Episode Details

How should we spend our time now that writing code is cheap? In this episode, Kris and Matt are joined by Doug Soo, a staff engineer working on the storage systems at Honeycomb. They discuss his blog post Spend More Time Talking to Humans, how AI is changing software development, and how that affects the way we communicate.

The trio go from hedging the claim that we trust the output of compilers so we should trust the output of agents, how correcting LLMs can lead to exhaustion with little benefit, the ways in which decision making has become the core job of software engineers, how change can be actively bad, and the difference between optimism and hope.

For our wonderful supporters we have an expanded edition! In this week's expanded content we have advice on how to reconcile AI with your career, regardless of whether you're just getting started or if you've been doing this for 30 years; an MIT class that shaped the way Doug thinks; how to tell if you actually enjoy implementation and which implementation skills matter; and Kris' prediction that the era of agents is coming to an end. Not a supporter yet? You can fix that right now by going to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe and signing up today. You'll get expanded editions of Fallthrough, bonus content in our other podcasts, and higher quality audio-only editions. Sign up today!

If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kMo8aazKPCc.

No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show.

Thanks for tuning in and happy listening!

Table of Contents:

• Prologue (00:00:00)
• Chapter 1: Spend More Time Talking to Humans (00:01:26)
• Chapter 2: Who I Am and How I Got Here (00:03:34)
• Chapter 3: Your Users Are Twofold (00:05:04)
• Chapter 4: One to Two Weeks, One to Two Minutes (00:09:06)
• Chapter 5: Trust Was Earned (00:12:52)
• Chapter 6: Just Another Tool (00:15:34)
• Chapter 7: Faster, But Not Better (00:18:54)
• Chapter 8: A Big Fan of Pairing (00:21:18)
• Chapter 9: What Do You Do With All the Junior Engineers? (00:25:06)
• Chapter 10: Should We Slow Down With LLMs? (00:28:10)
• Chapter 11: Draining in a Different Way (00:31:33)
• Chapter 12: Now Everyone Is a Product Engineer (00:34:48)
• Chapter 13: Change Itself Is Actively Bad (00:37:35)
• Chapter 14: Stability and Primitives (00:40:57)
• Chapter 15: The Ultra Software Factory (00:43:12)
• Chapter 16: Where's the Net New Software? (00:47:23)
• Chapter 17: The Types of Recruiter Emails I Get (00:51:14)
• Chapter 18: You Must Use This Many Tokens (00:53:40)
• Chapter 19: Not Necessarily For and Against (00:58:07)
• Chapter 20: The Mediocre Answer Is Never Spicy (01:02:17)
• Epilogue (01:04:54)

Hosts

• Doug Soo - Guest
• Matthew Sanabria - Host
• Kris Brandow - Host

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