From "AI mid-life crisis" to the "time of my life" | Steve Yegge (Sourcegraph)

Software Misadventures

A Silicon Valley veteran and known for his writings like "The Death of the Junior Developer", Steve Yegge joins the show to chat about his "AI Midlife Crisis", the unique writing process he employs, and building the future of coding assistants.

Segments: (00:00:00) The AI Midlife Crisis (00:04:53) The power of rants (00:09:55) “You gotta be able to make yourself laugh” (00:11:46) Steve's writing process (00:14:10) “I published them… and nothing happened for six months” (00:17:30) Key to perseverance in writing? Get pissed. (00:23:24) Writing in one sitting (00:29:05) The AI Midlife Crisis (00:35:04) Management to IC (00:38:35) The acceleration and evolution of programming (00:41:43) Picking up new skills in a new domain (00:43:40) The power of prompt engineering (00:47:27) Secondary hashing (00:50:47) The importance of context in coding assistants (00:53:56) “The future of coding assistants is chat” (00:57:15) The importance of platforms in coding assistants (01:02:30) The nefarious T-word in AI (01:06:32) The death of the junior developer and its consequences (01:09:35) The future of code understanding and semantic indexing (01:13:15) The power of context in AI platforms (01:16:21) Surprising capabilities of LLMs (01:21:04) Transferable skills in AI product development (01:23:53) Mental health and the innovator's dilemma

Show Notes

• The Death of the Junior Developer: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/the-death-of-the-junior-developer
• Steve’s blog rants: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
• Steve’s medium posts: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/
• Sourcegraph’s blog: https://sourcegraph.com/blog
• Steve on twitter: https://x.com/steve_yegge

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Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en