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vicki
@vboykis
Moving vectors to different machines sometimes. Founding ml engineer in recsys/search. I like reading, art, Nutella, and terrible jokes
1.2K Following    61.6K Followers
Resharing this and urging everyone to read it for several reasons. 1. Everything Cindy writes is fantastic and serious engineering discourse 2. The examples here are concrete and clear and most importantly production services with real world consequences
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The magic isn’t in being the “first” to an idea but the first to make it “just work.” That is the bitterest lesson for folks in this field.
feels like I’m the only one pacing tbh and that’s only because I’m getting docker build errors
everything eventually converges to something you will desperately want to query
"we'll use a NoSQL database so we don't have to worry about schema migrations." - someone who is about to spend the next two years reinventing relational joins in application-level javascript.
At the turbopuffer event in NYC tonight, come say hi if you’re around
Startup idea: small personalized models that are fine tuned on the trauma of your past production incidents
We're hiring developers to work on Hegel (property-based testing for ~every language) in London with me, and are struggling a bit to source candidates, so I wrote a less professional post about why this is the coolest job ever and you should apply.
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Untrue! Just finished Lonesome Dove, best book about leadership and all the questions around it I’ve ever read
I don’t think anyone in tech has read a book in the last year (myself included).
alright folks I have the grand pleasure of interviewing this friday @vboykis about how she would be learning all this AI stuff in 2026 if she was a beginner. let me know in the comments your burning career or learning questions I'll weave them in.
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There are fake big concerns about AI, and there are a lot of actual, genuine concerns, like this:
We are seeing a new trend in submissions to @arxiv (and presumably to conferences and journals): Authors submitting papers whose contents they likely do not understand. 1/
this paper on the design-space of async/await (from @tonofcrates, @ShriramKMurthi and Gavin Gray) is just fantastic. such a joy to read. are there more like this? i don't care about the topic, could be rpc, ffi, gc, whatever. just this kind of vibe.
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trained a fly connectome to handle kubernetes deployments imagine escaping your mortal body only to find out you're now primary oncall
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Corollary to this for software engineering is that I don’t know any good engineers who don’t tinker around with stuff that interests them in the field in their spare time
I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea. I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics). The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency. In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them. They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it. I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen. I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same. I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that. Number one tip: act with agency.
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Girl, you're making me 😭😭😭 Remember when we were young, and unpolished nerds, and the mercenaries hadn't shown up yet, and the only thing that mattered was making the world a better place and we made fun of social mobile local apps and no one thought the world was going to end?
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@vboykis Was feeling this today too. I miss the human craft of the app, the human writing, the technical debates.
I remember discovering this in 2008 working on PYMK at LinkedIn. Realized simple logistic regression + way better/more/faster data far exceeded all this SVM, lasso technique, PhD stuff. Spent time on engineering from then on.
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Watching stuff like this makes me feel like there are genuine down-to-earth concrete engineering problems in doing agents well and gets me excited about engineering again
all you have to do is not give the model access to the internet what am I missing here
Between watermarking, safety filters, undocumented system prompt changes in harnesses, routing to less capable models, and usage limits, it will be interesting to see how long hosted models continue to produce results that are useful for everyday work.
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Anthropic's watermarking is working great 👍
a model can never learn research taste because research taste is driven by spite
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