Few things are all or nothing in life. There are many forms of retrieval and many conditions for their use. In some scenarios it is helpful to have retrieval with LLMs and other times less so.
Agreed that it's an underserved market (personal genome sequencing).
Do you own or have access to a sequencing platform / machine? Or do you just buy and prepare kits, and then send the prepared sample out for sequencing?
Roughly agreed. I'm a bit baffled when it seems like someone is having long conversations with multiple tasks and loads of add-ons. I generally have one or two iterations and then a new session.
I'm using another tool, not claude code, but I don't think that matters much.
You might look into applying RL in the domain of low cost robotics and drones. That would draw on some of your past experience but applied to a domain (robotics) which I perceive is seeing renewed interest.
I find value in learning some things deeply but not all things.
The ability to be more selective about where I attend deeply, while leveraging fast shallow learning to complete other tasks... That seems like a potential benefit and a nice choice to have in the toolbox.
It's intriguing how book recs aren't really that good anywhere. I mean they are ok, but rarely great. Google and Amazon have most of the text but still don't solve this so well.
In any event, I sometimes use GoodReads. You can go to the page for a representative book and then start browsing the "readers also enjoyed" list.
Significant chunks of the software engineer community self select into minimizing time spent with customers or even any non-engineers. It's understandable but unfortunate too.
I would suggest looking for people that were initially hands on but converted to sales engineer or professional services roles. Some switch because they don't like the programming. Some will quietly be very good engineers that have seen a lot of scenarios.
You'll have to pay a premium for travel if you want to get experienced people that have families at home.
Agreed. You should be able to set the waf to just drop the packets and not even bother with the overhead of a response. I think cloud flare waf calls this "block".
Working in ISP and Managed Hosting environments made me a better engineer. Lots of unix/linux, networking, DNS, etc. Lots of support and problem solving. It all led to both a breadth and depth of experience. It's been a useful foundation for my career even after moving into other areas like swe and ml.
I've found a lot of value in the habits of politeness, especially in written communication. It's disappointing when it's not a first class citizen in a company culture for things like code review. There are plenty of rationalizations for how it might not be needed, but that just feels like laziness.