Rattlesnakes, LLMs, and the Truly Good Product

You’re already integrating LLMs into your products and workflows, but what does it mean to do this well? In this talk you’ll receive a framework for how to ensure you build truly good things.

In 1893, Clark Stanley, the “Rattlesnake King,” hawked an oil made from boiled rattlesnakes that could cure all pains and even lameness. It did nothing. Stanley was fined handsomely for his fraud, but the crazy thing is that there actually was a kernel of truth under all his extravagant claims. He had stolen the idea from transcontinental railroad workers who had used Chinese water snake (Enhydris chinensis) oil as a legit anti-inflammatory! But all he succeeded in doing was turning “snake oil” into a synonym for fraud.

We face a similar moment today with LLMs. The underlying tech is real, but we’re overselling it when we promise that it can act as anything from your programming intern to your therapist. In this talk I’ll share a simple framework for evaluating not just what we build, but whether the things we build are net good. (1) Does it augment humans or replace them? (2) Can we deliver a better product without LLMs? (3) Does it enable something truly novel, good, and impactful, or would the world be mostly the same with or without it?

We’ll apply it to leadership scenarios you’re likely to face in your job and see how you can be an advocate for building the company’s great ideas responsibly. As technical leaders, we have the agency and the duty to steer our companies past snake oil hype so that we can make an actually positive difference in the world.