madmax

I used to be a language lawyer. In the late 80s I _studied_ the ARM (Annotated Reference Manual for C++). I knew the language cold, inside and out. I could make it do backflips. I shipped a lot of code using it. A LOT. I’ve attacked other languages with a similar intensity and depth. Until recently, that was simply the only way to become adept at building software systems. I now consider the deep understanding of a language to be a supreme waste of time and effort. I don’t want to learn Rust, or Golang, or Typescript, or any of the thousands of other languages out there. I’ll leave that to my agents. What I need now is to understand the high level gestalt of the system. I want to see the systems and subsystems. I don’t need to inspect the cogs. If I truly need to understand a detail at the cog level, I’ll interrogate my agents. I’m not going to pretend to be a language expert anymore.

Great line from the CTO of Proton. I’m paraphrasing and stealing it : Your job is not to use agents to help you write code. Your job is to lead the agents to help them write code.