Nat Friedman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, here's another one. Large scale engineering projects are more soluble in IQ than they appear. And here's my question, does that make you think that the impact of AI tools like co-pilot will be bigger or smaller because one way to look at co-pilot is it’s IQ is probably less than the average engineer, so maybe it'll have less impact. Yeah, but it definitely increases the productivity of the average engineer to bring them higher up. And I think it increases the productivity of the best engineers as well. Certainly a lot of people I consider to be the best engineers telling you that they find it increases their productivity a lot. It's really interesting how so much of what's happened in AI has been soft, fictional work. You have Midjourney, you have copywriting, you have Claude from Anthropic is so literary, it writes poetry so well. Except for co-pilot, which is this real hard area where like, the code has to compile, has to be syntactically corrected, has to work and pass the tests. We see the steady improvement curve where now, already on average, more than half of the code is written by co-pilot. I think when it shipped, it was like low 20s. And so it's really improved a lot as the models have gotten better and the prompting has gotten better. But I don't see any reason why that won't be 95%. It seems very likely to me. I don't know what that world looks like. It seems like we might have more special purpose and less general purpose software. Right now we use general purpose tools like spreadsheets and things like this a lot, but part of that has to do with the cost of creating software. And so once you have much cheaper software, do you create more special purpose software? That's a possibility. So every company, just a custom piece of code. Maybe that's the kind of future we're headed towards. So yeah, I think we're going to see enormous amounts of change in software development. Another one – The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful, great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment. And the rebuttal to this is if you micromanage you prevent people from learning and to develop their own judgment.…

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