“Engineers are becoming sorcerers” | The future of software development with OpenAI’s Sherwin Wu

Some engineering around an AI exists to compensate for weaknesses that may change with the model. Sherwin Wu, engineering lead for OpenAI's API and developer platform, describes this as a moving product-design problem. Wu's example is retrieving information: a carefully orchestrated search pipeline may sometimes give way to letting a capable model use search tools itself. Wu explicitly acknowledges that vector stores still have uses. The argument is that teams should reconsider the machinery around the model as its capabilities change, because preserving every workaround can preserve yesterday's constraints.

“95% of engineers use codecs. 100% of our PRs are reviewed by codecs.”

Sherwin Wu

“It literally feels like we're wizards casting all these spells.”

Sherwin Wu

“So I think we might actually enter into a golden age of B2B sass.”

Sherwin Wu

“The models will eat your scaffolding for breakfast.”

Sherwin Wu

“Make sure you're building for where the models are going and not where they are today.”

Sherwin Wu