At the exact same time, coding agents helped me iterate quickly and ship software that worked well (after some dutiful testing, of course). They were also, I found, excellent tutors…
In the day to day of shipping agents into production…
Recurse Center (RC) is a self-directed, full-time programming…
Coming into RC, my goals were the following:
- Train an LLM from scratch. This includes pre- and post-training, and I want to do this mostly from scratch; not just fork a premade codebase but write a Transformer myself.
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For example, a nice thing I picked up from someone I pair programmed with: when this guy was writing code and didn’t quite remember the syntax or operations, he would often just quickly open up a terminal and type a super simple example to rapidly iterate. He was usually able to work it out and verify if it worked correctly in less than a minute, and he didn’t have to google anything and comb through search results or ask an LLM.
This technique might seem obvious to some, but making this process muscle memory has helped me become unstuck much faster.
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Soon I’ll be shipping agents to prod and running evals with a whole new bag of tricks and skills. But for now I’ve got 6 more weeks left at RC
I am sorry, but what a… trolling and clickbait…
I do regret opening it, reading it, and increasing their visiting counter…