Shadowing Practice: Andrew Ng on Coding Agents and Deciding What to Build - Learn English Speaking with Video

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You know, I'm actually very excited about the future of databases.

I know I'm going to ask you another question, I'll just share one thing.

I feel like right now,

the world is going through a massive data center build-out with a lot of AI training and inference data centers being built.

I suspect something that a lot of the world does not yet appreciate is that in the future, a lot of core infrastructure,

be it computed storage, will be used not just by humans, but by agents.

and that agentic usage of all this infrastructure will drive massive demand.

And so in addition to the AI data center buildup for training and inference,

I think a lot of databases that are built for human usage today, and we can only look at or query so much data,

but with agentic usage, I think the demand for core infrastructure for compute will continue to skyrocket.

So you're very bullish on this category at home.

Yeah, it's an amazing space.

I mean, we feel very fortunate to be in the thick of it.

And actually, we had a partner day yesterday where we invited a lot of people who work with builders or developers.

And basically, everyone's saying, yeah, we're running out of compute.

We need, like, the amount of builders pouring into the world is just going crazy right now.

Yeah.

So, actually, I'm going to start because you have one of the most impressive backgrounds that, and I couldn't memorize it all.

So, I'm just going to, I know you're very humble.

I'm going to read out for anyone who doesn't know, you're the founder of Deep Learning AI.

You're a general partner of an AI fund, managing partner of AI Aspire, chairman and co-founder of Coursera, professor at Stanford University.

Previously, you were the founding lead of Google Brain, VP and chief scientist at Baidu,

director, formerly director of the Stanford AI Lab.

and you are part of the Time 100 AI list for the most influential AI persons in the world.

So first of all, that's crazy.

Thank you.

What a life.

Actually, how do you have the energy to kind of keep reinventing yourself and keep doing or do all these things?

I feel like the answer I have is kind of the obvious one is I've been really

so blessed to work with so many great people consistently across so many organizations.

I feel like for the people I get to work with, I would hardly manage to accomplish anything myself.

So I've just been really blessed.

That's cool.

Okay, so I was going to talk about SkillsMap.

I was going to try to explain it, but you are first and foremost a teacher.

So maybe you can tell us a little bit about SkillsMap.

what you're doing at the moment, and then we can dive deep.

Yeah.

I think the most exciting profession to be that's very rapidly at this moment in time is AI engineering.

And by that, I don't mean people that'll take on an AI engineering job title, but rather people in all sorts of job roles,

including software engineering, front-end, back-end, DevOps, mobile, that will benefit from having AI engineering skills.

So my team at D1Ai did a lot of work over

several months to try to map out what are the skills that are needed to do AI engineering well.

And so we wound up categorizing.

So we looked at over 10,000 job descriptions, job postings, did dozens of structured interviews, ran a bunch of surveys,

and synthesized views, talking to partners as well.

And we wound up figuring out that there are four key skills needed to do AI engineering well.

One is the ability to build and deploy AI applications.

And the difference between AI and non-AI applications is they're uncertain.

And so how do you manage that?

The second is software engineering fundamentals.

It turns out that even if AI writing a lot of code for us, people that understand software engineering fundamentals,

understand what's the rewrite ratio, what's the transaction.

You know, people can steer coding agents much better that way.

Third is the ability to use coding agents.

And then lastly is the ability to, is a skill of shaping the build

because developers are no longer playing a role where someone tells them what to do and they just implement it,

but instead are participating in deciding what to build and also influencing the process by which something gets built built.

So what I'm seeing in the job market today is developers,

either people with an AI engineering title or people with other titles that gain some AI engineering skills,

are in great demand and we just can't find enough people with these skills.

So DeepLand.ai is excited to work upon this to to help more people become skilled at AI engineering.

Cool.

And the skills map itself, actually, first of all, starting with skills, why do you focus on skills in particular?

I think you have a view on skills that they're one of the more important parts.

Do you think that they're going to be critical as we go along,

or can the agents just become so good that we don't need to focus so much on providing our own custom skills?

How do you see this part of Wolverine?

Yeah, so I think about there's some things we do today that I hope an agent will take over for me.

For example, you may remember three-ish years ago, there was a lot of hype about the prompt engineering job

and how much money someone could learn by being a prompt engineer.

And I think at that time, it was already clear to...

Actually, you're Chris Manning credit.

He was saying this very clearly even back then,

which was this idea that we need humans of arcane incantations to prompt an LM to do something.

That's going to go away because an LM was going to learn how to make those same arcane incantations.

And so even today, I see some things that, like, you know, how do you manage a swarm of agents?

Some things humans would be needed to do.

Some things is more of a one-size-fits-all

that I think AI agents will manage other AI agents better and better in the coming years.

And one of the key things that distinguishes whether AI will take this over or not,

is whether or not humans have a fundamental context advantage.

It turns out when all of us are building applications, we know a ton of stuff that AI agents do not know.

You may remember a conversation with a customer, you know, where you said something and there was a funny expression on their face.

Or you may remember something that you learned, you know, five years ago, reading some market report saying people want this and not that.

So I find that humans have a bewildering, vast range of contacts and remarkably good at pulling out this context and make key decisions.

And so for that set of decisions where humans have a fundamental context advantage, until someday where, I don't know,

like slap a camera on us and monitor the facial expressions of everyone we talk to and have a good view.

That's a very difficult part.

So I think there's a lot to the task with humans with a fundamental context advantage

that we want humans to do for a long time.

And then giving people the skills to do that valuable work to complement the wonderful work the coding agent is doing,

that seems to be the path that will be on for a long time to come.

And this is why, I think you've probably seen, with coding agents being the wonderful things they are,

the number of job postings for software engineers is up, because as software engineers and AI engineers become more productive,

we want a lot more of them.

And businesses I know, even my teams, we just can't seem to find enough skilled AI engineers.

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And I think this will continue.

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Yeah, so let's dig into that.

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Let's imagine two developers who are too strong developers, but one gets better results than the other.

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What would the stronger developer be doing that the weak one isn't doing today?

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You know, this is a great question.

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And when we're mapping out the AI engineering skills map, that was one of the questions we repeatedly asked ourselves,

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which is we actually interviewed a lot of people.

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And one of the standard questions you asked them was think of a great developer, think of a less good developer.

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What is it that a really great developer does compared to the less good ones?

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And a lot of the answers were what we wound up distilling into the AI engineering skills map.

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And it's actually more than one thing.

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It's actually a lot of very different things.

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But just to give another example, the first of four key skills we highlighted was the ability to build and deploy AI applications.

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And it turns out that the key differentiator for AI applications compared to traditional software applications is they are uncertain.

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Whether you prompt an LOM or trade a supervised learning algorithm, you don't know in advance what outcome you get.

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And so, school AI developers have come up with

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or are familiar with a set of techniques to monitor the performance of these systems, often in a Cisco way,

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and to drive a distant error analysis and evals loop to make progress in a systematic way.

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And so it was by asking questions like that

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and reflecting on our own experiences that we then tried to systematically map out the not one or two,

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but frankly, the very large number of gaps between skilled developers and novice level developers.

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And we tried to distill

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that into what we call the AI engineering skills map to

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then try to work systematically to help people go from your less skilled expert level and all of these really valuable skills.

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Is the skills map itself for anyone to use, mostly for software engineers, people with background?

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How should people think about the skills map itself?

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Yeah, so we published, deep into that, we published a weekly newsletter called The Batch.

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So for five weeks in a row, I wrote about nothing but the AI engineering skills map.

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And actually no other companies that are now looking to structure curricula around our AI engineering skills, which is actually pretty cool.

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But I feel like for individuals, there's a way to understand what being excellent, which many of you already are,

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but where you're already in other places where you want to become more excellent.

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And then one thing deep learning.ai is working hard on is

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to then create those paths for people to become skilled at AI engineering.

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But I think the educational space, both DeepLander AI

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and other companies still have work to do to help people

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develop clearer paths to become skilled broadly at all of these AI engineering schools.

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I'm curious, what are you seeing in terms of people who are pouring in?

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Is it experienced developers?

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Basically, there probably is some sort of curve where there's these experienced developers who don't want to let go.

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I mean, myself, I loved the getting in the zone of coding, and it took me a long time before I was like,

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okay, now I just let the agent do it.

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Are you seeing this shift slowly happen where people are like, okay, I'm giving up and I'm shifting all of it to skills first?

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Yeah, it's interesting, actually.

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You know, I don't know, it's funny.

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I actually don't miss coding by hand.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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But actually, do you, Do you miss the, I don't know, do you get like in the zone,

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you know, when you just kind of lock in on this problem, you had to go to Stack Overflow and copy and paste 50,000 things.

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Maybe you didn't.

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I did.

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And then, you know, you spend three hours on the problem and finally it clicks.

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I don't kind of get that vibe, I guess, anymore.

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But yeah, I also.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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I think, I bet you, I bet a lot of you have this problem too.

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Remember before AI, we used to have a list of priorities we wanted to work on, but couldn't finish.

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Now, my list, and I'm going to guess yours too, has gotten way longer.

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Now that AI has supposedly made us more productive.

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So I find that for myself, there's so many projects that we work on and don't have time to work on.

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And even as our capabilities grew, certainly my personal ambitions grew maybe even faster than our capabilities.

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And so, yeah, it's a different type of vibe, right?

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I think starting a coding agent before you go to bed to see what it comes up with the next morning

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is a different way of getting into the zone, I guess, than debugging some weird JavaScript syntax.

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But I have to admit, I seem to like the new vibe more than the old one.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, we're definitely getting more dumb, that's for sure.

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Actually, I'm curious how you design a curriculum in such a rapidly changing market.

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Do you foresee that you're going to have to change this curriculum every single year, every month?

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How are you iterating on it?

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You know, it's interesting.

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I feel like the hype is that AI advances so fast.

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Everything changes every three months.

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The AI engineering skills map, the one piece that does change the fastest is coding agents.

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And the way we code now is very different than three months ago, very different than six months ago.

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So the use of coding agents is changing very rapidly.

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But when you look at the other parts of the schools that I find really valuable, the way we build and deploy AI applications,

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there's a lot of fundamental knowledge about how to steer these systems, how to deploy them, how to monitor them, how to update them.

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That is actually changing much slower than the PR hype says.

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One of the funny thing, at least before Astra, I think Astra may have changed, I'm not sure.

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It turns out most AI systems, they're not very good data scientists, they're not very good AI engineers.

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You kind of ask it, what should I do in a project?

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And for the most part, and frankly, data science, right?

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I now don't do my data science work by hand, you know, no more coding up handers, data frames, whatever.

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I'm still using it on the backend, but I now use AI agents to do a lot of my data science work for me.

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And then frankly, it just makes really weird decisions.

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It comes to really weird conclusions.

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I hope that frontier models will get better, but somehow there's a lot of understanding the fundamentals to make trade-offs.

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And I see that a lot of engineering is making trade-offs, right?

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You know, cost latency and speed, reliability.

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And the challenge is until you understand the fundamentals, you often don't even know what trade-offs exist to be made,

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which is why when someone vipe codes without understanding, very often the coding agent will make a bunch of trade-offs

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that you didn't even know it made a trade-off and just bites you later.

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So I find that people that are good engineers understand the fundamentals in many, many parts of the skills needed just make much better decisions.

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But I'm also encouraged at what's now possible to do when you vipe code without understanding.

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But I think really good engineers just do such vastly better work than, you know, any serious engineers.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And actually on that one, like, as part of the skills map, you talk about shaping the build.

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I found this kind of an interesting concept.

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Maybe you can explain what you mean by shaping the build?

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Yeah.

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So as building has become easier, the bottleneck is less building, but deciding what to build.

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And so previously, there used to be a lot of, let's say front-end engineers.

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But now front-end engineers with AI systems can also do a lot more backend than was possible.

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I'm personally much stronger on backend and front-end,

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but now, frankly, I'm maybe like a bad front-end developer with AI systems.

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But so a lot of developers have gone from a more narrow role to being a full stack developer.

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But then even beyond that, it turns out that if a developer builds something and needs to wait for a product manager to get customer feedback,

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and steer what's built next, that's much slower than the developer themselves has a little bit of product instinct, a little bit of product gut,

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or can talk to a couple customers or users and get feedback and keep driving the process forward.

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So in development, what I'm seeing is a lot of people

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are expanding their roles from just implementation to deciding what to build.

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And it does not mean engineers should become product managers, but it does mean that engineers that can make some product decisions

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or more architecture decisions are much more productive than engineers that play the more narrow-sider role from a few years ago.

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And so we call this shaping the bill where engineers that can influence product decisions,

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have some product guts, also hope to think through the bill process.

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Like, is this a good time to build an MVP?

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Or is it a good time to invest in building really robust architecture

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and thinking about scale or is this a good time to go to customers to get feedback

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or is this a good time to do some research to better understand what back-end technology stack you use so developers

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that can steer the building process end up contributing much more to the overall um comfier project how much

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then should they spend this time kind of designing the system one of my favorite skills i don't know

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if you know is this like a grill with docs creates these like architectural decisions

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and it spends an hour grilling you exactly what you want to build.

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It's like how much time do you think people should be focused on upfront what they want to build,

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how they want to build it versus like just go build your MVP and then fix it later on iterating?

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Yeah, I think it's a real question.

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The challenge to answer that question is that the answer is stage dependent and it depends a lot on what

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Jeff Bezos calls one-way door versus two-way doors.

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directionally in the early stages of a project, frankly, whatever idea you have, type it into coding agent, build it, see what you get.

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Solace can do it in a safe way and don't leak sensitive data, or just don't, so that's their protection for bad outcomes.

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But I find that a lot of projects, one of the challenges about AI engineering is, the right decision is very stage dependent.

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I find that for early stage projects, Solace can do it in a responsible, safe way, build a quick and dirty prototype,

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see what happens, throw it away, build a quick and enterprise, see what happens and drive rapid learnings.

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Then there's also a time and place, thinking carefully about architecture, figure out what's the rewrite ratio, what are the customer requirements,

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what are sensitive data, thinking through your security infrastructure, and then doing that.

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One thing I've seen is, I've known a lot of engineers that are really good at the zero to one startup phase.

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I've also known a lot of good engineers, good at the mature systematic phase

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but sometimes depending on the stage of project you're on the skill

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and the speed and the how to think about velocity versus protecting from downside risk shifts

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and even the use of coding agents

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you see a lot of people talk about how oh you should always plan it out write a long spec

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and there is a place for that and then sometimes there's a place

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and you know you're going to go to bed in 20 minutes, just bang out some stuff, have a coding agent work for a few hours

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and see what you get the next morning and and i think

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that stage dependent answer has been very tricky for people to learn okay i need to switch gears

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and i need to ask you a question

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because i was uh chatting to swix yesterday in from latent space i don't know

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if you know him but he's here covering uh this week

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and he said something spicy i might misquote him but he said something like, oh, schools are dead, or the way that we're changing,

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the way that we have to learn has to completely change.

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I'm very, I'm sure you get this question a lot.

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I'm curious on your take on like, how will learning change?

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Put us forward 10 years.

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How are we learning?

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Surely does it look the same as what we're doing now in schools?

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Completely different?

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So it will change.

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So we're having two observations.

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So first, I'm going to say something obvious when we sound controversial, but chatbots are terrible for learning, right?

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I love LMS, use them a lot, currently pro AI.

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At the same time, on university campuses and then, you know, K-12, we know that students that use LMS do better on homeworks,

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but worse than final exam.

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And educators have known this intuitively, students have known this intuitively,

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but the rigorous studies are now increasingly coming out that show that cognitive offloading to an LOM, meaning if a student doesn't know anything for you,

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you get more work done, but you learn less.

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And I think even though the rigorous studies on this are coming out in K-12

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and in higher education universities in formal educational contexts, I think people still underestimate the degree to which this is happening among working adults.

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I find that, you know, I love my coding agents, helps me do a ton of work

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but the reduced thinking I have to do I think there are certain things

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that and then to be clear there are ways to use OMS

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that do improve learning just like I think there are ways to use TikTok that's great for learning

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but the vast majority of ways

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that the vast majority people use social media does not result in learning

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and the vast majority of ways the vast majority people use OMS does not result in learning

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so now the flip side of this though is I think we can do better.

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So the teams I work with including Coursera, Udemy, DevEarned AI, LearnVector are working hard to create new learning experiences

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that are not focused on getting stuff done but rather on developing rather on focusing on accelerating human development.

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Here in Silicon Valley we're very excited about our front-end AI labs

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and accelerating AI development and that's great very much in favor of

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that in LearnVector

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which was a recent announced company funded by with a Coursera's initial investor

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I'm actually really excited about not accelerating not just accelerating AI development

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but accelerating human development and the way

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that we're operating is building LearnVector into a frontier AI into a frontier human development lab and as one example

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I feel fortunate that Coursera participated in changing education 15 years or so ago,

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but today looking back on that experience which still works, it feels very much one-to-many where we create one course

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and everyone kind of takes the same or very similar course

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and it works nothing's wrong with that but the technology now exists for us to create much more one-to-one experiences

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and it will be much better.

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So LearnVector hasn't yet announced exactly what products we have,

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but I'm actually very optimistic from the internal quality types we have and we will have more to share in months.

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That's super exciting.

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Okay, I want to leave the crowd with something tangible.

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So let's say you could design a way that everyone here could spend the next four weeks

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upskilling to become the best AI developers, how should they spend their time for the next four weeks?

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Where should they go?

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What should they learn?

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What tools should they adopt?

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Anything that comes to mind?

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In the case of AI engineering, DeepLandEye's focus is to help developers become skilled at AI engineering,

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or if you're already skilled, to become even more skilled.

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working hard on even improving what

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Deep Learning AI offers.

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But I actually find myself taking a lot of Deep Learning AI courses myself to learn what are the frontier tools,

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kind of what's the latest in a voice stack or in generative UI or, you know, building local memory for agents.

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So I find that maybe as an insider, I see a lot of ways I wish deep learning were even better.

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But I think that my own learning, actually a lot of it has been with Deep Learning AI.

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I hope you all will find that whole form.

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Cool.

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Keep building.

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I think all of you are builders.

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I still find myself waking up in the middle of the night too often to check on the coding agents up to.

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Do you fire off on your phone as you wake up in the middle of the night?

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Yeah.

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I don't know.

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I think coding on the phone has been so wonderful.

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Do you text or do you use voice to chat to your coding agents?

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I use text a lot more than voice coding, with the usual Mac Mini.

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Yeah, OK.

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Yeah.

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OK, that's cool.

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There's a bit of inside baseball.

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I'm very curious about your setup, actually.

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OK, first of all, I know that you had a very strict schedule.

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And so we're incredibly grateful that we could fit you in, and you could fit us into your timing.

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So thank you so much for coming.

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Coming to Select is really a pleasure and an honor to have you here.

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Thank you so much.

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Just saying, you know, of all the credentials you rattled off of me just now, the thing that's going through my mind,

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my one credential you didn't mention was I'm also a proud father of two choy-yong.

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So, thank you.

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And so the reason I need to dash is because I actually need to go pick them up from school.

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That's super important.

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Okay, we'll let you go then.

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Thanks so much, Harvey.

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Thank you, Andrew.

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That's it, that's it.

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That's it.

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That's it.

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It's a bird.

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Right in the game, then do you want to let him never do not dance?

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Oh, hit the noise of opera and a bird to repeat.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Andrew Ng on Coding Agents and Deciding What to Build”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: skill, engineering, agent, developer, coding. This video has 345 sentences and 4552 words to shadow. The speech runs for 26:17. The speaker talks at a natural 173 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
developer noun	/dɪˈvɛləpɚ/	A person or entity engaged in the creation or improvement of certain classes of products.
skill noun	/skɪl/	A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate.
fundamental adjective	/ˌfʌn.dəˈmɛn.təl/	Related to a foundation, base, or basis; serving as a foundation.
vast adjective	/væst/	Very large or wide (literally or figuratively).
frankly adverb	/fɹæŋkli/	In a frank or candid manner, especially in a way that may seem too open, excessively honest, or slightly blunt.
accelerate verb	/ɪkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪt/	To cause to move faster; to quicken the motion of; to add to the speed of.
infrastructure noun	/ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/	An underlying base or foundation for a building, organization, or system.
curious adjective	/ˈkjʊɹ.i.əs/	Tending to ask questions, or to want to explore or investigate; inquisitive; (with a negative connotation) nosy, prying.
stack noun	/stæk/	A large pile of hay, grain, straw, or the like, larger at the bottom than the top, sometimes covered with thatch.
frontier noun	/ˈfɹʌntɪə/	The part of a country which borders or faces another country or unsettled region.
prompt verb	/pɹɑmpt/	To lead (someone) toward what they should say or do.
steer verb	/stɪɹ/	To guide the course of a vessel, vehicle, aircraft etc. (by means of a device such as a rudder, paddle, or steering wheel).
deploy verb	/dɪˈplɔɪ/	To prepare and arrange (originally military unit or units, i.e., to array troops) for use.
architecture noun	/ˈɑː.kɪˌtɛk.t͡ʃə/	The art and science of designing and managing the construction of buildings and other structures, particularly if they are well proportioned and decorated.
monitor noun	/ˈmɑ.nɪ.tɚ/	Someone who watches over something; a person in charge of something or someone.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
turn out verb		To end up; to result.
wind up verb	/waɪnd ˈʌp/	To wind (rope, string, mainsprings, etc.) completely.
come up with verb		To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it.
figure out verb		To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
go through verb		To travel from one end of something to the other.
think through verb		To fully consider, so as to understand all the consequences of.
come out verb	/ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/	To be discovered; to be revealed.
come out in verb		to be afflicted by (a visible disruption of the body)

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

You know, I don't know, it's funny.
I actually don't miss coding by hand.
How are you iterating on it?
You kind of ask it, what should I do in a project?
I'm curious on your take on like, how will learning change?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to have · used to be
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've been · I've just been · you've probably seen
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	being built · are built · been really blessed
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	people who work · anyone who doesn · skills, which is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 87 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, don't, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: thick /θɪk/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: ratio /ˈɹeɪ.ʃoʊ/, conclusion /kənˈkluːʒən/, implementation /ˌɪmplɪmənˈteɪʃən/, examination /ɪɡˌzæm.ɪˈneɪ.ʃən/, controversial /ˌkɑn.tɹəˈvɝ.ʃəl/
Long words — get the stress right: developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, fundamental /ˌfʌn.dəˈmɛn.təl/, accelerate /ɪkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪt/, infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, architecture /ˈɑː.kɪˌtɛk.t͡ʃə/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like developer, skill, fundamental.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Andrew Ng on Coding Agents and Deciding What to Build - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?