CTO at @imprintpayments. Wrote some books.
SF
Joined March 2007
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A lot of folks want a map to Staff Engineer, and just as many Staff Engineers want to better understand their role. Towards that end, I'm working on a small project to collect folks' stories of reaching and operating as staff-plus engineers
staffeng.com/
Will Larson retweeted
understand how they think about engineering in an ai-first world
- does code quality even matter anymore?
- what will codebases look like in an ai-first world?
- how much of review can be automated?
- what's the opinion on ai review + merge without human approval
- what are the biggest bottlenecks when building with ai? how are they solving them?
- how should hiring evolve? what about team structure
- what does seniority even mean going forward?
- how should credits be allocated across team?
i'm interested in whether they've spent time thinking about these things and not just answers
Will Larson retweeted
We stopped trying to evaluate the AI skill directly. Now we ask managers to walk us through the last thing they shipped with AI — what they delegated, what they checked by hand, and what broke. Tells you everything in about five minutes.
How are folks evaluating Eng managers for AI abilities these days? Eg not ai engineer manager just any Eng manager. We’re doing some programming with AI, but doesn’t feel perfect…
I forgot part of the punchline in the first draft, which is much of the pattern here was introduced to cut down on "meat proxy review" which I see as a bottleneck-masquerading-as-a-solution for useful PR review
Wrote up how we're trying to reduce PR review friction with concept of "small-change" as PRs/eng/week has increased 10x on some teams. (Aside: incidents down 42% HoH, critical incidents down 78%! Velocity vs quality never been a falser dichotomy.)
lethain.com/small-changes/
Wrote up how we're trying to reduce PR review friction with concept of "small-change" as PRs/eng/week has increased 10x on some teams. (Aside: incidents down 42% HoH, critical incidents down 78%! Velocity vs quality never been a falser dichotomy.)
lethain.com/small-changes/
Will Larson retweeted
fun fact: @lethain has been my manager twice, but more importantly a great friend and biking (and drinking!) partner over the years.
Announcing the first speakers for Orbit (by Linear):
> Karri Saarinen (@karrisaarinen)
> Katelyn Lesse (@katelyn_lesse)
> Will Larson (@Lethain)
> Can Duruk (@can)
More speakers coming soon.
Request your ticket: orbit.linear.app
Will Larson retweeted
Announcing the first speakers for Orbit (by Linear):
> Karri Saarinen (@karrisaarinen)
> Katelyn Lesse (@katelyn_lesse)
> Will Larson (@Lethain)
> Can Duruk (@can)
More speakers coming soon.
Request your ticket: orbit.linear.app
In the small wins department, both willlarson.com/ and willarson.com redirect to my domain now. (have had the later for ~20 years, but the former picked up a few days ago)
Will Larson retweeted
🔥Hot off the press: Issue #362 of Level Up, a curated newsletter for leaders in tech #cto #vpeng #engmanager #techlead w/content from @Lethain @kwojciszko @ttunguz @costlow @FrankDelporte @Werner @markhurst & more! See sh1.sendinblue.com/3gmy6t9z5…
The biggest change in my thinking style over the past year has been retraining myself to inspect implicit assumptions to avoid the inconsistent and invisible specter of reasoning which was handled by a harnesses instead of a human.
lethain.com/make-no-assumpti…
Will Larson retweeted
The traditional way to make AI legible to bank auditors: decision trees.
The problem: decision trees make terrible experiences.
@Lethain and @ImprintPayments built an agent that reasons — then made that legible to regulators. Behind the build: sierra.ai/customers/imprint
My X search results are all from 2011 now, but it did reveal that someone shared one of my posts to @jeff_weinstein in 2011 which is very Small World
In the year 2081, everybody was finally equal—and not just before God and the law. They were equal in focus, equal in productivity, and above all, equal in their inability to finish anything.
This equality was enforced by the relentless supervision of Claude.
Will Larson retweeted
I get asked every now and then: "how do I become more influential, as a dev/eng leader, better known online?" Either for themselves, or to help put their company on the map.
The single best thoughts on this come from @Lethain, from this article: lethain.com/tech-influencer/
Is fascinating watching our 5yo learn math from an iPad app, just shockingly quickly. But then also not be able to reproduce any of the concepts on paper 😅
Will keep iterating to figure out how to get concepts to transfer or if somehow the ideas aren’t actually landing.
The agentic passive voice: any sentence in the active voice, where the actor is a model, is actually in the passive voice.
Example: Claude messed up my code.
Example: Codex wrote some bad tests.
The passive voice is unclear, please avoid it.
Will Larson retweeted
Ok here we go!!
StaffEng, AI edition, with @voidfiles and yours truly.
Sign up for our listening tour and to nominate guests! (Link in thread)
Now that I’m a few years out from podcast.staffeng.com… I kinda miss doing a show.
Maybe I’ll start something new. Probably about AI best practices for eng leaders in big tech—the future is more unevenly distributed than ever.
@voidfiles wanna join? @lethain wdyt?
Wrote up a series of nine short posts on interesting problems we encountered while building an internal agent framework (virtual files, compaction, LLM vs code-driven workflows, etc)
lethain.com/agents-series/