It’s May 2025, and the AI revolution is in full swing. If you’re a knowledge worker and you haven’t integrated AI into your workflow somehow, then… like, what are you doing? I’m currently paying for OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s lowest-tier premium plans, in part because I’m curious to see how the companies built around the foundation models navigate their soul-searching between being research institutions and product businesses, but mostly because I find the injection of intelligence into my personal and work life to be really useful and fascinating....

I’ve wanted to record some casual reflections on my experience learning and getting better at Mandarin Chinese, particulary as someone whose productive language skills (namely, speaking) far outpace the receptive skills (listening). When learning a language, there’s a point when your command of it reaches an operational level, such that you can make your way through casual, day-to-day conversations. While graduating to this range of proficiency represents a significant milestone on the path towards mastery of the language, it also brings a new challenge: you can no longer have high confidence about exactly how much you understand of what is being said....

My initial reaction to the term prompt engineering was skepticism that anything of the sort could be called engineering. Having now spent a bit of time using LLM AI to produce a solution to a small content generation problem, I’ve arrived at a few takeaways, some of which have pushed me to be less dismissive of this notion. ...

I was recently prompted (perhaps by a voice in my head) to come up with my own set of engineering values. What follows is surely incomplete, but it arrived with an odd clarity. ...