What is the right team composition in era of LLMs?
3Check out my essays: https://aisc.substack.com/
OR book me to talk: https://calendly.com/amirfzpr
OR subscribe to our event calendar: https://lu.ma/aisc-llm-school
OR sign up for our LLM course: https://maven.com/aggregate-intellect/llm-systems
AF: It's a good two, three decades we've been talking about agile teams and in reality, they haven't quite happened in a lot of organizations. So given the fact that things are moving ridiculously fast on the technology side, obviously the imperative is "get your act together", "figure out the agile thing and start doing it". A lot of teams are still struggling with that, and now you're suggesting a few new things that have to be added. What's practical? Where should people start?
AM: Great question! I think there's a dangerous kind of pathology we sometimes fall into, especially in larger organizations where we get mixed up between the actual goal and the means to the goal. "Agile" is a great example. If you do it well, can be brilliant. If you do it terrible, it's just another methodology. The key thing is, how do you execute.
It may be kind of classic waterfall, some organizations like that. I'd say we operate in a kind of "wa-gile" way, where we often have phases, but we still do scrums and sprints and a lot of the ceremonies. If you can focus on the end goal, which is to deliver high quality products, to make them very safe, make them robust, solve the business problem, and just build a very good standard, then you can dodge that challenge.
You're right, Amir, if you've not sorted out agile by now, you're probably not going to go agile. Now, having said that, I think the important thing is, to really get good people on the park who understand the engineering and science challenges. And that's the key thing. If you have good people, I think they can make it work in any environment. Even if you're struggling to use JIRA and get your scrum set up, I think you'll still be quite successful if you have good people who have the authority to solve these hard problems.