Senior "vibe code" janitor. All things frontend. Always caffeinated. Serial reposter.
Toronto 🇨🇦
Joined December 2014
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If you have a few minutes, this was a really nice read on the tension between a process and a culture problem.
You CANNOT fix CULTURE with PROCESS.
Earlier this year, one of my sales managers slacked me a new Google Form. Every sales engineer (SE) would have to fill it out before every customer call. FOREVER.
I get why he created it.
A rep on his team showed up to a call the prior week unprepared. The SE was there too, just as unprepared. He spent the call asking the customer questions we should have known the answers to before we ever dialed in.
They wasted the customer's time.
So he did what most managers would do: "I'm going to create a process so this never happens again - so now before an SE or an AM gets on a call to show the product, they have to fill out this form."
Then he spent his Saturday - his Saturday - building a 14-question intake form. Required for every SE. Before every customer call. FOREVER.
That is not the answer. You don’t fix unprepared reps with a form.
You build a culture where nobody shows up unprepared in the first place.
Every process you add is a TAX.
And you CHARGE that tax to every person on your team who never had the problem - every day, forever - to fix the one person who shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Stack enough of those and you end up with processes on top of processes and everything slows down.
Some processes are worth the tax. Most aren't. This one wasn’t, so I told him to kill the form and do this instead:
Before you build a process, say the standard OUT LOUD.
Get the team on a call, tell them what happened and tell them what the standard is.
In our case: “Competing with ZoomInfo should be a DAUNTING experience for ANY of our competitors. This is NEVER acceptable. Showing up unprepared to a customer call doesn't live up to that. Full stop.”
Point back to that standard every time someone misses it. Let the people who can't meet it self-select out.
Manager: "But Henry, what if it happens again?"
Then it happens again. And you have the conversation again. Louder this time.
Process fixes broken systems - it doesn’t fix broken standards. Start with the standards.
Sumedha Kulkarni retweeted
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month.
I have a spicy, optimistic take - I think there's an opportunity for junior engineers: felixrieseberg.com/hunger-be…
Sumedha Kulkarni retweeted
First they came for the software engineers, I said nothing for I was not a software engineer.
Then they came for the mathematicians, I said nothing for I was not a mathematician.
Then they came for the product managers and I said "make sure you get all the product managers"
Sumedha Kulkarni retweeted
Introducing shadcn/lint. An agent-first linter for Tailwind design systems.
You define what’s allowed. When an agent breaks a rule, the error explains what’s wrong and how to fix it using your components, variants and theme.
There’s a lot you can do with this. Let me show you ↓
github.com/shadcn-ui/lint
Sumedha Kulkarni retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Sumedha Kulkarni retweeted
Musk, Altman and Dario are not calling for an AI frontier slowdown because they suddenly developed morals.
Sumedha Kulkarni retweeted
It is crazy how a technology that has the potential to cure cancer, alzheimer's, and who knows what else is so universally hated outside of rich tech.
How did Sama and Dario so thoroughly fumble this?
How did they not see telling everybody they're going to lose their jobs every few months and now we might (👉👈) accidentally kill everyone isn't a winning strategy?