Week 1166 -- Back to work

Justin and I continued to grind on ghiblify after New Year’s Day. We added a feature where you can insert yourself into the Spirited Away train scene. It takes about 3-5 minutes for the video to generate and fluctuates depending on GPU availability and cold start wait times. We are working on ways to make it faster and it’s been quite interesting to deep dive into the GPU infra world. We also added user auth and a history feature for users to see their previous outputs.

After trying out all the new copilot tools, it’s so obvious to me that the act of typing code will be commoditized away. The truly valuable skills as an engineer will be in understanding software design patterns and shaping the LLM output to be in a form factor that is easily understood by your teammates. I feel like I got much better at this while at Retool, but I feel an urgency to improve my product design skills and general infra knowledge. Having good design taste will become a huge differentiator as code becomes a commodity. I also want to learn more about infra/hardware/networking to get a better understanding how code is actually run and how information is passed around.

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I read 2 books this week; both were relatively short and focused on Chinese history. This Is China: The First 5000 Years by Haiwang Yuan gave a short high level overview of Chinese history starting from the ancient Xia dynasty to the present. China in Ten Words is a collection of essays by Yu Hua where he shares his experiences of growing up during the Cultural Revolution and some observations about China’s recent economic growth. I loved Yu Hua’s writing style and it’s was fascinating to contextualize his stories with the accounts I’ve heard from my parents and grandparents. I’ll definitely be reading some of his other works in the future.