AI Engineer role is meant to address the fact that calling AI…
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Vibe Coding: A Review
It was the tweet (xeet) that launched a thousand vibes-based projects. Early in February, Andrej Karpathy posted about how good AI-assisted coding had gotten. The interesting thing about this kind of vibe-based coding is that his flow – using SuperWhisper and Cursor means that he is basically interacting with his codebase at a high level.…
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Neovim – leg day for developers.
There is a bit of a tempest brewing in the developer community about cursor and AI assisted coding tools. I recently saw a post from a dev that mentioned that they were turning off copilot for their IDE finding that the suggestions were making them overly dependent on the AI model. Reading arguments about this…
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On Happiness and Embodiment (and Aikido)
On why you’re not just a “brain in a vat”. There is a difference between understanding a truth and deeply internalizing it. This is why there are so many evident truths to happiness that we understand at a surface level, but end up blithely ignoring in our own lives. I asked Claude.ai for five obvious…
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Engineering Management and Entropy
Throughout my time in Engineering management, I’ve had an evolution in thought about what a good manager does. Initially when I became an Engineering Manager – I patterned a lot of my practices around the best that I had seen from better Engineering Managers that I had reported to in the past. Fundamentally – the…
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A good craftsman never blames his tools
There has been a tweet that has been in my thoughts a lot in the last.6 months – regarding AI agents. In the end, it boils down to “Agents are the Hello World of the AI Engineer.” At first, I wasn’t sure about this sentiment. General agents may be some ways off, narrow agents can…
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5/4 – Papers I’m Reading
Every week the firehose of new preprints continues for AI. There are so many papers of late, that it is a constant running gag in the ML community about how much research there is to keep up with. My purpose in cultivating more of an intentional practice of reading and engaging with whatever new ideas…
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Training 100 models in public
One of the things that I’ve admired of individuals like Andrej Karpathy or Dwarkesh is that the work that they do is deeply public. Things like Mini GPT are both a way of advancing one’s own knowledge about the depth of craft with transformers, as well as a way of teaching and transmitting that knowledge…
Deep Learnings 