Kris Walker

OK this is a HILARIOUS story I heard from inside Meta: You know when Director+ folks write stuff that is clearly AI slop? But everyone is too polite to say anything. Happened a ton inside Meta's internal "LinkedIn" (Workplace**) BUT morale is so low that lots of devs no longer gave a damn. So they started to call out, in the comments. Savage comments, just no longer caring. And the result is... these AI-written slop posts are... gone from Workplace! ** it's not really an internal LinkedIn, more like their own version of Facebook, but is used to communicate projects, ideas, learnings etc. This comparison I felt more apt, given the AI slop happening especially on LinkedIn (that LinkedIn themselves encourage by offering to AI write your posts)

I talk to engineers at other companies every day and hear the same thing: one person is 10x'ing their output with Claude but the rest of the org hasn't caught up. Watching teams adopt AI, I keep seeing the same 4 steps. I mapped them out here: Steps of AI Adoption claude.ai/code/artifact/bfdf…

Kimi K3 is worth testing. It pushes open weights models quite significantly forward. If you interact with it, it feels like a proper large model. And the vision part is really good.

Before vibe coding became a thing, programming was already evolving in that direction. It already increasingly consisted of installing and configuring stuff other people wrote, without reading the source.

AI may move to directly generating binary code, but I suspect there are still advantages to reasoning in a different representation. Textual code is a flattening of an abstract syntax tree, and while LLMs produce tokens linearly, the prior context is only linearly connected by the relationship of the position embeddings, so I wonder if they could work more effectively if the position embeddings directly represented tree structures. Code could be “parsed” into the context instead of directly entered into it.

As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes: 1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship 2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra 3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance 4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit 5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS. A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product: - A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3 - A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5 - A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2 Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?

It’s time for everyone to realize that the fight against data centers has nothing to do with data centers. They have become a proxy for the hate towards AI and the concentration and accumulation of wealth it’s creating. Until those running the big LLMs understand this and start a community tour, not to explain the benefits of AI, it’s too late for that, but to help towns and cities that may be impacted by job losses (and I’m a believer their will be a net gains in a few years), this battle is only going to get more intense and let me tell you now , no matter how much money you pay to buy politicians and races, you will lose. One thing I have learned is being hated is not good for business. How can they help ? They will tell you. You will need to do what they ask. Billions of dollars is a lot of money across towns and city programs. Across the major LLMs, it’s a cost of doing business. At the same time, I would go to LA and NYC and ask the arts and creative unions what kind of programs would help and protect their artists. DO NOT GO TO THE MUSIC OR FILM COMPANIES. that will make it worse. Don’t try to pay famous people to endorse what you are doing. That’s dumb. Talk to artists and ask them what you can do to provide financial and creative support. Every creative I know is TERRIFIED about what AI will do to their profession. You must meet them face to face and basically do what they say. The big LLMs have lost the PR battle. Why ? Because they all suck at putting people first. They have an SV attitude that makes them all think they are John Galt saving the world Given the number of data centers and power that is needed, today and going forward , If you don’t kiss the asses of the people that go to work every day, and are just trying to pay their bills, you will fall far far short of the capacity you need to make your business work.

I want world-class, full-stack infra to be accessible to every developer with a dream. More work to do, but we're getting there. 💪

Quite a lot but I think it all comes down to this: no one in the founder seat and managers optimizing for not looking bad. Company basically had outsourced all its decisions to consultants who had become leaches bleeding the company dry. And because good people kept not being listened to and consultants were running the place, it had become very hard to recruit excellent people. You’d be interested to know that I am pretty sure Opendoor has now more ex-YC founders from S14 batch as employees than any company (including any S14 company!). Half of our Eng leadership channel is YC founders (not just S14).

Talked to an engineer inside of NVIDIA about how they and their team works. Very interesting: “We don’t need to worry about layoffs. This means no need to worry about elbowing people out of the way to try and make yourself “safe” and important. So everyone helps everyone.”

The birth of quantum mechanics was a series of observations that made no sense, followed by theories that fit the data but made no sense. The theories predicted more things that made no sense… but turned out true. The universe is under no obligation to make sense.

the quality of your projects is the quality of your life

Why do people think there is more clarity in their communications when they throw their thoughts into an LLM before sharing? I’m so sick and tired of engaging with people who send me regurgitated clanker slop :-/