i think “build out infrastructure” is hugely overrated in research. for example, the existing codebases for SAEs (training, activation caching, autointerp) are often actively worse than useless, such that i would rather spend a weekend rewriting it from scratch than work within them. in general i think people should throw out and rewrite research infra much more often than they do. not saying truly good research infrastructure can’t exist, in theory, just that empirically people really suck at making good reusable infrastructure.
i think “build out infrastructure” is hugely overrated in research. for example, the existing codebases for SAEs (training, activation caching, autointerp) are often actively worse than useless, such that i would rather spend a weekend rewriting it from scratch than work within them. in general i think people should throw out and rewrite research infra much more often than they do. not saying truly good research infrastructure can’t exist, in theory, just that empirically people really suck at making good reusable infrastructure.