softwaredoug

Thank you. fixed.

Pre pandemic Block had ~4000 employees They grew to 11000 Now they’re going to shrink to 6000 The whiplash from ZIRP days to whatever AI cost restructuring happening today is massive

This reminds me of the pendulum that swings between every company I've worked at For a time, its all about shipping faster. And rushing things out. Then there's a major bug/incident…

I'm a bit perplexed by the developer selection effects. I get that developers want to use AI. But are they also claiming there's not still a no/low-AI population of developers? Or that …

US tech stocks have been running overly hot (high P/E ratios) recently. So they are very sensitive to even minor shocks. If it looks as all like the company might be a victim, not a benefactor, o…

More like developers - infamous for not writing the shit code needed to test PMF :)

> Wasn't writing code always cheap? No. If you’re a startup that wanted to ship your product, you were stuck hiring developers and waiting 6 months. I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” i…

This is the brake on “AI will replace all developers”. Coding is a correctness-discovery-process. For a real product you need to build to know the right thing. As the product matures those constraints…

Coding is solved. Engineering is not solved.

I think people would do best to retool away from “coder” towards some specilaization where coding is part of the job. Don’t be a coder, be an X that codes. If we think of coding becoming like writing,…

We have laws explicitly for imposing tariffs for these reasons (like Trade Expansion Act of 1962, Trade Act of 1974) The difference is they have to go through administrative procedure, and are subject…

They predicted a warming planet based on human activity as long ago as the 50s We’ve known about the mechanisms of CO2 leading to atmospheric warming since the 19th century. We know humans are adding …

If you're interested in code gen for search ranking https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10/19/agentic-code-genera... What anthropic does is nice though because…

I’d say the jury might be out on whether code is worthless for giant pieces of infrastructure (Linux kernel). There, small problems create outsized issues for everybody, so the incentive is to be cons…

“Good at marketing” means a lot in the agentic coding era You will do far better if you’re out there, talking to potential or current customers, understanding their needs deeply, and solving them. It …

Fair. My perception was my parents thinking this is a dumb waste of time. When I eventually went to college in the late 90s / early 2000s that attitude seemed to switch. Add to that today's …

In the last few decades, we went from a small handful of programming languages / libraries to a massive cambrian explosion from Github-fueled open source. Everyone's choice of Javascript fra…

> Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, …

What if we choose to see this as an “always fork” open source ecosystem. I mean I don’t want you sending PRs to my vibe coded project, but I also don’t care if you fork it to make useful for your need…

Many open source projects are also (rightly) risk adverse and care more about avoiding regressions

That’s the positive case IMO - a human, you, remain responsible for the fix. It doesn’t matter if AI helped. The negative case are free running OpenClaw slop cannons that could even be malicious.

I have done this sort of thing too. I’m curious about big, mature projects like numpy or the Linux kernel. It seems the users of this are so varied that refactors like what you describe would be rolle…

Are there maintainers of mature open source projects that can share their AI coding workflow? The bias in AI coding discussions heavily skews greenfield. But I want to hear more from maintainers. By t…