My good friend Nick Hobbs has a brilliant piece on a new role called AI Designers.

He observes that people used to building traditional software are having trouble incorporating LLMs.

Traditional software does exactly what you tell it to (which might not be what you meant).

You can design it precisely and pin it to the wall and it stays perfectly in place.

But LLMs are like jello.

Squishy computing.

Impossible to pin to the wall.

A better proxy for LLM apps is not software engineering but game design.

Game designers are very familiar with the idea that the core of their software (the game loop) is not something that they control.

It is squishy, organic, emergent.

You can't directly control it; you can only poke and prod and evolve it indirectly.

My best cheat code for building AI-first software: include an indy game designer on the team.