jameshush

I focus on realtime voice AI uses cases and nemotron's time to first token is INSANELY fast. It's become a legit option for voice use cases

I'm one of the most pro-AI support/solutions/FDE engineers you'll find, and I really don't see AI taking away support and hand holding.

Even though I use AI to answer questions large customers would still rather wait for a weekly meeting to ask a question or have someone fly onsite then write the same question in an email or to a chatbot and get a near instant answer

Are you making less than 130k total comp in NYC while doing AI stuff as an engineer?

I'd highly recommend looking for a new job.

For the best experience, you'll still want it to communicate with 3rd party APIs to handle the speech to text, text to speech, and LLM.

This is more of a VAD/turn detection issue. It's gotten a lot better over the last few years, but it's a hard problem. The extra ~100ms of latency makes a huge difference otherwise, especially when you have use cases that require tool calling that can easily add 500ms+ of latency.

I expected the same out come you're saying here, but in my experience this hasn't been the case. I've been researching new acoustic guitars to purchase, and I've been getting an equal amount of suggestions from the major brands and the small brands.

Part of it though is I'm giving lots of context (e.g. guitar player for 10+ years, huge Opeth fan, looking for something with as close to an Ibanez style neck as possible under $1000)

Had the pleasure of working with Alex while at System1. Great guy. If I remember correctly I got one tiny change merged into Waterfox that's probably since been undone in the years since :-).

@cootsnuck, if I didn't really love working with the people/company I'm at now, I'd also start my own consulting company.

Once I realized you really only need 3-5 consistent customers (well, you only REALLY NEED one customer), and you can generally keep customers and employees happy by responding quickly and doing what you say you'll do (aka not taking on work you can't handle) I'm confident I could branch out on my own if I ever wanted to.

It might be role-specific. I'm a solutions engineer. A large portion of my time is spent making demos for customers. LLMs have been a game-changer for me, because not only can I spit out _more_ demos, but I can handle more edge cases in demos that people run into. E.g. for example, someone wrote in asking how to use our REST API with Python.

I KNOW a common issue people run into is they forget to handle rate limits, but I also know more JavaScript than Python and have limited time, so before I'd write:

``` # NOTE: Make sure to handle the rate limit! This is just an example. See example.com/docs/javascript/rate-limit-example for a js example doing this. ```

Unsurprisingly, more than half of customers would just ignore the comment, forget to handle the rate limit, and then write in a few months later. With Claude, I just write "Create a customer demo in Python that handles rate limits. Use example.com/docs/javascript/rate-limit-example as a reference," and it gets me 95% of the way there.

There are probably 100 other small examples like this where I had the "vibe" to know where the customer might trip over, but not the time to plug up all the little documentation example holes myself. Ideally, yes, hiring a full-time person to handle plugging up these holes would be great, but if you're resource constrained paying Anthropic for tokens is a much faster/cheaper solution in the short term.

1000%. When the sale doesn't go through, it's the salesperson's fault. When the product doesn't work, it's the "real" engineer's fault. When everything works, the client gives you a high five.

If you don't know the answer, you can ask one of the "real" engineers.

As long as you show up with a smile on your face and the demo kinda works during the call, you're 10/10.

At FAANG companies, you generally get paid at a level above your technical role; for example, if you have a mid-level engineer's coding ability but can also talk to customers, you'll generally be paid a senior engineer's salary.

Some days, I don't understand why everyone doesn't want this job. But then I'll talk to the product engineers on my team, and they'll thank me for talking to the customers so they can focus on coding. I think it's really a personality/preference thing.

This is one of the few hills I will die on. After working on a team that used Phabricator for a few years and going back to GitHub when I joined a new company, it really does make life so much nicer to just rebase -> squash -> commit a single PR to `main`

I agree with you for many use cases, but for the use case I'm focused on (Voice AI) speed is absolutely everything. Every millisecond counts for voice, and most voice use cases don't require anything close to "deep thinking. E.g., for inbound customer support use cases, we really just want the voice agent to be fast and follow the SOP.

I'm Canadian. My parents are British. I always thought we spelt all words the same until now

Why bother doing that when a non-engineer can just change the prompt and output a different result? :shrug:

When I went through the grind, I just would open up levels.fyi and check the salaries whenever I felt like giving up.

Now that I have a wife and kid, its very easy to find motivation to do things I don't want to do to provide for my family :P