Mitchell Hashimoto Profile picture
May 15 1 tweets 1 min read Read on X
I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

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More from @mitchellh

Mar 15, 2021
@mattturck @semil Yeah, we’ve had to let a handful of people go over the years for this. Other things that popped up: (1) someone joined while on paternity leave for another company, was working full time but collecting two paychecks, reckoning came when that paternity leave was up…
@mattturck @semil (2) we had someone join and they were splitting the work with their spouse. This was a weird one to catch.

(3) we had someone join who contracted out the work to other people for cheaper.

Actually, these are all weird to catch. But, over 1200+ employees, super super rare haha
@mattturck @semil To expand on the spouse one: this person was capable of doing the work and had done it a long time. It was only when they were “pushing” for a promotion did they start to bring their spouse in to make them look like they were doing more. Such a weird experience.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 4, 2021
(1/10) I think it has been long enough that I can share a fun, interesting part of HashiCorp's history: In 2013, Armon and I were offered $50 million for HashiCorp. Note this is pre-Vault, pre-Terraform, and we still owned 80% of the company at this point. We said no. Read on!
(2/10) This seems like an easy yes. $50 million is a flabbergasting amount of money (we were 23 and 21 years old at the time). And we genuinely liked the company that approached us. My immediate internal reaction was: hell yes. 🤑 💰
(3/10) The more time we thought about it, the more torn we felt about it. We had much bigger hopes and goals for HashiCorp as a company, but especially with the products. We hadn't even built Terraform or Vault yet and we already knew we wanted to.
Read 11 tweets
Mar 11, 2020
The force to remote for much of the workforce is going to be very positive but also create a ton of FUD. Lots will “get it” and it’ll work for them and they’ll be forever changed. Many will realize it isn’t as simple as pretending your at-home desk is your in-office desk.
It also just isn't going to work for some people. Not everyone is compatible with remote and that's _okay_. We've had numerous people over the years quit HashiCorp saying "loved the work, loved the people, but I just need in-person social interaction." That's totally normal.
So, I'm going to thread here what I've been telling many new hires at HashiCorp for years. I'm sure I still have a lot to learn, but here's some tidbits from a guy who built a company with 800+ remote employees (myself included of course) and what that has taught me.
Read 11 tweets
Oct 16, 2018
1/ When delivering software to enterprises, you usually must also provide support for all software used under the covers. Example: if you depend on Redis, you or SOMEONE need to support Redis. Makes sense, right? If your dependency causes YOU to go down, you need support.
2/ This seems obvious, but has surprising implications. One, you can’t shrug when a customer asks where to get that support. Either you provide it or you suggest someone because your own sales deal isn’t closing until they figure this out.
3/ It’s a double edged sword: if you suggest someone and that someone does a poor job, it’s going to reflect poorly on your software cause your software is still down. You need to find good, high quality partners. And you’re trusting them. Scary.
Read 10 tweets
Jul 10, 2018
1/ An interesting part of HashiCorp history is that we’ve had over 8 years of experience supporting different configuration paradigms across well-adopted products. Vagrant is pure Ruby, Packer pure JSON, Terraform introduced HCL+JSON which we've adopted into Consul, Nomad, Vault
2/ And we've learned a lot in those 8 years. First, no one paradigm will make everyone happy and quite the opposite, you'll get continuous quite hyperbolic emails/tweets about how your decision was COMPLETELY WRONG, about every paradigm.
3/ A fun event that happens a couple times a year: two strong emails side-by-side with one saying "you should've used a language like JSON" and the other saying "JSON is complete trash, you should've used Ruby." Its clear there is no one winner when you're on the maintainer side.
Read 13 tweets
Mar 15, 2018
1/ Video conferencing software still has a long way to go and I think there is still huge opportunity there for newcomers. Its core tech for remote-first companies. Everyone seems focused on the core problem but as more companies grow remote its time to go higher level.
2/ Support video categorization, sync to Dropbox, Drive, etc. Some do this, but others just give you a giant video file at the end.
3/ Provide a summary "segments" of who is talking and for how long. All real video conf software already does speaker highlighting so this data is already there, just needs to be persisted and utilized.
Read 8 tweets

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