I think it depends on how “before” we’re talking about.
I can remember a time when learning was valued and leaving the camp cleaner than you found it was considered a basic professional standard.
But I can also remember a time when Scrum became all the rage and next thing you know we’re all stuck on the sprinting treadmill, management is obsessing over “velocity”, and it’s generally an everyone-for-themself free-for-all to clear the absolute minimum criteria to get the ticket moved to the “done” column in a semi-desperate effort to keep up with your ever-growing backlog of tickets to which you’ve been over committed. Don’t worry about incomprehensible code or flaky designs; taking your time to do it right the first time looks bad on the KPI dashboard but rework does the opposite because you get to count the second (third, fourth, etc.) times the same task needs to be revisited towards your velocity metrics, too.
I’m not sure most developers younger than maybe 40 realize just how much worse our line of work has become over the past ~15 years.
Yes it did. That's how I learned a great many things throughout my career. I'm sure some people didn't pay attention or try to understand what they were doing, and didn't learn. That's on them. But most of us learned a lot that way.
I think that what they mean is that instead of ten perfectly orthogonal "unix philosophy" tools (skills) for the agent to compose when solving a problem, each with an API surface (description text) the size of Texas, you'd want to can each composition in a shell script (or a bespoke rust binary, if you enjoy watching your bot perform some heavy lifting) that only solves one problem but solves it so focused that the accompanying skill description barely consumes more context than the tool's self descriptive name.
I still didn't follow, you mean to pipe things between tool calls? Like if you want to query something and then update another without the intermediate getting brought in context?
Instead of requiring each session to understand the n tools used to solve a particular problem, you bundle up the solution in a conventional script (that's what I meant by "can", as in canning) that the agent can use with very little documentation in the context. When the model is smart enough to figure out the composition of underlying tools during regular execution, it will also be able to do the canning up as a script and write the lightweight documentation that turns the script into a skill. Subsequent use will only require that lightweight documentation in context.
Won't you just end up with hundred of very specific scripts that can only do a very narrow thing? And now they'll all have their description and name in context.
You are trying to make friends not interview people. The easiest way to make new friends is to engage in a common activity. Sports, hobbies, music, clubs whatever. Join one and see what happens.
Get into slacklining. Set up a slackline at a park and people will come.
If you're into music, find out what local/regional bands are in your area and where the small local venues are. Show up a little early and talk to strangers.
Rock climbing isn't for me, but my brother has made a bunch of friends at the local rock climbing gym.
Bird watching clubs are everywhere and you guys can nerd out over different camera setups.
Join a running or cycling club. I've heard the ones around here are very welcoming to people new to the sports.
Table top RPGs are fun. Your local game stores probably have one shot nights where everyone is welcome and noobs are encouraged.
Find some sort of hobby you enjoy and find others who want to nerd out over it
The unfortunate reality is that unless you use these tools it is impossible to keep up. People using these tools well are substantially more productive, and often they were already the most productive.
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