TIL: October 19, 2025 - Weekly Reading: Career and Vibe Engineering

Career

• You have 12 shots in life – Jessy

  A thoughtful framework for thinking about career strategy using the concept of “shots”. I’ve heard this expressed before using the term “projects” but it’s basically the same.

  The idea is that since you have a career of roughly 50 years, and each major opportunity takes about 4 years to materialize, you have about 12 major opportunities in your career to create meaningful work.

  The reason that the “shots” terminology works is that each opportunity is not guaranteed to succeed. You have to take a shot, and most of the time you miss. You might end up with only 1 or 2 really big successes in your career.

  Jessy suggests using the 天地人 framework – timing (天), place (地), and people (人) – to evaluate each opportunity. This is fine, but there are probably a million ways to do this.

  The main takeaway is to be strategic about your career, don’t waste time, and take lots of shots.

• The illegible nature of software development talent – Lorin Hochstein

  The idea here is that software engineering talent is often “illegible” in the sense that they aren’t visible on social media or GitHub, but are still highly skilled and effective engineers.

  This mostly talks about it from the perspective of hiring, and how companies may miss out on great talent because they don’t have a good way of really identifying strong performers during the hiring process.

  I have definitely seen this in practice at Google where many of the truly amazing engineers there didn’t have much of an online presence. I suspect this is because they don’t need to have an online presence. When you are that good, your impact shows up well on paper without needing to embellish it.

Vibe Engineering

• Vibe Engineering – Simon Willison

  Simon suggests we use the term “vibe engineering” to describe “vibe coding” in a more deliberate, strategic, and systematic way, using software development techniques to amplify the output and put in place guardrails to avoid mistakes.

  For example, automated tests, documentation, version control, and code reviews all can help ensure that the vibe coded software is high quality and maintainable.

  Like the Wall Street Journal article Why AI Will Widen the Gap Between Superstars and Everybody Else, Simon thinks senior engineers are best positioned to leverage AI coding tools. That may make it harder for junior engineers but I’m not sure that this is a whole lot different from any other tool.