Sahil Lavingia: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I mean, first off, it's not easy. Change is uncomfortable, right? It requires work and energy, and biologically, I feel like we're trying to save our energy all the time. So you have to, you know, you have to motivate people. You have to make it exciting. You know, there's a reason, like, colleges and classes are in person, right? Like, there's a... It's like fun to train together. You know, it's easier to go to the gym in a gym than like at home in your bedroom. Right. Part of it is doing it myself, too. You know, like if your manager, your annoying boss is telling you to do something, it's different than like leading from the front a little bit. I often do like screen shares. Actually, like I recorded these videos and I recorded this one with Josh Pigford on YouTube, which is like three hours long. And I basically did it because I wanted to. I was like, this is, you know, got a lot of views, actually. Like I. Yeah. That's how important I felt it was. Not just for me, but for everybody. But I basically recorded it for the team. I had my team in mind as I was doing it. Like, check out how cool it is. Imagine once we switched to Tailwind, how fast we can do this kind of thing. It sort of is part of that, bringing the energy. We also financially motivated people. So there's a couple times here. I'll find you an example of a Devon competition we did. So we did this competition where we did 30... $33,000, uh, split amongst whomever opens and merges more Devon PRs than me over the course of May. So, you know, it's a kind of a fun way to like motivate people to learn it's time bound. Uh, And I actually did pretty well. Let's see the results. So I got fourth. I opened 27 PRs with Devin, and then three people beat me. And I do a lot of easy wins. So props to all the engineers who But yeah, this is all my Devon PRs. A lot of people are like, there's no way you use Devon. Like you're making it up. You're just trying to like go viral or whatever. I'm like, not really. Like I'm just trying to like help people be more productive. I didn't know that was controversial. But you know, there's like a lot of small things like remove this part of the homepage. There's this like recap that we do in Slack that's generated by AI that recaps like everything that shipped last week. And so I said, hey, Devin, could you, you know, like, for example, these two things don't really need to be here because there's nothing under them. Right. So I just said, hey, Devin, like, could you like, you know, only show the products that actually have shipments and like hide the other ones. And also like some of these aren't really shipments. Like, this one is only the back end. The front end hasn't shipped yet. So, like, make sure, you know, update the AI prompt that we're using for this. Which, by the way, I've never seen. Like, I just know that there's an AI prompt that's, you know, involved. And that's actually what this one is, right? update the AI prompt that we're using for this. Which, by the way, I've never seen. Like, I just know that there's an AI prompt that's, you know, involved. And that's actually what this one is, right? So it found the Slack weekly recap and it made these changes and it created this PR. So we can actually go in and see this PR and we can confirm my suspicion or not, which is, oh, turns out there is a prompt. So it's primarily on shipments, feature improvements, and bug fixes. Prioritize these categories. And then it also did something here, which is, if we looked, it did this. It added a filter. So basically, only the projects that I have more than one. The thing that I would critique about myself is that ideally we would have a test and maybe there is a test that I don't know about. So this is when the human would come in. I don't normally just hit merge on these things. You know, I would normally send this to somebody else and be like, hey, I did my best shot at this. And you could see here for the Slack recap, don't include product names. And then I pasted this, the link to the update. You know, I would normally like say, hey, well, can you make sure this looks good to you? And if there are any tests that need updating? And personally, I think this is way better that like someone has done most of the work for you. And basically, I think humans will start the process. I think of it like flying a plane, like humans will take off, decide where to go and land typically, you know, do QA in this context, but, you know, not actually build, write all this code, right? Like look up, like, for example, you know, like dot filter versus dot trim or dot, clean, or, you know, like, every language is different, right? But overall, I know rough amount of software architecture, that like, this is, you know, this is the right solution, right to this problem, you're just adding a simple filter that removes the things. And ideally, there would be a test. So I would have even higher confidence that this, that this has done what it what it should, you know, One thing I was gonna call out on the code you just showed was I find that these AI engineering tools are pretty good engineering citizens and that their code is well commented. They call out what, you know, there's a little bit document doc strings and things like that that make it easier to parse some of those changes. Okay, so this is what we kicked off with. It's the native date picker replaced with the ShadCN one.…

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