Asana migrated off testing framework Enzyme in two weeks: without AI, this work would surely have been kicked down the road. Airbnb and Uber share similar stories and AI seems excellent at migrations.

This email is a response to the 50+ podcast pitches that arrived in my inbox just last month, and keep arriving in growing numbers, from PR agencies and marketing teams at various companies. It's also a message to tech founders building stuff for developers: focus on building something

In what was predictable: Meta’s layoffs and forced reassignments pushed engineers not impacted by either to look for a new job. Meta is now offering large equity retainers, and it doesn’t seem working

Devs discover that Grok CLI pushed all local files, .env files and git history have been pushed to a GCP bucket, unencrypted. SpaceX’s initial reaction? Blame the devs

In only 5 years, Hopin went from zero to a $7.7B valuation, and back to zero again. Also: Bending Spoons’ startup acquisition model.

Spotify’s podcast platform has become chronically unreliable since the company’s leadership started boasting about AI adoption. Competitors haven’t had similar issues, so I offboarded from Spotify.

Top of mind for engineering leaders: what to do about the growing code review load, and how devs are starting to review code less thoroughly than before? Many questions, but few proven solutions.

To a sceptic, spending $165K to migrate Bun from Zig to Rust sounds very expensive. But to a realist, shortening a 1-2 year migration down to 11 days opens amazing new opportunities for devs. However, a thoroughly-tested project is required to pull it off.

Power users generate 10x as many lines of code vs the median, most of the AI spend is coming from input tokens not output ones, and almost half of AI changes are accepted without manual review by devs (!!)

Are there any ‘intelligent’ router solutions out there which select the right model for the right task? I looked into it, and there are a few options.

In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen, founded by Callum Negus-Fancey. The short of it:Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid

Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from this past The Pulse issue. Full subscribers received the

Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from The Pulse issue from two weeks ago. Full subscribers

Feedback about the redesigned IDE is overwhelmingly negative due to bugs, poor UX & model support, and eating through Gemini token quotas. Also: a clue that Antigravity’s own devs use other tools for their work?

Massive demand for the role at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The latest version of the FDE role looks like the consultant / solution architect role done by many early-junior engineers.

A $124B fund in Australia would have lost all data stored with Google Cloud, had they not relied on a third-party backup. A rare blunder from GCP, where regional replication did not stop the deletion – and a just as rare statement from Google Cloud’s CEO taking the blame.

For the past few weeks, Anthropic has continually upset devs with its “dumber” model, and by removing Claude Code access from some paid accounts. After securing lots of compute from SpaceX, could the reason have been to conceal capacity issues?

tl;dr: TechPays is joining Levels.fyi: so the leading tech salary site in Europe gets the love and care it deserves. Thanks to Zsombor for building this project with me for so many years.Pay transparency has always been an issue in tech, especially in Europe. For a while,

GitHub’s leadership blames the 3.5x increase in service load as the cause of degradation – or it might be self-inflicted.

In the past 2-3 months, spending on AI agents has exploded at many tech companies, Details from 15 of them, including the different ways they are coping with this realization.

At Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and other large companies, devs are purposefully burning tokens (and money!) to inflate their AI usage and hit AI usage metrics which they treat as targets.

Availability has dropped to one nine (~90% – !!), partly due to not being able to handle increased traffic from AI coding agents. There’s also no CEO and an apparent lack of direction.

Job postings for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) have surged, but many professionals don’t want the role because it’s more like solutions engineering than software development.

An engineer at Cloudflare rewrote most of Vercel’s Next.js in one week with AI agents. It looks like a sign of how AI will disrupt existing moats and business models. Analysis

I used to pay $120/year for a SaaS that hasn’t added new features in four years, and didn’t fix its broken billing system for three years. Using an LLM, I managed to rewrite all the functionality I used to pay for in 20 minutes. Is this bad news for “write once, don’t update later” SaaS?

When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering? There is grief involved for us developers, that's for sure.

Deja vu: a large Cloudflare outage caused by an instantly rolled-out global config change – two weeks after a similar problem

From next February, workers at Instagram must be in the office, five days a week. This makes Meta the second tech giant after Amazon to mandate a 5-day RTO. Will more big companies do the same?

During the Cloudflare outage, Downdetector was also unavailable. I got details from the team about why they have a hard dependency on Cloudflare, and why that won’t change anytime soon.

A 30-person startup called Nasha Tech translated The Software Engineer's Guidebook for the benefit of their company and the Mongolian tech ecosystem.