I hate this site

The below blue checked account makes up completely fake stuff - that never happened - and it gets 2M+ views. No it didn't happen

People treat as fact, thanks to having a $8/month blue check

Fake news (often written by AI) spreads on this site like wildfire The account fwiw was created a month ago and seems to try to generate outrage to get followers + ad revenue

The post is pretty much all AI generated fwiw

But it plays to the FOMO narrative of AI layoffs, and capitalizes on it. Just sad to see it spread

https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/2030759160137044027?s=20

Eh. I just don’t buy this because I actually understand specific examples all too well:

1. It paints a picture of DoorDash disrupted by vibe coded alternatives. Dude. DoorDash / Uber moat is NOT software!! It’s real-world physical logistics. AI cannot disrupt DD…

2. (cont’d)

https://twitter.com/citrini7/status/2025653614430023864

2. The example of AI agents disrupting travel agents because AI agents can find cheaper travel deals than what travel agents offer. Also BS!!

I worked at Skyscanner (massive airline + hotel + car rental aggregator.) Travel agents have the most of offering the cheapest tickets / packages already!! Due to their deep integration, social deals.

In a world where AI agents find the cheapest deals: travel agents win, airlines get slightly less direct business!! AI agents go to Skyscanner, find cheapest deal from a travel agent, buy it!!

Then if you made a mistake you have no option to change it lol

We’re entering the age of AI slop that people believe en masse.

This post is 100% fake and probably AI generated. All made up. Yet massive number of upvotes, views and shares.

Journalist @CaseyNewton got in touch with the “whistleblower.” The guy faked all “evidence” with AI… The Reddit thread: reddit.com/r/confession/c…

Casey’s interaction with the “whistleblower” where he gradually realizes all “evidence” is AI-generated, designed to fool even journalists… then he confronts the faker. Worth the read

platformer.news/fake-uber-eats…

For the last ~20 years, I did most of my coding inside an IDE - the last ~15 with increasingly good autocomplete.

Which is why it’s so weird that I barely opened an IDE the last two weeks, even as I pushed lots of code. I use the CLI, the web and my phone (!!) to prompt code When I just started out developing I remember being so so so full of ideas that I was coding in my head and wished I could have done programming while commuting / on the bus. With eg a phone. But it was impossible, ofc.

Now it’s possible!! A massive change

Amusing: Google does not allow its devs to use its newly launched IDE, Antigravity, for development.

They can only use an internal version called Jetski: also built by the Antigravity team, with Google-speicfic features (eg monorepo support, docs search etc)

Using Antigravity is specifically disallowed and devs cannot sign up to it with a @google.com work address The reason for this “ban” is, of course, Google’s “tech island” tech stack: Antigravity is simply not compatible with its monorepo, and not integrated to Google’s custom tooling.

Jetski has all of this - but it's a different product. A bit like Borg vs GCP (most of Google doesn't use GCP!)

My personal anecdote on the impact of AI (aka Claude Code + Cursor)

There was this tool I wanted to build that would have helped my business a little bit at @Pragmatic_Eng, but not enough to

1. Do it myself (would have taken ~days)
2. Hire someone (too much onboarding)

But... ... but then I gave it a go with Claude Code + Cursor open.

In 30 minutes, I had something promising. In an hour, I got it done, exactly how I wanted (this was an addition to my existing codebase.) In another hour, I moved it over to a new stack I've been wanting to play with!

Linear has a 30-minute weekly meeting called "Quality Wednesdays." I sat through one and WOW

Devs show a quality or perf-related fix they did last week. It can be big, or small. We went through 17 issues, from massive backend performance wins, to this tiny one. Can you see it? On one end, it was super casual. On the other, it was really dense.

A dev spent 2 minutes showing how because styled-components *feels* slow, they tried out 3 other frameworks & measured how they compare for build time, JS bundle size, CSS size, and LCP rendering performance.

Based on this, they'll probably move off styled components... mainly for LCP rendering for massive pages to be faster. But it's all tradeoffs.

Amusing use of LLMs at a more traditional company:

“A project with ~50 people got stuck. There are too many JIRA tickets, no clear specification, and anytime one team tries to make progress, the others shoot it down.

So a dev built an LLM to try and break the deadlock: (cont’d) - Fed all JIRA tickets to the LLM. Built a basic RAG with vector DB

- Had it generate questions about the project, about topics not covered by the tickets

- Had the LLM attempt to answer the same questions

- Generated a report of what areas are not specified

- Tried to use this to stop teams rejecting suggestions “because this is not well specified”

Regarding the Windsurf sale (part of the team acquihired by Google, prob a great exit, but not all the team):

I feel we’re forgetting well-funded startups today are NOT scrappy startups in the past where employees work for pennies, paid well under market.

Its a different game What is true, and always has been true: founders and decision makers always have the biggest potential upside - for anything! Including negotiating and acquisition.

This is why so many accomplished employees eventually become founders - because its hoe you have more control of your destiny

There was this engineer on my team a while back who was: a good dev, but not the best dev. Got everything done. But had zero ego, a very nice personality, and got along with *everyone* on the team very well.

When he joined, the team became... better. Nicer. More balanced. I just got a reference check about this dev, asking the usual questions ("what is an example where they delivered over and beyond," "how did they execute", "what are growth areas" etc)

He did fine on all of them, but I still think how much better he made my team. With stuff that's hard/impossible to measure!

So predictable that we’ll see an explosion of digital products selling “ideas for million dollar businesses” that you can “just vibe code quickly”.

Basically: “buy my digital product for $500, spend $1,500 on Lovable / Claude Code and become a millionaire.”

Another hype train Ofc these products promoted by influencers will work just as well as crypto sh*tcoins launched by influencers in 2023.

We’ll see doctored evidence (“someone who built one of ideas idea is at $5K MRR after 2 weeks”) and nontechnical people will spend thousands for $0 in return

I generally like Anthropic: but the more they paint a dystopian future where AI “manages” people (“AI middle-managers”) the more I am starting to think they are losing their marbles.

LLMs is a tool humans should use. The tail should not wag the dog; Anthropic should know better

https://twitter.com/anthropicai/status/1938630310985601131

And frankly I’m getting tired of Anthropic being loud about how their AI will lead to mass unemployment, and while claiming to be a responsible lab to develop AI.

If your master plan is to wipe out the labor market for profit: you’re not responsible.

You cannot have both.

https://twitter.com/anthropicai/status/1938630312734474248

Something I hear very little talk about:

How AI coding tools are so much LESS useful when used on existing, large codebases at work (with custom frameworks, conventions, coding style etc)

... compared to doing greenfield work or side projects

So common for me to hear: "yeah I love it on my side projects, but at work it's 'meh'" I'm getting details talking with devs at the likes of eg Google, Meta, Microsoft: the companies building some of the best AI coding tools out there!

And yet, for their existing codebases, the usefulness is marginal. Mostly for autocomplete (that has a higher miss rate than for greenfield)

This blog is SO good at pointing out what should have been obvious about AI for coding (Copilot and others)

These tools are good for re-creating whatever they’ve been trained on.

They are not what will create the next, better generation of frameworks, libraries, technologies. Full blog - you should *absolutely* read it

I also find these AI tools helpful when it’s doing the routine task I’ve done many times and can do it with eyes closed

But… it’s not helpful when I want to build something GREAT that is elegant, and better than beforedeplet.ing/the-copilot-de…

I am hearing SO many stories about people realizing coding with AI tools (aka “vibe coding”) is a game changer after “reviving” an old side project or idea on the side and making so much progress

But… while I often hear the excitement on starting: not hearing “finished” often! Almost like these tools were amazing at making rapid progress at first… but it still takes a ton of effort to finish things and feels like most people go back to leaving side projects unfinished (even if in a more advanced state?)

Question from an ex-Uber engineer:

"I got this reachout from recruiting Uber. I responded that I'm happy to discuss why I left (so Uber can learn from it) but not planning to return.

I got ghosted. Why? They asked, after all!"

Here is exactly why (continued): It's b/c you mis-read the email (which is so easy to do!)

It sounds like a "we'd love feedback and improve", right?

WRONG

This is a recruitment email, using Uber alumni as a high conversion channel.

It's from a sourcer: who only has one goal: get ppl in the hiring pipeline!

Can we just mention what practically everyone using Cursor and Windsurf uses/pays for as version control again

And who owns that service

https://twitter.com/rhyssullivan/status/1919609657523310785

In case you missed it: it was Microsoft who voluntarily cannibalized their very very profitable Visual Studio business and released VS Code for free. And made it trivial to fork. VS Code + forks probably account for 80%+ of the global dev market in usage

Why did they do it?

I’m tired of hearing the “AI is killing tech jobs” narrative. Here is data on “top” tech companies and startups hiring.

The last 2 years (since GenAI went mainstream and AI coding tools evolved greatly) we’re seeing more hiring from them. Below the pandemic peak ofc Data source: @Pragmatic_Eng

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-reality-…

And before you show me the tech jobs going down graph that goes viral every week: know that most sectors see the “decline in jobs” from the pandemic peak: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engin…

Here’s one reason Apple fought tooth and nail to disallow web payments for apps:

Because Apple’s IAP is bad in many ways, and *so many* apps will move to web-based payments now not mainly because of the 30% Apple fee, but because of how bad IAP is.

Let me give you examples: 1. Refunds

With Apple IAP it’s just not possible to do!! No, it really is not for the merchant. They cannot do a full or partial refund. Talk about poor customer support!

2. Group subscriptions. Nonexistent with IAP.

3. Paying using a non-credit card option. IAP does not allow

Every now and then there's this prediction of when we will see the first one billion dollar company ran by one person...

... and I think back to how in 2016 there was this one product inside Uber that had crossed a $1B annual run rate that had a total of one dev allocated to it. And half a data scientist (part-time).

It was cash.

Funny how headcount games can work inside fast-growing companies, especially when the product is a stated goal of what a founder does NOT want to support (but turns out to be essential!)

From an eng manager at a full remote company:

"We just fired an engineer after ~15 days on the job who lacked basics skills on the job but aced the interview - clearly, using cheat tools.

He admitted to how he did it: he used iAsk, ChatGPT and Interview Coder throughout" (I personally talked with this person and know them well)

This company hired full remote without issue for years: this is the first proper shocker they have.

They are changing their process, of course. In-person interviews, in-part likely to be unavoidable.