The Exchanges

Q Is it, um, like, a known space of, like, domains and algorithms one can learn, or is it really, like, learning to solve problems algorithmically really well, and it could be completely new problems or domains in every competition?

A Yeah, there's definitely, um, there definitely are standard algorithms that exist, so, like, you know, shortest path or something, or, you know, binary search trees or things like that, and so it helps a lot to learn the fundamentals, but the whole idea is that every problem in a contest is Um, it's totally unique. You know, it's, it's a new problem that's never appeared before. And, um, um, you know, the, the, the beauty of the contest itself is in the creative problem solving that you're doing to figure out the right algorithm. Right. And so, you know, while the fundamentals are very helpful, a lot of it is figuring out how to use each of these pieces and, you know, reduce the problem to a shortest path problem or how you, you know, modify, you know, certain algorithms to make them work for, for different use cases.

AI assessment note: “there definitely are standard algorithms that exist... but every problem in a contest is totally unique”

Q Why do you think, like, engineering doesn't disappear as a class of work in the future?

A We're obviously very excited about Devon, but, um, you know, I, I think if anything, there's going to be more engineers, not less, um, and I'll kind of give two reasons why. I think the first is, um, there's just so much demand for engineering out there and so much demand, honestly, even in ways that we, we don't always think about, right? A lot of using Excel or a lot of, you know, working with various tools is, is in some ways, um, is there because, There's, because engineering is hard, right? I think there, there are so many problems that could be solved with code. There's so much more that could be built with code, um, that I think multiplying every single developer is going to give us more developers, not less. Um, you know, the other thing I think is that Devon is very much not the type to decide what to do, you know? And I think there is always this core part of, um, how you decide what exactly to build or what problems to solve or, you know, how particular things should work. Rather than engineering going away, I think engineer actually becomes a more pure, um, you know, abstraction of those things, right? I think the average software shares today might spend 20% of their time thinking through all these, like, really fundamental problem solving questions, and 80% of the time writing that in code. Um, and I think they'll, they'll be able to do five x more, and they'll be…

AI assessment note: “I think if anything, there's going to be more engineers, not less”

Q What do you think is going to be important from a human software engineer or just, like, human technology person five years from now? I realize that's a really long time scale in AI, um, but it's certainly not, like, encyclopedic knowledge anymore, right?

A Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I think there's, there's, there's a meme that, you know, the hottest new programming language is English, right? And I, I mean, I think there's a lot of truth to that, um, but with that said, I think that, you know, the software engineering fundamentals are obviously still super, super valuable, right? Um, people, you know, um, For example, like, I think, you know, the internet today is, is something that we all kind of are able to use and kind of take granted, but people who work with these networks, um, it's certainly very helpful for them to understand the details of TCP, right? And I think similarly, I think, um, You know, I, I think we'll be able to communicate our ideas in English and work with all these things, but, you know, understanding the internals of, um, of how computers work and understanding logic gates and, you know, a lot of these core kind of pieces, like these core foundations, I think will still be very useful, right? And so, you know, um, whether that's, um, you know, algorithms or technologies or, um, you know, logical reasoning or, or things like that, like, I, I think the, you know, I think the role of A software engineer, um, five or 10 years from now, it looks something like a mix between a technical architect and a product manager today, you know, where, where a lot of what you do is, you know, you take problems that you're fa…

AI assessment note: “a mix between a technical architect and a product manager today”

Q come from that world. And I feel like that's a lot of people in the AI world today. Um, was that true for the IOI community as well? Was it largely like online interactions and trading tips with strangers who became friends and all that kind of stuff? And then if so, how's that impacted your career or your life or, you know, working with others over time? Yeah, definitely.

A I mean, I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and so there were, there were not a lot of other people who had the same kind of interest in math and programming that I did. And so Um, you know, a lot of these competitions were, was the first, like, were the first time that I got to meet, um, others who, um, who had a lot of these same interests, and, um, you know, the competitions are once a year, and maybe there's training camps, or things like that, that are a couple times a year, but for, for the large majority of the year, we'd be talking online, and, you know, we had our, all of our own communities where we'd talk about, you know, competition problems, but also kind of, um, yeah, yeah, we, we, we became very close friends through that, too.

AI assessment note: “for the large majority of the year, we'd be talking online”

Q It's like a interesting topic for somebody who, uh, was world-class at IOI. Like, what is practice like for getting better at competitive programming?

A Yeah, I used to, um, you know, programming and math competitions used to be my entire life when I was growing up. Um, I, uh, you know, it's what you think about the shower. It's what you're spending all your time on. It's, you know, how, how, how every, every problem in life that I would run into, I would frame as, as an algorithms problem, basically. Um, and a lot of it is, is Um, like a lot of other disciplines, it's just, you know, putting a lot of effort into it and being willing to, to think really analytically and, um, you know, be very brutal about your own shortcomings and, you know, focus on the things that you're not doing well and just continue to push and improve it.

AI assessment note: “putting a lot of effort into it and being willing to, to think really analytically”

Q What is Devon today better and worse at than human software engineers? How does that change how you guys use it internally?

A The encyclopedic knowledge is obviously really, really useful. Uh, I think honestly with DevOps and Dev setup, um, I, I think there's a lot that it's very good at. You know, I think DevOps is just kind of hard for humans. Actually, one of the first, um, the first really exciting moments with Devon was, um, we were trying to set up, um, You know, get a database spinning, um, get Kubernetes up and, um, whatever else, you know, for our own purposes. And we were stuck after like an hour or something, you know, going down the rabbit hole of debugging errors and stack traces and whatever. And we just asked Devin, Hey, can you set this up please? And then let us know how you did. Cause we can't do this right now. Um, and Devin actually did. And that was, that was one of the first like really exciting moments, um, for us. I think the, um, You know, the, the, the step-by-step flow of, you know, editing and working with things, you know, running commands live, looking at the errors that come up, you know, all those pieces of, hey, like, do I have this port open? Or like, maybe I need to install this package or, or whatever, you know, work very, very well in an agent workflow. Um, so that's a big one. I think, um, I think data analysis is another big one, um, which we've seen a lot as, as a good use case. Um, a lot of you had a few use cases in that bucket actually in particular, but, uh,…

AI assessment note: “The encyclopedic knowledge is obviously really, really useful. Uh, I think honestly with DevOps”