Thorsten Ball's advice to junior engineers: systems thinking and evals first
omarsar0 · x · 2026-10-19
Thorsten Ball published his reply to a junior engineer asking for career advice, centered on systems thinking. Elvis Saravia adds: effective agent work means decomposing systems into subparts, and you should learn to measure outcomes and build evals early—if you don't objectively measure what you build, you can't tell real progress. Start with agents, but always inspect the data and traces.
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