There’s plenty of people that know the fundamentals of the system. It’s a mistake to think that understanding specific technical details about an implementation is necessary to understand the system. It would make more sense to ask questions about whether someone could conceivably build the system from scratch if they have to. There’s plenty of people that have worked in academic fabs that have also written verilog and operating systems and messed with radios.
strongly disagree with this article. I think using the tools can actually directly lead to a junior engineer getting closer to a senior engineer. Telling junior engineers that they have to get better at typing out code in order to be better engineers misses what actually makes someone a better engineer.
It's worth actually being specific about what differentiates a junior engineer from a senior engineer. There's two things: communication and architecture. the combination of these two makes you a better problem solver. talking to other people helps you figure out your blindspots and forces you to reduce complex ideas down to their most essential parts. the loop of solving a problem and then seeing how well the solution worked gives you an instinct for what works and what doesn't work for any given problem. So how do agents make you better at these two things?
If you are better at explaining what you want, you can get the agents to do what you want a lot better. So you'd end up being more productive. I've seen junior developers that were pretty good problem solvers improve their ability to communicate technical ideas after using agents.
Senior engineers develop instincts for issues down the road. So when they begin any project, they'll take this into account and work by thinking through this. They can get the agents to build towards a clean architecture from the get go such that issues are easily traceable and debuggable. Junior developers get better at architecture by using agents because they can quickly churn through candidate solutions. this helps them more rapidly learn the strengths and weaknesses of different architectures.
I think it's important to note that there's nothing forbidding LPU style determinism from being used in training. They just didn't make that choice.
Also tenstorrent could be a viable challenger in this space. It seems to me that their NoC and their chips could be mostly deterministic as long as you don't start adding in branches