14 karma · joined March 14, 2023
https://markhalstrom.com
I am always happy to talk: markhlstrm@gmail.com
For interviews where candidates are using AI I think you can supercharge this approach, but I do not think there is value in turning it into a code navigation puzzle as there is little value in that can be evaluated in the ~45 min you have for coding in a 1 hr interview slot. Ultimately in many software engineering jobs these days we need to understand how to build quality systems without looking into the underlying system except as necessary. I am not sure how to best evaluate this judgement in an AI assisted interview
My solution was to put tasks and their dependencies in a sqlite db. https://github.com/mhalstrom/maximizepm take a look if you're interested
What I did was build my own process for this: https://github.com/mhalstrom/maximizepm
The main take away is: 1. You need an agent to manage your agents that you mainly interact with. 2. You need a durable way to manage tasks and the dependencies between them. 3. You need agents with multiple roles ie manage, build, review etc 4. You need to manage yourself across projects so any system you build needs to take that into account
Interns that I have seen be successful at Amazon do the following:
1. Show interest in the process.
2. Work really hard to unblock yourself. (You should feel like you're stuck a lot of the time. If you're not the project is too easy)
3. Learn when to get help to unblock yourself.
4. DO NOT tell anyone on the team or adjacent to the team you are on that you are not interested/ would not accept a return offer. This will guarantee no offer. Our best intern did this. (If you are skilled everything will turn our fine but it is nice to have options)
If you are using the model to write to code faster with extensive human oversight you can develop a lot faster using the non-frontier models. I was doing that extensively last summer.
But now my thought process is I want to focus on architecture and product direction. I have not seen Sonnet level models be capable of performing autonomously enough to take a feature end to end reliably enough to be completely hands off. In fact there a many cases where Opus will fail as well where Fable will succeed.
Of course that is not to say that Fable will always do things correctly. It will happily take an under-specified problem statement and happily use up all of your usage to build the wrong thing, while Opus at least recently stops constantly to check in.
However what happens when you actually build and launch your agent is customers try it, do some initial runs and then go ask your manager to automate their use case. That is why I have been building https://toolscaled.com/ The goal being work through your problem space using agentic chat (like Claude Desktop) and then at the end convert it to a workflow. I am pretty close to launching and have been testing. If you're interested send me an email! (if you do sign up just fyi its still in beta so YMMV.