25 chunks · 19 episodes
...folding for the future. The users didn't need to know it was held together with duct tape and fax machines. They just needed to see that ordering food online was possible. This is the beauty of early-stage demos: they don't have to be real...
...he other way around, and it's mostly code, with a little bit of LLMs as magical duct tape? The former has the prompt injection problem, fundamentally. The LLM is in the driver's seat, and the LLM can be tricked. The latter has the potentia...
... well for a niche is better than having great components that customers have to duct tape together and configure themselves. It turns out there's basically no way to do arbitrary integration cheaply or scalably. You can get consulting styl...
...ople think of the model as having more agency, but the model is more like bland duct tape; it only springs into life in response to the questions you pose and the prompts you give. It reflects back answers to those prompts. Even a boring s...
When you're trying to prototype to find the fun, don't overbuild. Can you duct tape something that will work for the next 3 months, and that won't set you on a path that in 3 years you'll look back and hate yourself for? If so, good ...
...an agency. It can be, if it's a minor component of a larger system, the magical duct tape. But if the LLM is in the driver's seat, if it's treated like an oracle, then it has absorbed some of the human's agency.
...could be made tinkerable. But LLMs are squishy! They can squish things! Magical duct tape.
...JSON representation, most LLMs today will do a great job! With this new magical duct tape, can we make tools that allow humans to act like humans, but with the benefits of scaling that only computers can offer?
...asier / cheaper tier before that point: simply ask an LLM to do it. Use LLMs to duct tape something together, cache the result, and then later replace it with traditional code if you want to keep it and use it a lot. In my Code Sprouts hob...
...s are adopting it aggressively: "I use it all the time for everything." Magical duct tape is hard to use in a structured way (e.g. top down) but it's easy to use by anyone to jury rig anything. AI is the most individualistic disruptive tec...
...e all of the components sitting on a shelf ready to be integrated with a day of duct tape work, they still need to be the right combination, everyone needs to do their tasks in a way that coheres, everyone needs to coordinate to do the tas...
You can't build a machine out of only duct tape. Duct tape has no structure on its own. You have to duct tape something else that has the structure. If you don't, you just get a big mushy ball of d...
LLMs are magical duct tape that are made out of crystallized society-scale intuition.
Machine intuition is super useful as magical duct tape! These are machine intuition but we use them for machine reasoning. LLMs seem like they're reasoning, but it's really just absurdly good intuition an...
...code. End user product management is more about behavior. Even with the magical duct tape of LLMs, end-user programming is still hard to achieve. You can get quick, scrappy prototypes quickly, but it's hard to maintain / grow / extend them...
...es anywhere. They're just stuck in chat transcripts in the system. Another way: duct tape together your own system with Python and a local database in an hour or two. But not shareable! These are precisely the kind of thing that should be ...
The right set of scrappy systems thinkers in the right situation can duct tape together something that looks dinky but goes on to change the world.
...ed together into novel combinations. The only risk in the system comes from the duct tape for the combination, which is small and cheap. This allows you to try many different combinations quickly and with low risk. Often you can find game-...
...'re a part of the Thing. What is the Thing? We don't know yet! LLMs are magical duct tape that can be used to build the Thing. Chat bots are a very natural medium for LLMs, and humans have been willing to meet them where they are so far. L...
...mal, computer-friendly way at scale in the past. But LLMs, as a kind of magical duct tape, allow you to take this baseline for granted.