DSPy Author's $70 O'Reilly Book Rejected by Engineer Who Now Just Tells Claude What to Do
lateinteraction · x · 2026-10-16
DSPy creator Mike Taylor shared that the first engineer he tried to gift his new O'Reilly book Context Engineering with DSPy ($70 on Amazon, 9 months of work) declined it — the engineer now just tells Claude to write code and doesn't care whether it uses DSPy.
Taylor's response is the substantive part:
- DSPy is the only codebase he still reads, because it's been reduced to a spec: define inputs and outputs per module, chain them, and the optimizer handles prompts.
- That helps him reason about the workflow he's automating.
- He argues books still matter even if you never read the code: knowing proven patterns lets you steer Claude toward them, and books work as idea catalogs.
A telling snapshot of how senior engineers' relationship with technical reading is changing in the AI coding era.
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