Nikhil Thorat

I wouldn’t be alive if not for the H-1B program

I hate to be that guy, but I’ll go out on a limb and say this prediction is complete bullshit.

A more realistic take is: LLMs will aid humans at all of these stages, which makes them insanely valuable tools. And that’s why I’m excited about them. But replace is a bit of a grifter take, IMO.

I’m not sure if y’all have used LLMs in serious software engineering, but we’re not even at milestone 0 robustly. LLMs still completely screw up even when slightly complex technical constraints are well formed, in extremely subtle and frustrating ways.

For humans, these are all pretty intermingled, and you need software engineers at all of these stages. I think it’s safe to assume you have to get to milestone 3 to “fully replace all software engineers”

Milestone 2: an AI translation layer of product requirements from a human to large scale technical requirements.

Milestone 3: AI coming up with product requirements altogether.

Milestone 0: AI can translate very focused technical requirements into software.
Milestone 1: AI can translate project-scale technical requirements into software. This means understanding how many large technical components fit together.

There’s a lot of chatter of “AI solving software by the end of 2025”, which IMO is way off the mark.

I useful to break things down into milestones 🧵

the day-night edge is so surprisingly sharp

Streamline AI Agent Evaluation with New Synthetic Data Capabilities

Blog: www.databricks.com/blog/streaml...

We just released the Databricks synthetic evals SDK! 🎉

We’ve found that synthesizing evals is a great way to hill climb your AI system before you’re able to get labels from domain experts.

We’ve also recently release a new diff UI that lets you both qualitatively and quantitatively view results!

You would be a master VJ, one day i’ll make an llm to convert your animations to touch designer

oh yeah it is, I just never think to use gemini directly I guess!

This query sold me on Perplexity

Trying to understand if PCM will block sunlight for plants for a friends greenhouse. He wanted a fully natural way of keeping it warm in the winter. The answer was deep in academic papers that aren’t normally summarized by other search engines.

My cleaner shrimp molted its exoskeleton, under a microscope there’s a tiny world of little agents.

80x and 1200x magnifications

Something about the blue color on this app makes it feel so much friendlier than X.

Not to mention I now get overtly racist anti-indian memes now over there…

Agents are just normal programs with unstructured data flowing through them, and LLMs doing some of the transformations

My twitter notifications are mostly spam / bots that have bios trying to convince me to click a link to go on a date with them.

Let’s try to make this app work.

@mmitchell.bsky.social has convinced me to use this app again :)

Bluesky slowly is becoming more than just a few people posting!

Also — is this “skeet” a joke or real? I can’t say that without laughing.

Wait… is that what they call it here? That is absolutely hilarious.

🌸lilacs are blooming🌸

Yeah it does! It’s so cute. And it contributes to a central database to track bird migration patterns. ~~For science~~

This is the coolest AI project I know of.

Bird Buddy is a bird feeder + camera that classifies birds 🕊️

Bluesky nailed the “omg I want an invite” even though features are identical.

I don’t like when someone yells “8$” and makes me feel bad about it.

Carrots not sticks!

My profile photo is a microscopic image of pond water at 40x magnification and colors inverted.

No AI in sight!