softwaredoug

If you optimize for engagement you create secondary effects that can drive users away. If social media becomes addictive because it angers you constantly, that’s engaging but you may hate it. Enough p…

I wonder if our kids will see social media the way we see cable news: a toxic political cesspool that the older generation gets sucked into.

Well and also a lot of Claude Code users data as well. That telemetry is invaluable.

Nobody care until there’s an incident or security vulnerability, something doesn’t work based on some PMs assumptions of how it should work. The question to me becomes whether the PM -> engineering…

I’m probably in the 10 lines of code camp At the same time I make enough silly mistakes hand coding it feels irresponsible to NOT have a coding LLM generate code. But I look at all the code and (gasp)…

Even if Claude writes 100% code, I think there will be a bifurcation between people who are finicky about 10 lines of code. And those finicky about high level product experiences. I think the 10 lines…

A lot of examples of creating clones of existing products don't resonate with new products we build For example, most development work involves discovering correctness, not writing to a fullproof…

Well some of us have a distracting “home mode” that we enjoy mandatory focus / phones off / quiet of a theater. Barking dog, kids asking me to do something for them, loud YouTube in the next…

Post WW2 was a time of labor scarcity the US benefited from - but eventually that went away with global competition. The tech boom years were another labor scarcity time, and that’s also going away. B…

Even with a perfect coding agent, we code to discover what correct even is. Team decides on vague requirements, then you actually have to implement something. Well that 'implementing' means …

If enterprises are deterministic, that’s what a coding LLMs are for. To create the deterministic part with the help of the LLM.

With consulting you make some $X * N consultants on staff With products you hope to make $X * N units sold. Staffing to build product + make those N sales takes something like log(N) sold units. At le…

Yes though still it was a big barrier to build an OS.

Yes, I would argue good (stable, fast, easy to use) software was somewhat of a moat and much harder before coding agents. Stripe, Square, Shopify, Google, all thrived in some part because their servic…

It doesn’t help that now other potential growth markets for AWS, like the EU, now are getting pushed to have more and more data sovereignty due to the administrations antipathy towards allies. Musk ca…

Every tech company assumed they would be the benefactors, not victims, of AI. And investors now see that without the alleged AI growth, these companies at best look like stable utilities, not high gro…

With tech companies, investors buy future growth, not stable businesses.

Yes I think any codegen with a lot of tests and verification is more about “fitting” to the tests. Like fitting an ML model. It’s model training, not coding. But a lot of programming we discover corre…

I think we’re getting to a place where for anything with extensive verification available we’ll be “fitting” code to a task against tests like we fit an ML model to a loss function.

The joke I hear is Claude Code will double your PRs One PR from Claude. The next PR from you fixing Claude’s mistakes.

Sure its fun to (vibe) code some internal version for a SaaS, but maintain it month after month? Maintain SLAs, etc? That's not fun. Vibe coding gives you that dopamine hit of creation, but does …

Washington Post has always been very strong covering US Politics in DC. That’s probably what drives subscribers more than anything. Reporters there have a lot of access to decision makers in Congress,…

The local cuts hurt and feel like a betrayal if you’re in the DC area. It’s possibly the most mature outlet covering local issues with actual investigative reporting. At a time when local TV outlets a…

The Atlantic, WSJ, The Economist, Politico all come to mind as profitable. I don’t think it’s anomalous to have a major national newspaper that’s profitable. And WaPo should have been absolutely prime…

Well I’d argue this IS in part the AI bubble. These companies valuations depend on them owning the AI. But people don’t want random company’s AI when they can just use Claude Code or ChatGPT. So sudde…