Context is for kings
Engineering is moving from law driven to context driven. Buckle up.
Universal laws are for lackeys.
Context is for kings.
If / then. 0s and 1s. True or false?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always heard about how computers were driven by binary, and how everything could be distilled into two distinct states: On or off.
Then, I used GPT-3 for the first time. It was very un-binary.
Depending on the text I wrote before I ran the completion, I could get wildly different results. And that’s cool, and can make great new experiences, but it’s hard to build a business on wildly different results.
LLMs are more like construction contractors than software.
Have you ever worked with a handyman to do construction around your home? Ask them when they’re going to come fix that hole in the window. Or when they’re going to finish painting that room.
Tomorrow will be a liberal term for “in the future when all things line up the way I expect and I remember to be there.”
For a homeowner, waiting to get something done is fine, because as long as the promise of a less-expensive fix, regardless of when it happens, is appealing because paying less for something that eventually gets delivered at an acceptable quality is a tradeoff most people can make.
But not for businesses.
Imagine your employee shows up every day exactly when you ask, but 20-80% of the time they can’t complete the task without extreme oversight. Maybe they’re having a bad day, maybe they’re drunk, but either way, it’s going to be hard to make it work.
At best you’d build a system of redundancy, but at worst, you’ll destroy your business’s credibility, or spend so much time managing this employee, you won’t end up better off than you started. Either way, quality control and performance reviews are a must.
Good employees do what they’re told. Great employees do the work without being asked.
So this is the trick, right? How do you make sure your employee shows up every time reliably without micromanaging them?
Context, it turns out, isn’t just for LLMs, it’s for people too.
I’ve only had two managers (Blaine Mucklow and Randolph Faust) who have ever understood how i work, and how to put me in positions to succeed.
The difference between them and every other manager I’ve ever had? They gathered organizational context on my behalf, and then helped me focus exclusively on what needed to be done next.
For me, they are context engineers: People who skillfully understand the problem space, and gave me the right information at exact the right time.
I got the highest performance rating available at facebook… a feat that is extremely rare.
Empower and communicate, don’t command and control.
Bad companies and managers treat their employees the way we treat LLMs. They just give vague ideas, in whatever order seems pertinent, and hope things work.
Great companies treat their employees like partners. They give them freedom and autonomy to make choices, and concentrate more on outputs than process.
So then how do we treat our LLMs more like partners?
Empathy, it turns out, is the key trait of both. Figuring out what your coworker needs to understand, without burdening them with detail, is the difference between a high performer and a person or LLM you want to fire.
Communication is the new code
We’ll be talking at length about how communication now matters more than code. 10x engineers have always needed to be effective communicators, but now everyone needs to be.
I’m the product of computer science and communication. I can’t wait to show you how to how communication changes everything.
great read