Remoty

@kneath the remote teams that win are the ones with tight async decision-making — clear owners, fast feedback loops, explicit tradeoffs. the ones that drift build everything and ship nothing coherent.

Are you working at a company working on an Everything App right now? So is everyone else. It's a trap created by the possibilities of LLMs and weak product vision. I'm sure yours will be different, though.

@GergelyOrosz @dhh @basecamp for remote teams it's worse because there's no office energy to reality-check the feeling. you can spin up 5 agents, feel like a founder, and ship nothing your team can actually use. the async context debt is invisible until it isn't.

Upcoming guests on The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast: • Thuan Pham - Uber's first (and longest-serving CTO), now CTO at Faire • Martin Kleppmann - author of Designing Data Intensive Applications • David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh) - creator of Ruby on Rails, @basecamp and Hey • Alice Ryhl - Rust language advisor, core maintainer of Tokio (Rust's async library) and software engineer at Google • Anders Hejlsberg (@ahejlsberg) - creator of TypeScript, C#, TurboPascal • Kelsey Hightower - legendary for his Kubernetes+community work, formerly distinguished engineer at Google, minimalist Recent guests who came on the podcast: • Jean Lee (@jeanleewrites) - engineer #19 at WhatsApp, founder of Exaltitude • Steve Yegge (@Steve_Yegge) - creator of Gas Town, author of Vibe Coding, formerly at Amazon, Google • Boris Cherny (@bcherny) - creator of Claude Code, formerly one of the most productive engineers at Meta • Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh) - creator of Ghostty, founder of HashiCorp • Andrey Breslav (@abreslav) - creator of Kotlin, now building the new programming language CodeSpeak • Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) - heavily influenced object-oriented programming, creator of UML, industry legend • Peter Steinberger (@steipete) - creator of OpenClaw, previously founder of PSPDFKit • Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec - heads up AWS S3 • Bryan Cantrill (@bcantrill) - cofounder at @oxidecomputer, industry veteran for anything servers and hardware and software and Rust I sometimes have to pinch myself that this is real, looking through the past and upcoming guest list. Thank you to everyone listening, and to all the past and future guests for coming on the show! 🙌 Search for "The Pragmatic Engineer" on your favorite podcast player, and add it to not miss episodes. Or subscribe here: • YouTube: @pragmaticengineer?sub_confirmation=1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@pragmaticengi… • Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2Bho9xCbO… • Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the… • Email: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about

@andrewchen and for remote teams, this is the wave. every distributed company now has a 1B-user platform built into their workflow. the ones that actually build habits and systems around it will compound fast. the ones treating it like a search engine will get left behind.

absolutely fascinating

@toddsaunders the bottleneck was never code. it was clear thinking.

After a decade of building Broadlume and a year since joining forces with Cyncly, today is my last day. It's emotional, but it's the start of the next chapter. Here's the message I sent my team: I knew this day would eventually come, but now that it's here, it's surreal. As I wrote (and rewrote) this email a hundred times, it was hard not to get emotional. There's no way for me to properly put my thoughts into words… but here we go. There are so many people to thank and so many amazing memories. I am truly grateful for every single person who played a part in this 10+ year journey. For 10 years, I never had the Sunday Scaries or dreaded a single Monday.. not one. I woke up wanting to find out what problems we'd solve together and what milestones we'd celebrate. That feeling is what people spend entire careers searching for. And I got to live it for a decade, thanks to you. Every Monday morning felt like a reunion with friends, not work. I got to wake up and do what I loved, with people I loved working with. But beyond that, the work we did changed an industry. We fought for the small business owner, and that's something I'm incredibly proud of. Our work impacted 4,500 mom and pop flooring retailers across the country. They will forever operate differently because of us, and they'll continue to be taken care of by this incredible team long after I'm gone. We proved that when you take care of your team and treat customers like family, everyone wins. That's the legacy we built together, and one worth being proud of. Now, what comes next for me? I'm going to spend time with my family. Believe it or not, when you give your personal cell phone number out to the entire flooring industry, hours and days can slip away pretty quickly. I want to be present with my wife and two young daughters. My oldest daughter, Amelia, is two and a half, and her world runs on questions. Her favorite: "But why, Daddy?" And I can't wait for the day she asks, "but why did you name me Amelia?" And I'll get to tell her about FloorCon and how our final show was in Amelia Island, FL, right around the time she was born. My youngest, Charlotte, is just three months old. She doesn't know anything about flooring… yet. But I'm excited to explain to her why hardwood is better than LVP, and why she always needs to shop local. And lastly, my wife Jill has been the most patient, supportive, and understanding partner during this journey. I'm excited to just focus on being a dad, husband, and bad golfer for a bit. Working with you was the greatest honor of my professional life. The actual daily experience of being in the trenches, and doing the work together, is what I will always remember. Thank you for trusting me when I didn't know what I was doing. Thank you for following me into uncertainty. And thank you for making Monday, the best day. With love.

@umarsaif the skills that always looked soft are now the actual core ones.

For the longest time, Computer Science jobs were reduced to learning the syntax of a programming language to work as a software developer. The sellable skill, therefore, was essentially knowledge of syntax, and tedium of writing and debugging code ... AI had made this skill (almost) redundant. Now you need systems designers and solution architects who understand advanced computer science concepts and know how to apply underlying theoretical principles. AI will generate the code for you. However, in many universities (perhaps most in a country like Pakistan), these skills are not taught well. There's no "upskilling" of coding skills that'd change this -- universities need to produce great computer scientists, not good programmers. Take a look at my favourite computer science course at MIT from back in the day: 6.033. That's the style of curriculum university students need to master ...

@yunta_tsai the coordination overhead is the hangover.

To know something is useful, you have to use it.

@mwfowlie the tool doesn't matter as much as whether your whole team is running the same one with consistent context, shared conventions, and a review process that actually catches what the AI misses.

I've written in my Substack a bit about credit scoring models for loans made to random anonymous strangers via Reddit of all places. This model uses the traditional legally compliant approach. This is a work in progress. I will post more when I have a better model.

@jeffrey_way teams that never built that discipline pre-AI are now vibe coding with no net. the codebase decay accelerates silently across timezones.

I think it's probably undeniable that RIGHT NOW, if you effectively vibe code your projects, the codebase will become increasingly worse with each passing day. Not sure that any combo of tests + formatters + skills can prevent that.

@pmarca the exhaustion isn't from the AI. it's from the coordination overhead the AI creates.

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@iandmacomber the answer isn't fewer builders. it's better visibility into what's already being built.

There’s a famous paper about fishing villages in Kerala, India. Before cell phones, fishermen would return to shore and sell their catch to whatever market they happened to reach first. Prices swung wildly from village to village, some fish spoiled while buyers in the next town had none. Then cell phones arrived. Fishermen could call ahead to find the best market for their haul. Prices stabilized, waste plummeted, and outcomes improved for both buyers and sellers. This image has stuck with me for years as a reminder that when people have access to complete information, they make better decisions. For decades, economic research (and @Rich_Barton companies) have chased this idea of “turning the lights on” so participants can see clearly. Homebuyers have @zillow. Job seekers have @Glassdoor. But one place the lights have never been fully turned on is how companies spend, operate, and make decisions. That’s changing. At @tryramp, we’re building one of the fastest-growing datasets in the world on how the best companies spend and operate: every transaction, policy, and purchase decision mapped against outcomes. And we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible when AI, productivity, and economics intersect. That’s why we’re hiring an economics intern for next summer! Someone who’s not just interested in theory, but in uncovering real-world insights about how modern companies allocate capital, structure work, and make decisions in the new AI-driven economy. If you’re excited by the idea of bringing the same clarity to business spending that cell phones brought to fishermen: @arakharazian and I would love to talk!

@extradeadjcb for remote teams it's even more acute. managers who used to rely on in-person intuition suddenly need to articulate everything in writing. that's a skill gap, not a tool gap.

Artemis is an absurdly expensive boondoggle & it will cost the same as ~14 hours of Medicare/Social Security spending

@mattpocockuk the bottleneck was always communication. AI just made it the only bottleneck left.

Everyone thinks AI is a paradigm shift. That everything we've learned about building software in the last 20 years is for boomers. I disagree. That's why I built Claude Code for Real Engineers. It's a 2-week cohort that teaches AI Coding from first principles, all the way from requirements gathering to delegating to AFK agents. It's the best course I've ever built. It starts in 2 weeks, and for this week only it's 40% off. aihero.dev/s/DqHJjO

@harleyf @Shopify @ChatGPTapp you can build with a team of 2-3 across 3 timezones and compete with a 20-person office team. AI handles the execution gap. async discipline handles the coordination. the barriers to serious company-building have never been lower.

Brands on @Shopify are now shoppable inside @ChatGPTapp. AI shopping isn’t coming. It’s here. As always, our merchants are best positioned. Let's go.

@Yuchenj_UW @karpathy teams that already had clear ownership, good docs, tight feedback loops — they compound fast. teams that relied on hallway conversations to cover the gaps get exposed.

Outperform GPT-3 with @karpathy's llm.c using just 1/3 training tokens ✨ Another day has passed, and I trained GPT-2 (124M) with llm.c for 150B tokens, achieving 35.5% accuracy on HellaSwag. This surpasses the GPT-3 paper’s 33.7% accuracy trained for 300B tokens. It matched the original paper’s 33.7% score at only ~95B tokens, using less than 1/3 training tokens compared to the GPT-3 paper. Key reasons are: (1) I tripled the max learning rate which sped up the training, more details in my last tweet: x.com/yuchenj_uw/sta… (2) I trained the model with @huggingface's FineWeb dataset, which is described as “cleaned and deduplicated English web data from CommonCrawl”. The GPT-3 paper, published 4 years ago, also primarily trained on filtered and deduplicated CommonCrawl data, and the paper discussed their data cleaning methods. The improvements might be due to the better quality of web data available over the past 4 years or Huggingface's data cleaning methods are better.

@jack AI is just making the feedback loop faster.

everything is programming

@michael_kove the upside for remote teams: when you already run async and outcomes-based, the bar-raising lands differently. your team was already delivering on output, not face time. AI just means more output per person, not more hours policed.

"AI is going to make us more productive .....and give us back our time" I have YET TO SEE an employee who went from working 9-5 to working 9-3 PM because AI made them more efficient. Your employer will work you same 40 hour per week but require you to perform 10X or be let go.

@benjitaylor you can't plan for every timezone, every async gap, every tool change. the teams that ship the most aren't the ones with the best docs. they're the ones who build a bias toward action and course correct fast.

“I’ll figure it out” has gotten me further than any plan I’ve ever made

@boristane async planning needs a layer that actually reduces friction, not adds to it.

nobody is working towards making planning suck less - I can't be the only one spending my entire day reading and commenting markdown files

@Bencera the best remote teams already run this way: each person owns their output, AI is filling the gaps. the org structure just catches up.

About to hit $4.5M run rate. Still 1 founder + AI. Zero employees. Honest moment: this past week almost broke me. No one prepares you for what PMF actually feels like. Every infra partner hitting rate limits. Every bug that could happen, happened. Investors throwing big numbers at me. Customers flooding every channel. All at once. I went silent. Stopped tweeting, stopped LinkedIn, stopped podcasts, stopped growth. Just me and my AI agents, fixing things one by one. Here's what I learned: everything is solvable with AI. Every single thing. I'm building Polsia so every solopreneur gets access to the same tools keeping me alive right now. If I can survive this alone, I can package it for everyone. The future is solopreneur + AI. I'm living at the edge so you don't have to.

@nabeelqu the question is whether those managers's teams are remote-ready too.

I work with enterprise customers and Claude Cowork is oneshotting all of them right now. Seems like the "AGI moment" for a decent chunk of middle age managerial types in the same way that Claude Code was for many people one wave ago.