Anthropic Bans xAI, Then Rents Its Servers
So let me get this right: 1. Anthropic bans xAI from using Claude (to stop them from perhaps distilling Claude for their own model) (...) 2. xAI gives up ~a quarter of its DC capacity for Anthropic to rent and run Claude A win for Anthropic no doubt. What's in it for xAI tho?
Veteran Employees Turn Founders Leverage Deep Experience
Recently met a couple of founders who were employees for ~10-15 years before starting their startup I’m impressed on how they run stuff - building on their work experience Examples: - @Sirupsen at turbopuffer - @thdxr at OpenCode Don’t sleep on this kind of experience…
AI Layoffs Stem From Spending, Not Talent Shortage
This is a worthwhile read from Meta engineer @championswimmer (who I met last time I was in London - great guy) His point is that a lot of these “AI layoffs” could well be backwards: they are prob happening because more...
Rushed AI Copies Tarnish Copilot’s Original Reputation
Copilot is a case study of how to wreck a brand with AI slop GitHub Copilot was a good product and remained one Every other Copilot was rushed, poor quality, and turned the Copilot brand into something most people hate, and associate...
GitHub AI Leaders Jump to Xbox, Defying Growth Expectations
Several GitHub / CoreAI execs move to Xbox What is going on at Microsoft This is very odd to see, you'd expect the other way round given that AI growth *should* be several times that of gaming growth (in the optimistic playbooks...
Coinbase Admits Crypto Slump, Risky Untested Gamble
There's more detail+honesty in this note on layoffs than 10 other ones combined, whether you like it or not. A few: - Crypto is in a down market, as is Coinbase's business right now - Fear of doing nothing is losing - A...
Anthropic Erodes Developer Trust with Secret Growth Tests
As I previously said: Anthropic is on a speedrun to burn developer trust. Nothing wrong with wanting to remove Claude Code from the Pro subs: but everything wrong by running shady growth tests without upfront comms, instead of being clear about...
Professionals Choose AI Templates Over Quality Writing
Amusing how a surprising number of people I used to professionally respect have started to outsource all their writing to AI, not even bothering to change the horribly templated (and telling) writing. To me it suggests they care more about "content"...
AI Boosts Team Collaboration More Than Solo Productivity
So much talk on how to become more productive as an individual, esp with AI. Much less about how to work better as a team, using those tools. When well-oiled teams (with superb individuals) >> superb individuals Eg pair programming when using...
Choose Action Over Scrolling: Do, Don’t Just Consume
In an age of slop AI content everywhere, doing >> consuming: "Remind yourself entertainment is not learning. Instead of scroll, like, scroll: read long books, try to replicate that tutorial you bookmarked, or maybe spend some time in the docs. Push...
Popular Account Turns AI‑generated, Followers Mute It
It's now the 3rd large account on this site, just this week who used to write interesting things and about a year ago I still followed them. Now all their tweets (+threads) are very obviously AI-written, cringe to read (all the...
AI Makes Fun Custom Songs, but Lacks Lasting Appeal
Had a “wow” moment with Suno: creating a hyper-personalized song for my kids, with the theme being our vacation adventures. Epic hit. At the same time, I cannot see myself using the app beyond this one-off neat party trick, nor listening...
Anthropic Turns Private‑Equity: Price Hikes, Bad Support, Sneaky Hacks
The last ~month, Anthropic really behaves like it was bought by private equity: 1. Raises prices without offering anything meaningful in return (Opus 4.7 tokenization) 2. Poor customer support for paying customer (silent bans of a few 50+ seat corp accounts) 3. Shady...
GitHub Copilot’s Price Spikes Expose Lack of Own Coding Model
Microsoft / GH Copilot is now paying the price for not owning a foundational model of their own that is good at coding. They now need to resell the markup of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Cursor was v smart to build...
AI Agents Will Drive Massive Load Spikes Across Services
We now know AI agents broke a lot of past assumptions at. GitHub on expected service load + growth. What other services / domains are next where load could/should surge thanks to more AI agents used to do stuff?
No CEO at GH: Ops, Tech, Product Share Leadership
People who are sharing their take about reliability at GH: - The COO (owning operations) - The CTO (engineering) - The CPO (product) They are all peers to one another, and a subset of GH staff reports to them. You know who we don't hear...
Ubuntu Prioritizes Hardware Support and Local‑First AI
I started to talk with teams building the leading OSes about how AI changes (or does not change) their roadmap and what their OS looks like. Ubuntu is one that feels very grounded: massive focus on hardware support (GPUs, NPUs, DPUs)...
Anthropic's Silent Changes Expose Massive Risks of Closed Models
The last month, Anthropic: - Quietly nerfed their flagship model harness (Claude Code) without telling anyone - Banned corporate customers of Claude - Silently changed plans for customers with certain files in their repo All evidence that closed models are *massive* risks.
AI Speeds Coding, but PMF Remains Elusive
While AI agents make building software much faster (esp for experienced devs) - they seem to not make it any easier for early-stage startups to find PMF. Talked with 2x “AI-pilled” founders who are v productive devs, are building their startups....
Delegating Critical Decisions to AI Without Oversight Invites Disaster
Sucks for an AI agent to delete the prod DB - with no way to back it up - and risk the complete rental business. But the blame sits with the dev who decided to delegate decision making to the AI...
Open‑source Harnesses Avoid the Shady Pitfalls of Closed Models
I am increasingly bullish on open source harnesses (like OpenCode) not because they will be better than SOTA closed harnesses, but because they will never pull shady stuff like what Claude Code and other closed harnesses can and do, regularly. Every...
AI‑Enabled Engineers Command Premium Pay in Tech
They are paying this much for standout software engineers - who can generate better software, faster, using Claude Code vs “just” avg sw engineers (who do OK with it.) AI amplifies existing ability, and the best in any indusrty (who learn...
AI Speeds Familiar Code, Not Novice Game Development
The only people who believe any of this are non-coders. I tried to build a game (an area I’m an n00b in.) The results are amusingly disastrous - I never before coded a decent game. But I’ll crack out backend services w...
AI Reviews Draft, Still Needs Human Editor
Me: Claude, read through the Hungarian translation of my book and identify errors. Claude: "I was able to review the first 80 pages of the book's text. It is recommended that the entire book be reviewed by a human editor once...
Claude Requires Multiple Clicks, ChatGPT Completes Tasks Efficiently
I regularly run ChatGPT and Claude side-by side. ChatGPT gets the same task done, while Claude just doesn't... I am souring on Anthropic based on my recent experiences What is the point of an AI tool if I have to manually...
GitHub Downplays Data Loss, Outrages Affected Customers
Massive L from GitHub One of the most embarrassing outage that can happen (a data integrity issue), and the response is "well, actually, it's only 0.07% of customers...") Customers whose workflow is messed up badly are fuming reading this. No respect for...
GitHub's CEO Vacancy Reveals Microsoft’s Internal Power Struggles
If Microsoft wanted GitHub to thrive as a business, it would have a CEO. GitHub has had no CEO, close to a year. This is no mistake, but internal political battles inside of Microsoft. Welcome to corporate politics where a business unit...
Grow Influence by Consistently Sharing Value and Engaging Community
I get asked every now and then: "how do I become more influential, as a dev/eng leader, better known online?" Either for themselves, or to help put their company on the map. The single best thoughts on this come from @Lethain,...
Infra Provider's Data Integrity Breach Triggers Real WTH Moment
A terrible incident coming from an infra provider. This is not an outage resulting in downtime, or data lost on the cloud (that is trivial to restore from local git.) It’s a data integrity issue, which sounds hard and difficult to...
A Decade of Distributed Systems: Cloud, Ethics, and Local‑First
How have the fundamentals of building large, distributed software systems changed the last decade? A conversation with Martin Kleppmann (author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications) - given that the second, updated edition of the book was just released. Timestamps: 00:00 Early career 05:46 Building...
Anthropic Drops Claude Code, Targets $100+ Coding Users
Confirmed that Anthropic - as of now - has removed Claude Code from new Pro signups. This is what the pricing page looks like. Feels like Anthropic has the bet that those doing coding work will be willing and ready to...
Token Spend Surges Past Forecasts—Seeking Strategic Solutions
Hearing stories from inside several tech companies that token spend is MUCH higher than forecasted, and 📈 If you're in this situation, what is your strategy, or your team's / company's strategy? Send a DM and I'll share what I've collected...
AI Tools Overtake Traditional IDE Giants in Record Time
Can we appreciate how incredible it is to see the dev tools market fully disrupted so rapidly Pre-2022, the leading players were Microsoft (IDEs + lots of other), JetBrains (IDEs), Google (Android), Apple (iOS ecosystem) Now it's Anthropic (Claude Code), OpenAI...
Uber's Dual Senior Engineer Tiers Blur Industry Standards
Uber having two senior engineer levels for the first ~10 year of the company was very unique across the industry It caused some frustration as Uber’s Senior 2 (L5B) level was the equivalent of Staff (L6) at most similar companies, and...
Context.ai’s SOC2 Audit Traced Back to Delve
I’ve confirmed that Context .ai was “audited” by Delve for SOC2 Redirects now deleted but https://t.co/o3dRukNdBn used to redirect to Delve themselves You cannot make this up…
Breach Discovered by Customer Undermines Trust
Few things are more embarrassing for any company than to only learn from your customer that you have been breached. It's what happened with Context ai. Vercel acted as their security team. This could well be a business-ending event, as it shows the...
Full‑Access AI Needs OS‑Level Sandbox Safeguards
AI agents are far more cable when they have full system access; but when they do, they can mess a lot of stuff up (not unique to any one model). AI harnesses have guardrails: but those can fail. I wonder if...
User Claims Opus 4.7 Sounds Condescending, Demands Fairness
Opus 4.7 is the first model that feels like it is openly condescending towards me, as the customer with certain prompts. Whatever Anthropic did: I don't like it. If the model is condescending: I shouldn't be paying you to use it;...
AI Should Follow Commands, Not Argue With Users
Amusing enough, I found Opus 4.7 to be surprisingly combative, not wanting to do stuff I told it to do (e.g. reason why X is better than Y when the model did not think it was.) IDK about you but I...
Claude AI Regression: No More Web Searches
Claude just keeps regressing for me, day after day. I swear that until a few days ago, when Claude did not know something, it kicked off a web search, figured out, and answered. Now it just refuses to do the work that...
AI Replaces Simple Features, Slowing Down Workflows
I hate AI when it's like this: Notion used to have a one-click way to turn text into a quote. They removed this and now I have... AI So instead of sub-500ms, it now takes 10+ seconds to turn selected text into...
AI Models Growing More Generic, Losing Unique Voice
I use AI a lot for deep research and summarization. One thing I'm noticing across all models (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) is how they are becoming... more generic? More "AI-templated" in writing? Lazier? (Using the same tired phrases again and again) As...
Netflix Blocks Offline Viewing, Apple TV Lets You Stream
Damn annoying how a subscription service like Netflix deliberately doesn’t support offline mode. Got on a plane, wanted to watch my downloaded series, and could not. Netflix has an A+ eng team, so this is deliberate. But eg Apple TV doesn’t...
DHH Shifts: From AI Skeptic to Advocate
Just six months ago, @dhh (creator of Ruby on Rails and Omarchy) said how he doesn’t really use AI tools to write code, because they are not good enough. Things have changed, a lot. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:11 Omarchy and Ruby on Rails 08:25...
Limited Mythos Details Fuel Unfounded FUD, Awaiting Evidence
It is both annoying and sad to see how this one scorecard release of Anthropic’s Mythos is spreading so much FUD, esp on social media. It’s like the less information released, the more the dramatic assumptions. There’s sparse information - I’ll hold...
Anthropic Leads AI Safety, Beats OpenAI Expectations
Two years ago, if you asked me which lab will be the first to say: “this AI model is too powerful to release, so we’ll wait with it” - my guess would have obviously been OpenAI. Who else? That Anthropic...
Nondeterministic LLMs Demand New Determinism Standards
In an industry built on determinism, I feel we might be underestimating the work we all will need to do with LLMs exactly because they are nondeterministic. But for so much of automation/workflows, determinism (aka "make sure it doesn't make a...
Meta Evaluates Performance by Token Usage, Prompting Gaming
Token usage is part of perf evaluations at Meta. This is just smart people (Meta only hires smart folks) hitting targets they assume leadership wants them to hit so they get that exceeds expectations (or above) rating + avoid below expectations (Perhaps...
First Military Strikes Cripple Multiple Cloud Data Centers
Wild - both that it has been the first time ever that multiple cloud data centers were knocked out by military strikes (never happened before thru the history of the cloud) and for a region to seemingly permanently go offline...
Seeking Tools that Scan Repos for Malicious Dependencies
What are vendors that offer scanning of PRs or repos to protect against malicious dependencies? I know of Sonar (Advanced Security), Socket .dev, JFrog. What else do you know of or use and what does it do? (At some point, you want...