Guillermo Rauch: recommendation

Transcript context

…Let me follow the thread on engineers. A lot of people are wondering, "Do we need engineers in the future? What happens to engineers? Should I learn how to code?" Your long-time engineer thoughts for folks that are trying to decide the career for themselves? Yeah, I think knowing how things work is the most important skill in the world. I foresee a lot of people becoming incredibly impactful in building and shipping amazing products, and building gigantic companies, and everything you could imagine, where a single person can do the job of a hundred different people in a hundred different specializations. Take the example of one skill set that's really important to build a front-end product is you need to know how to use CSS or Tailwind to style it. And once upon a time, I would hire people that were truly specialists in this task, the task of there's a Figma design or there is some kind of sketch, and translating that into reality because they knew really well how to manipulate layouts, layout code, box model code, we call it, and borders, paddings, margins, flex box, all these technologies for styling. And notice, I actually use the word translation very intentionally, because the origin of the LLM or the transform architecture at least, goes as far back as the architecture for systems like Google Translate. They were generative LLM techniques, basically. That's how they cross that chasm of, remember when translating tools were horrible and then one day the problem was just solved? And I look at a lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations, that I think are going away, in a way, or the tasks to be done, they're translation tasks. We were translating from a screenshot, or intent, or a design into a React, and Tailwind, and CSS implementation. And right now, v0 is incredibly good at doing that. It's so good that every time we put a new generation of the model out, I run this test of converting my own website and try to generate it with v0. Last time I did it, it had taken me like 10 prompts to replicate it. Keep in mind I'm an expert front-end engineer that's been in the arena since I'm like 10 years old and I'm 35 now. And so I do that test because it's almost like a test of self-imposed humility of, like, "I remember exactly how long it took me to build my website with Next.js, the framework that I created, and ship it." And so with the last model, it took me maybe 10, 15 prompts? With the most recent model, it took me two prompts. And so that translation from the design intent into working implementation, another anecdote that I like to share with people is the model, because v0 tries to embed all of the best practices of the web, the model output more accessible code than what I wrote. It follows the accessibility guidelines that the web standards consortiums put out better than I did, because it just knows everything. And so those tasks where you can almost model it to a translation task, definitely going away. But knowing how things work under the hood, notice all the ... I'm using specific tokens in this conversation. I'm saying, "CSS," I'm saying, "Layout." I'm naming styles. task, definitely going away. But knowing how things work under the hood, notice all the ... I'm using specific tokens in this conversation. I'm saying, "CSS," I'm saying, "Layout." I'm naming styles. Knowing those tokens is going to be very important for you because you're going to be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better. And so the TLDR would be knowing how things work, the symbolic systems, and that will mean that you have to probably go into each subject with less depth. I have engineers at Vercel that know every single CSS property by heart. They know when they became available in a certain web browser, they've been tracking this specification. It's almost like you're an encyclopedia of knowledge of each CSS property. You probably won't need that in the future, and probably that's good, because you'll free up your mind for more ambitious things.…

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