w h i t

UNIX was built in one month. Ken Thompson's wife took their son on vacation. He had 3 weeks alone. He wrote the kernel in week 1, the shell in week 2, the editor in week 3. Modern dev teams spend 3 weeks in sprint planning.

men in their 40s used to have cool midlife crisis but now they just have agentic workflows

Here’s what I’d do if I was in charge of GitHub, in order: 1. Establish a North Star plan around being critical infrastructure for agentic code lifecycles and determine a set of ways to measure that. 2. Fire everyone who works on or advocates for copilot and shut it down. It’s not about the people, Im sure theres many talented people, youre just working at the wrong company. 3. Buy Pierre and launch agentic repo hosting as the first agentic product. Repos would be separate from the legacy web product to start since they’re likely burdened with legacy cross product interactions. 4. Re-evaluate all product lines and initiatives against the new North Star. I suspect 50% get cut (to make room for different ones). The big idea is all agentic interactions should critically rely on GitHub APIs. Code review should be agentic but the labs should be building that into GH (not bolted in through GHA like today, real first class platform primitives). GH should absolutely launch an agent chat primitive, agent mailboxes are obviously good. Etc. GH should be a platform and not an agent itself. This is going to be very obviously lacking since I only have external ideas to work off of and have no idea how GitHub internals are working, what their KPIs are or what North Star they define, etc. But, with imperfect information, this is what I’d do.

I regret to inform America that this was just posted by the HHS Secretary.

Nobody wants to read the output of someone else’s prompt

The new servant leadership: we serve the agents by telling what to do 9/9/6