Pi is one of the coolest projects in the AI world today. I'm on their team. Giving developers and companies choice of model, control over the runtime, data, skills, plugins… Excited to have great support on @vercel: vercel.com/blog/making-every…

3 steps to becoming an actual software programmer 1. Build personal software 2. Build internal software (for a select group of people) 3. Build public-facing software If you've only ever built personal software you're not qualified to build public-facing yet. As you climb the rungs the stakes get higher, your constraints get tighter, and you need to QA harder. So my advice for anyone who's never built an app is this: Find a small group of testers (even 1 is great) that will actually use an app you built in their real lives. The feedback you'll get will blow your mind. It'll show you how forgiving you are of your own crappy product. You'll begin to focus on process and quality. It'll be frustrating, slow, and hard work. That's programming.

such a fascinating visualization - tracing my periods of burnout & re-enchantment (and the breaks for my band's tours) likes rings on a tree

you can just build “things”

Can I be real for a sec? I'm super nervous about this launch. It's something I never thought I would do, and I want to be as transparent as possible. This course is $1,300. You should not buy it. Let me explain. I've done YouTube for over 5 years now. I've never done a paid course of any form before. I have worked hard to keep all of my content freely available. I'm lucky to have found so many awesome companies that will sponsor short sections of my videos, enabling me to employ an incredible team without compromising my content. I have always hated the idea of charging my viewers. If I can't convince a company to cover our costs, that's my failure, and I don't like putting that failure on my audience. On October 26th, my first-ever paid course with @megadevhq goes live. It's $1300 a seat. That's really expensive. I keep imagining a scenario and it makes me feel sick. I think of a young, excited dev who's recently gotten into my content. They're scared of falling behind, so they cut their expenses and save up the money, because they believe my course might be the key to getting a real dev job. Even now as I type this, I feel my heart rate increasing and my stomach flipping over itself. The thought of anyone putting themselves in a harder financial position, all because of me? This might actually be my biggest fear. I don't want to sell promises. I don't want people paying me for hope. So why did I do this course with Mega? Two reasons: the people and the content. I was hit up by Joel about this course late last year. I trust him with my life. Even then, it wouldn't have been enough to convince me. Then I learned the other instructors who would be involved. Kent, Angie and John. All three were fundamental in my growth as an engineer. Getting to work with all of them was far too exciting. Made it really hard to say no. If I had nothing unique to say, I still would have said no. I'm incredibly busy as-is, and I'm running low on space to even show you guys all the stuff I do. What pushed me over the line was the realization that there is so much I want to say that doesn't fit in a YouTube video. I just did a video about "prompting better". It's a deep dive on my real world workflows and how I think about building with AI. The only way I could get people to watch it was clickbaiting the title, "your prompts suck". What if I wasn't bound by clickability? What if I didn't have to focus on being entertaining for the whole video runtime? What if I was freed from the constrains of making content for the 500,000+ people who watch my videos? I love YouTube. I love my audience. I love the videos I make. But I'd also love to do a multi-part deep dive on "building with AI in real world code bases" that I know would bomb on YouTube. That's what I filmed for Mega. I'm so proud of it. It's fundamentally different from any videos I've done before, but still feels like me just doing my thing. Is it worth $1,300, though? If that $1,300 comes out of the same bank account that you pay rent with, probably not. Is it worth $1,300 per person to a company trying to help their eng teams use AI properly at work? In my opinion, this is a bargain. If you're paying your engineers $100k a year, and this course makes them 5% more effective at their jobs, that's a 4x ROI. What I'm trying to say is simple: Don't buy this course. Get your boss to buy it. (If you have an education budget at your job that works too. Just please don't pay for this yourself. Seriously.) Sorry for the rant. If you can't tell, I'm genuinely quite nervous about this 🙃