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AI Engineer @ Microsoft | Building LLM & RAG Apps | Always learning, exploring and sharing the frontiers of AI.

๐Ÿš€ The Future of Engineering & AI โ€” Insights from CEOs

Michael Truell - CEO of Cursor

"We're not going straight to a world where AI does everything and engineers disappear. Instead, engineers are shifting rolesโ€”from implementers to orchestrators."

Everyone Become Engineering Managers

"I think something people don't talk enough about when discussing AI agents and AI engineers doing all this stuff for youโ€ฆ is basically we're all becoming engineering managers."

Why Reinforcement Learning (RL) is hot again?

Just finished listening to an incredible podcast featuring an interview with Wu Yi โ€” a Tsinghua alum and former OpenAI researcher โ€” and his take on Reinforcement Learning (RL) was one of the clearest Iโ€™ve seen!

๐Ÿ” 1. What is RL really about?

Wu Yi explains that RL is very different from traditional supervised learning (like image classification). In supervised learning, we train models using a fixed set of labeled data โ€” one-shot answers.

RL, on the other hand, is more like playing a game: you need to make a sequence of decisions (serve, move, react), and there's no single โ€œcorrectโ€ path. The quality of your decisions is judged by the final outcome (win or lose). Itโ€™s about multi-step decision-making โ€” much closer to how the real world works.

๐Ÿค– 2. Why is RL hot again? Whatโ€™s its connection to LLMs?

Prompt Engineering

Content


Key Takeaways:
Prompt engineering is an ๐—ถ๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ถ๐˜ƒ๐—ฒ ๐—ฝ๐—ฟ๐—ผ๐—ฐ๐—ฒ๐˜€๐˜€ involving continuous ๐˜๐—ฒ๐˜€๐˜๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด, ๐—บ๐—ผ๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ณ๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ผ๐—ป, ๐—ฎ๐—ป๐—ฑ ๐—ผ๐—ฝ๐˜๐—ถ๐—บ๐—ถ๐˜‡๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ผ๐—ป. As models continue to evolve, prompts must adapt accordingly to maintain effectiveness.


What is prompt engineering?

Prompt engineering is about "communicating" with LLM in a way that maximizes the model's understanding and performance on a given task. At its core, prompt engineering involves designing, refining, and optimizing the text inputs (prompts) given to models to elicit accurate, relevant, and useful responses.

Building effective agents

What are agents?

"Agent" can be defined in several ways. Some define agents as fully autonomous systems that operate independently over extended periods, using various tools to accomplish complex tasks. Others use the term to describe more prescriptive implementations that follow predefined workflows. At Anthropic, they categorize all these variations as agentic systems, but draw an important architectural distinction between workflows and agents:

  • Workflows are systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths.
  • Agents, on the other hand, are systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks.

Below, we will explore both types of agentic systems in detail.

Playwright vs Puppeteer vs Selenium

In todayโ€™s fast-paced development landscape, automated browser testing and web scraping are more vital than ever. Three of the most prominent tools in this space are Selenium, Puppeteer, and Playwright. Each has its unique strengths and target use cases. In this post, weโ€™ll explore how they stack up in terms of browser support, language options, performance, ease of use, and more.

However, for the most powerful and reliable option, Playwright is the best of the three.

The purpose of 1-1s

First, they create human connection between you and your manager.

  1. That doesnโ€™t mean you spend the whole time talking about your hobbies or families or making small talk about the weekend.
  2. But letting your manager into your life a little bit is important, because when there are stressful things happening, it will be much easier to ask your manager for time off or tell him what you need if he has context on you as a person.
  3. Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings, however. The bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust.

Top best practices for building production-ready AI apps

  1. Build evals
  2. Define test cases to ensure you're actively improving your app & not causing any regressions.

  3. Break down one LLM call into multiple

  4. AI systems do a lot better when you have many LLM calls chained together. i.e, instead of sending an LLM call to a model to generate code, send it to a "architect" model to generate a plan, then a "coding" model to generate code, then a "reviewer" model to verify.

  5. Start simple (with 1 LLM call)

  6. Then iterate with prompt engineering (few shot examples, chain of thought, descriptive prompts) before building a more complex system with chained LLM calls.

Globalizing Your Startup/One Person Company

TL;DR

  1. Building in Public
  2. Individual Entrepreneurship is a Future Trend
  3. AI and remote work make one-person companies more feasible.
  4. No Need to Overly Rely on Funding; Start with Lean Startup Methods
  5. Register Platforms and Services as a Company, Not as an Individual
  6. Using a company entity can mitigate the risk of unlimited personal liability.

How Elon Musk is so effective

Operating philosophy

  • Relentlessly focused on weekly progress
  • The Elon method boiled all the way down is "what have you gotten done this week?"
  • Rejects traditional corporate timelines and long-term planning over months and years

Engineering-first approach

  • Works predominantly with engineers
  • Personally understands all technical systems
  • Avoids non-engineering meetings/conversations when possible, joins all the core engineering focused meetings
  • Skips management layers completely
  • Talks directly to person in charge of specific project
  • He's in there with 24-year-old engineers and they'll just walk through fire for him
  • Engineers deeply respect his technical knowledge