Resharing this and urging everyone to read it for several reasons.
1. Everything Cindy writes is fantastic and serious engineering discourse
2. The examples here are concrete and clear and most importantly production services with real world consequences
"we'll use a NoSQL database so we don't have to worry about schema migrations."
- someone who is about to spend the next two years reinventing relational joins in application-level javascript.
We're hiring developers to work on Hegel (property-based testing for ~every language) in London with me, and are struggling a bit to source candidates, so I wrote a less professional post about why this is the coolest job ever and you should apply.
alright folks I have the grand pleasure of interviewing this friday @vboykis about how she would be learning all this AI stuff in 2026 if she was a beginner.
let me know in the comments your burning career or learning questions I'll weave them in.
We are seeing a new trend in submissions to @arxiv (and presumably to conferences and journals): Authors submitting papers whose contents they likely do not understand. 1/
this paper on the design-space of async/await (from @tonofcrates, @ShriramKMurthi and Gavin Gray) is just fantastic. such a joy to read.
are there more like this? i don't care about the topic, could be rpc, ffi, gc, whatever. just this kind of vibe.
Corollary to this for software engineering is that I don’t know any good engineers who don’t tinker around with stuff that interests them in the field in their spare time
I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.
I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics).
The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.
In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them.
They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it.
I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen.
I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same.
I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that.
Number one tip: act with agency.
Girl, you're making me 😭😭😭
Remember when we were young, and unpolished nerds, and the mercenaries hadn't shown up yet,
and the only thing that mattered was making the world a better place
and we made fun of social mobile local apps
and no one thought the world was going to end?
I remember discovering this in 2008 working on PYMK at LinkedIn. Realized simple logistic regression + way better/more/faster data far exceeded all this SVM, lasso technique, PhD stuff. Spent time on engineering from then on.
Watching stuff like this makes me feel like there are genuine down-to-earth concrete engineering problems in doing agents well and gets me excited about engineering again
Between watermarking, safety filters, undocumented system prompt changes in harnesses, routing to less capable models, and usage limits, it will be interesting to see how long hosted models continue to produce results that are useful for everyday work.