This is fascinating. The idea of leveling off in the learning curve is one that I hadn't considered before, although with hindsight it seems obvious. Based on your recollection (and without revealing too many personal details), do you recall any specific areas that caused the struggle? For example, was it a lack of understanding of the program architecture? Was it an issue of not understanding data structures? (or whatever) Thanks for your comment, it opened up a new set of questions for me.
A big problem was that he couldn't attain a mental model of how the code was behaving at runtime, in particular the lifetimes of data and objects - what would get created or destroyed when, exist at what time, happen in what sequence, exist for the whole runtime of the program vs. what's a temporary resource, that kind of thing.
The overall "flow" of the code didn't exist in his head, because he was basically taking small chunks of code in and out of ChatGPT, iterating locally wherever he was and the project just sort of growing organically that way. This is likely also what make the ChatGPT outputs themselves less useful over time: He wasn't aware of enough context to prompt the model with it, so it didn't have much to work with. There wasn't a lot of emerging intelligence a la provide what the client needs not what they think they need.
These days tools like aider end up prompting the model with a repo map etc. in the background transparently, but in 2023/24 that infra didn't exist yet and the context window of the models at the time was also much smaller.
In other words, the evolving nature of these tools might lead to different results today. On the other hand, if it had back then chances are he'd become even more reliant on them. The open question is whether there's a threshold there where it just stops mattering - if the results are always good, does it matter the human doesn't understand them? Naturally I find that prospect a bit frightening and creepy, but I assume some slice of the work will start looking like that.
Awesome! I love news-related ideas like this since I'm interested in several industries. Had an idea similar to this a few years ago (in a different industry though) but didn't follow-through because I got bogged down in hosting/email infrastructure decisions. Keep it up!
Thanks! If it helps, I ended up using Curated for hosting and email infrastructure. Been meaning to self-host something for ages but until then I'm happy to use them.
Marketing, Technical Marketing, and Product Marketing Roles
Location: United States
Remote: Yes (Also willing to travel to you for extended periods of on-site work during launches and important promos)
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: I'll adapt to whatever MarTech stack you are using
Résumé/CV: Available by request
Email: mkc.raig [at][g][mail] dot com
Who Am I?
20 year marketing veteran with technical background and experience in product, product marketing, and growth.
Began my career as a software developer in a startup in a semiconductor-related software field. Moved into a hybrid product/product marketing role. Worked alongside our B2B sales and marketing team in a cross-functional role, and collaborated with our global engineering teams and partners for global B2B marketing and sales activities.
Now I'm interested in finding a new growth or marketing role in tech. I'm open to a variety of industries.
If you are hiring, the roles I fill are similar to those “in-between” roles that fall into two categories:
(a)Engineering teams with expertise and need a technical marketing person to help translate their expertise into sales/marketing content
(b)A MarCom team who knows branding and content, but needs some assistance translating marketing speak into technical audiences
