Receipts

I told you so, past me

I keep coming back to this post I made almost a year ago on LinkedIn, here's the original:

I keep coming back to this post (I HAVE RECEIPTS) I posted almost a year ago and how much just a year ago Claude Code felt like the future of engineering. Now that we are truly starting to explore the world of Agentic Coding, it has been as revolutionary as I thought it would be, at least for me.

Lately I've been spending a lot of time running evals and tweaking what I can to get more consistent LLM behavior, and boy does knowing how to run small experiments pay off. Being able to get that baseline, try something, eval, and do it all over again is a great way for me to learn how these things work, and now I get to do that in a coding agent harness as my day job. That's pretty fun.

I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to put myself in others' shoes. At work, that means thinking about how engineers coming into this workforce will learn to use these agents as their first "real" tool. I remember being shown how IDEs work when I was early in my career. Before that I was just a vim-jockey, moving myself around text files with no way to easily dive into multiple files at once, and look at me now!

I come from a Linux background that started all the way sometime between the age of 8-10 (very fuzzy memory). The main reason I learned Linux at the time was because I would make the family computer unbootable, and needed a way to debug while at home. I learned that Linux distros could be burned to a CD and run the whole system from there. It blew my mind; I didn't bother fixing the Windows partition for a year after that (turns out I just needed to boot into recovery mode to get to a terminal and type bootrec /fixmbr).

What I really was learning back then was how to fix problems, how to do my research (rode a bike back and forth between home and the public library to use their computers), and how to work within my limits (not being able to afford anything is a great creativity booster).

I continue to wonder what I can teach early career engineers about using these tools to their maximum. I haven't gotten to work with anyone right out of college in the last year, but I imagine thinking that what you learned in school is completely irrelevant. Well, I also felt like that back early in my career as well.

So my advice now? Just keep doing what you're doing, be human. Humans solve problems all the time; we look at a challenge, and we figure it out, over and over again. Learn how to ask questions, be curious, don't be afraid to try something and throw it out.