#best-practices | Anand S - Things I Learned

Sat, Jan 4, 2025. Some management philosophies used to be successful but are no longer as effective. ChatGPT #best-practices
- Command-and-control hierarchy
- Taylorism: deep specialization
- Seniority-based advancement
- Annual performance reviews (without continuous feedback)
- Up-or-Out promotion models
- Confidential strategic information
- Narrow job descriptions
- Relying on formal authority

Sat, Jan 4, 2025. Some management philosophies have been around for millenia. ChatGPT #best-practices #future
- Lead by example
- Fairness and empathy
- Clear, consistent communication
- Delegation and empowerment
- Strategic planning and foresight
- Consistent rule enforcement
- Rewarding merit
- Leadership by virtue and character

Thu, Dec 12, 2024. I asked the Straive Digitalized Operations team what management techniques they would apply to manage LLMs. Here are the responses: #automation #best-practices #llm-ops #optimization #prompt-engineering
- Ask better questions. (Prompt engineering.)
- Create templates or step-by-step instructions. (Chain of Thought.)
- Ask for multiple options and pick from the best options. (Agentic approach?)
- Training. (Fine tuning.)
- Price weaker responses lower. (Stratified model pricing?)

Wed, Nov 27, 2024. With LLMs, fostering innovation is a new path to profitability. Companies are increasing innovation team sizes. Productionizing that is the next. Some initiatives are: #best-practices #future #llm-ops
- Convert popular demos into starter kits
- Create and evangelize trainings on solutions and solution techniques
- Create larger pools of capacity to build innovation and productionize it

Mon, Nov 4, 2024. Creating a LLM-as-a-Judge That Drives Business Results by Hamel Husain. #best-practices #dev #llm-ops #prompt-engineering
- Get THE domain expert (or approver) as the tester.
- Create a dataset that is DIVERSE.
- Covers EACH combination of:
  - Features
  - Scenarios: e.g. multiple matches, no match, ambiguous request, invalid/incomplete input, unsupported feature, system error
  - Persona: e.g. new user, expert user, non-native speaker, busy professional, technophobe, elderly user
- Generate data using existing data + synthetic data for each SPECIFIC combination of the above
- Evaluate based only on PASS/FAIL with a CRITIQUE detailed enough for a new employee. Include:
  - Nuances: Something a failed response did well or a passed response didn't quite do well
  - Improvements: Suggest how model can improve
- Build an SPA to make it easy for the domain expert to review

Sun, Oct 6, 2024. Parables on the Power of Planning in AI: Giving models about 30 seconds of thinking time consistently improves results - as much as increasing parameter size by a factor of 1,000 to 100,000! #best-practices #optimization #prompt-engineering
- This works particularly well for verifiable results (code, math, etc.)
- Technique: Ask an LLM hundreds of times at low temperature and pick the most common one. (Google's Minerva used this on the MATH dataset.)
- Better Technique: Ask an LLM hundreds of times. Pick the best solution based on an evaluation metric (reward model)
- Better Technique: Apply a reward model at EACH step of the process. OpenAI's "Let's Verify Step by Step"

Sat, Sep 28, 2024. API coding best practices Source via Simon Willison: #ai-coding-tools #best-practices #github #prompt-engineering
- Always add screenshots to the Readme. They never break.
- Always add every example. Human think in examples.
- Avoid defaults and be explicit unless 99% of the usage is with the default.
- Make the feedback loops incredibly fast.
- Make deprecations easy for users to deal with.
- Keep objects immutable.

Tue, Jun 25, 2024. LLM Patterns include Evals, RAG, Fine-tuning, Caching, Guardrails, Defensive UX, Collect feedback. Notably: #ai-coding-tools #automation #best-practices #future #llm-ops #optimization #prompt-engineering
- Defensive UX: Microsoft, Google, and Apple have guidelines for Human-AI interactions
- Collect feedback: Explicit and implicit

Wed, Apr 17, 2024. Tests and homework have a purpose. It helps people figure out whether they've learnt. So: #ai-coding-tools #best-practices #dev #future #github
- Write tests that make people think! Like DuckDB workshop
- Share a list of exercises that people can explore

Fri, Apr 12, 2024. Prashant Pandey: we need to prepare before every meeting. Something to teach #best-practices #future

Sun, Mar 31, 2024. How I write podcast. Paul Graham essays #best-practices
- Write simply. It helps communicate. (Don't concise if communication worsens.). It forces you to make the idea better
- Do lame stuff. Else you won't start. Low standards drive creativity
- The more to delete, the better your writing. Read your piece. Highlight what feels poor. Fix it. Ask friends to highlight what's BORING? UNCONVINCING? Delete the first, brainstorm the second. Or ask, what's the 10% to cut and 10% to keep.
- Write about stuff you don't know above the. Writing GENERATES ideas
- Write about what's BUS. GENERAL and SURPRISING. (Laughter is a sign of comprehension.) Do HARD things to cultivate taste.
- Spend more time with people who generate ideas in you. Ravi chithappa. Ram. Ankor. Ganes. Books!
- Build taste. I have a taste for picking technologies. Data visualization. Retrospect. Write down what you like and dislike. Copy what you REALLY like. Guilty pleasures.
- A benefit of lower standards is that it let's you pick the path less travelled.
- ITERATE. Discuss ideas. Iterate. Acknowledge. ITERATE.

Tue, Mar 19, 2024. Ways to use inversion #best-practices #dev #future #prompt-engineering
- "Pre-mortem" is an analysis at the beginning of how a project failed. Then avoid that
- "Red team" or "Black hat" are designated to contradict.

Wed, Jan 31, 2024. Paul Sloan. Lateral thinking podcasts from multiple sources #best-practices
- Deliberately engage with topics randomly.
- Deliberately engage with random people
- Read a random book from the library
- Watch a random film in a different language
- Consciously where the six thinking hats or look hard for the silent voices in your head and express them
- Ask children. They tend to think of more creative and childlike solutions
- He converted a hiring process into a contest
- Constantly ask yourself. What if every assumption I'm making about this is wrong?
- Scenario planning is really about this. List a few scenarios. They'd have high impact or high probability. What happens in this scenario? Ideate

Mon, Jan 15, 2024. How I write podcast. Tim Ferriss #best-practices
- High bars are constraints. I set the strongest constraints against the scarcest resources. Like reputation
- Being a category of one is more defensible than a competitive advantage
- Content always beats presentation. When in doubt, push for more interesting content
- Regular publishing improves thinking
- To build a habit, do less than you think you can do. That makes it easier to build momentum on the habit and sustain during crunch times
- There is a lot of mediocrity in the world. If you're doing something (in a winner take all ecosystem), be the best.
- Top lawyers are exceptional proofreaders. They are able to see what is unclair, and what is redundant, and what has loop holes very quickly.
- Forcing yourself to cut down from a thousand words to 200 to a paragraph to a sentence takes you through a phase transition where you discover something unexpected
- The more outrageous the question, the more likely it is to be useful in generating a new perspective

Mon, Dec 25, 2023. Ways of working with them #best-practices #future
- Collaborative problem solving
- Creative collaboration
- Decision support
- Personalized education
- Establishing ethical and safety protocols
- Recreational and leisure activities

Sun, Dec 24, 2023. Book to read (again) about how to take a team beyond their abilities even if you're not the expert #best-practices
- "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr
- "High Output Management" by Andy Grove
- "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande
- "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries
- "Creativity, Inc" by Ed Catmull
- "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz
- "The Four Disciplines of Execution" by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling