A Step Behind the Bleeding Edge: Monarch’s Philosophy on AI in Dev
This is a memo I published internally to my team at Monarch. I’m sharing it more publicly in case it helps other software engineering teams that are managing the crazy times we’re experiencing. There’s no question: AI is changing how we work as Software Engineers. There’s a lot of hype, excitement, anxiety, and uncertainty around…
Monarch’s Engineering Values
These Engineering values are what we use internally at Monarch. They are evolving, but we wanted to share them publicly. There are many ways to build an amazing engineering culture, and we’re just starting to hone in on exactly what ours is. So we ask for your investment, participation, and feedback in co-creating the culture…
Plenty Enough
Some examples of people choosing something else (purpose, charity, principles) over wealth-maximization. They all did well-enough financially, but didn’t optimize for money. FAQ This looks like Patrick Collison’s “Fast”? Yes, it’s inspired by it. “Fast” is a great list, but I find this list more interesting. What about The Giving Pledge? It’s a great initiative,…
AInxiety — AI is Awesome but It’s Fucking Exhausting
I’m a big fan of LLMs, and have incorporated generative AI into many parts of my professional and personal lives. In other words, I’m not an AI skeptic by any means. But I’ve noticed that I am, like almost everyone around me, feeling AI anxiety and fatigue. I thought I’d try to disentangle the feelings…
Mindless Products vs. Mindful Products
Why has your LinkedIn feed gotten so terrible? There are actually a few reasons, but I’d like to make the case that it stems from a breakdown in understanding of what type of product LinkedIn is. Let’s break down modern software applications into two very broad categories: Mindful products: These are goal-oriented products. They generally…
Writing an LLM Agent in 50 Lines of Code (or no Code at All)
One of the most interesting patterns that is emerging from Large Language Models (LLMs) is the idea of agents. If you’re like me, you can only truly grok a concept by seeing or writing code for it from scratch, so like many other folks, I decided to try building one from scratch. So what is…
What Managers Can Learn From the Army’s Antidote to Micromanagement
Picture a military leader, and picture their management style. If you’re anything like I was (without much exposure to the military) you’re probably imagining top-down, centralized decisions being made in an authoritarian way and handed (barked?) down to subordinates who are expected to just act without thinking. Because that’s what we’ve seen in movies and…
Stepping On the Managerial Brakes
If you’re leading a team or company, occasionally you will find yourself in a position where you need to “step on the brakes”. Stepping on the brakes occurs when the team has made progress in a certain direction and you need to stop them from continuing. It may be asking them not to launch a…
The Simplest Way to Build Trust
The best-performing teams have a high degree of trust. It just makes everything easier: it reduces politics, reduces process, and increases speed. What Is Trust? There are many ways of defining and breaking down trust. Perhaps the easiest is to break trust down into two dimensions: Competency: Your trust in someone’s ability to competently achieve…
How to Prioritize Technical Debt
If you’ve worked in software, you’re almost certainly familiar with the term technical debt. There are many ways of classifying technical debt: essential vs accidental, short-term vs. long-term, deliberate vs. inadvertent, whether it is caused by state, control or volume of code. These are all useful constructs. However, one of key questions around technical debt…
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