Agents will further entrench the incumbents in quantitative trading
Coding and research agents change the cost structure of quantitative hedge funds. But this does not provide for a particularly good opening for startup managers.
Reasons great engineers struggle to design well
Being deep in the code is a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for designing well.
Quant devs and product engineers
Closing the gap between product and engineering can eliminate a large class of unforced errors.
Early-stage engineering
Early on you need to be fast. And to do that you have to have the confidence to break with best practices.
Overconfidence and future-proofing
“Just to future-proof things” is perhaps the most common argument I hear to defend questionable design decisions. Future-proofing only makes sense if you have some idea of what the future will look like and you understand what the tradeoffs are.
The LLM productivity puzzle
Code generation is arguably one of the most interesting applications of LLMs, and one of the first with real commercial use (Copilot/Codex, Codegen, etc.). If you spend time on the internet these days you’ll see people claim productivity gains ranging from 0 to 100x, selection-biased to the high end (1). Whenever you see several orders of magnitude of disagreement, it’s worth trying to understand why.