Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. And then even deeper than that is like, once you go through this conversation, you're like, "Okay, let me eliminate myself again completely out of the equation because I won't remember to prompt you better two days from now." Put this into rules, put this what we just learned into Rules.md, because I'm making you read the rules every time anyways, so you might as well just record it there. So I'm not going to prompt you better. You're just going to learn that I'm stupid and you're going to prompt yourself better. Right? Again, just eliminate yourself and move the context, you solve 99% of the problems with AI today. So idea here is help it build its own brain and rules and way of thinking based on problems you run into. So great. Okay. So I want to come back to this point you've made a couple of times, which is so interesting. This idea that you watch the output of the agent to learn what is going on. There's something I've seen other people. Ben Tossell, who I think is at factory now, shared this recently. He's also basically vibe coding all the time. He was brilliant to no code tools before, and now he's all about vibe coding. Basically, he's learning how coding works and learning how systems work by watching the agent output. And this connects to something Michael Truell shared, the CEO of Cursor. He was on the podcast. He had this vision of Cursor becoming basically what comes after code. What's the layer that we are adding on top of code where people don't need to worry about code anymore? And at that point, it was like a year ago that we chatted and it feels like this is the layer, is the agent conversation of what it's thinking, and then what you tell it back. So essentially, it's English in a conversation, which is like, it's not even pseudocode. It's interesting that that's where it feels like things are heading. The layer over code, just its thinking and your conversation with it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Again, in a way, I really optimize for good judgment, and part of good judgment is it comes from, again, learning how these tools work. You need to know what's possible. We talked about it, and I know I may sound contradictory sometimes, but it's because as you said, it's so interesting the world we live in, that things contradict to each other. It's an advantage not to know what's possible, but then at the same time, you cannot be completely oblivious to something that's like a factual thing. So let me talk about a failure of mine that came from being delusional. Back in the day when OpenAI started or released image generation natively in the app, so you could go to ChatGPT and be like, "Generate an image of X, Y, Z," the whole world exploded. That was the biggest thing ever. Obviously, first thing that comes to my mind is like, "I want to build a Lovable app. I just want to build a wrapper and I want to build an image gen with Lovable," without thinking that OpenAI did not release an API for that just yet. So I spent at least a week trying to brute force my way into make... ... brute forced my way into making this work instead of just waiting for another week, because a week later, they had an API and I built this app in 30 seconds. The problem was that I tried to do it when it was impossible, impossible. So I think, again, it's just a matter of really learning what's possible through communicating with the agent layer. And Lovable and all the other tools are agentic now, which means they don't just write code. They can browse the web, they can read files. They have reasoning and thinking capabilities. So that's why I'm so invested into that conversation because a lot of times it will tell me, "Hey, what you're trying to do is just undoable at the moment because of X, Y, Z." So I always use those as a learning opportunity and I just level up most by being in chat mode for planning and learning purposes. And because it just, again, develops your clarity, your judgment capabilities rather than coding capabilities.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.