Jacob Dubin

What Is CoffeeBreak? | AI Orchestration, Memory, and the Future of Intel... youtu.be/k6ZqDmKGPqs?si… via @YouTube

Feels a bit like the early internet days again. A lot of noise.
A lot of hype.
But also real change underneath it all. Excited for this next chapter focused on building, solving problems, AI orchestration, and CoffeeBreak. Interesting times to be building things. ☕

@davidfowl Single step would be hard. Single pipeline with multiple stages and jobs with branch trigger? Sure.

How many of you have a single step, fully automated release process?

@DevLeaderCa I think you have a lot of good suggestions already. From a perspective on how to test, I think a combination of approaches is best. I typically divide the tests into unit, integration and smoke. The reason being that they have different value at different stages.

What's your approach to unit testing in .NET? Any preferred frameworks or tools?

The future of AI is not just a better chatbot. It’s systems that can work over time with memory, approvals, guardrails, and real-world context. A recipe bot gives ideas. A chef agent helps feed a household. That gap is orchestration. That’s where things get interesting. ☕

@TriCast_ 👋

If you’re a founder, let’s connect.

After more than 5 years at TFL, my last day will be May 29th. This chapter connects back to Ticket Solutions, Ticket Technology, StubHub, VeriShip, and a lot of my career in software and startups. Next up: Transcendent Software, CoffeeBreak, Open Jibo, AI, and the road less traveled.

@davidfowl Nice write up, David. I echo a lot of your thoughts.

@GenuineRex @kristijan_kralj did you mean solid or SOLID? 🤣

@JacobDubin @kristijan_kralj Obviously he isn’t talking about that level of abstraction. This is internal c# clean code slop he is arguing against and it is a solid argument.

The hidden cost of "enterprise" .NET architecture: Debugging hell. I've spent 13+ years in .NET codebases, and I keep seeing the same pattern: Teams add layers upon layers, to solve the problems they don't have. IUserService calls IUserRepository. IUserRepository wraps IUserDataAccess. IUserDataAccess calls IUserQueryBuilder. IUserQueryBuilder finally hits the database. I've seen a lot of classes having one-line methods whose sole purpose was to call the next layer and that's it. But to change one validation rule, you step through 5 layers. To fix a bug, you open 7 files. The justification is always the same: "What if we need to swap out Entity Framework?" "What if we switch databases?" "What if we need multiple implementations?" What if this, what if that. The reality: Those "what ifs" don't come to life in 99% of cases. I haven't worked on a project where we had to swap the ORM. But I've seen dozens of developers waste hours navigating through abstraction mazes. This happens with both new and experienced developers. New developers asking on Slack all the time: "Where to put this new piece of code?" But senior developers are too busy to answer that message. Why? Because they are debugging through the code that has more layers than a wedding cake. The end result? You spend more time navigating than building. Good abstractions hide complexity. Bad abstractions ARE the complexity. And most enterprise .NET apps? Way too much of the second kind.

The AI Industry Is Growing Up transcendentsoftware.com/blog/the-ai-in…

Growth Happens Before You Feel Ready jakedubin.com/2026/05/11/gro…

I’d say it has merit in one case which doesn’t happen all that often. The case would be that the customer (business / product owner) comes to you with most decisions already made. You can write tests first with abstractions, fill in implementations to match the tests and voila, you have working code. Real world is often messier and requires a lot of iteration.

Do you think TDD is overrated, or do you use it regularly in your development?

@ThetaForgeCo I can relate to your story a bit. Congrats!

I was laid off a couple weeks ago.. 25 Years of experience as a software/game/fintech engineer. Replaced by a guy in product with 0 experience, but he has a claude subscription at 1/8th the cost(true story). I received 6 months severance at least, and I'm the happiest I've been in a long time. I'm using this runway to go all in on myself and #indiegames. I'm done building others dreams only to watch them run away with my work to find success. If you want to follow my journey over the coming months as I put all of my experience to work building a Final Fantasy XI inspired MMORPG solo, follow and come along! It would mean the world to me!

Interesting shift happening in AI: The conversation is slowly moving from: “Can the model do this?” to: “Can the system reliably handle reality?” That’s a much harder problem. ☕

Interesting thing about rebuilding Jibo: The “magic” was never just AI. It was how everything worked together: - personality - movement - timing - responses - context That’s what made people connect to it. Still true for AI systems today. ☕

@artman @LyalinDotCom @linear Love it!

Today is a hard day. I shared this note with the @linear team today: We’ve made the difficult decision to increase our workforce. This is not a cost-cutting exercise or a reflection of anyone’s performance. We’re simply reimagining every role for the agentic AI era. We’re hiring. We’re sorry about that.

Working on Jibo again lately and one thing stands out immediately: People care less about how smart AI is… …and more about whether it feels alive. Personality. Timing. Consistency. Memory. Context. That’s the hard part. Not intelligence. Orchestration. ☕

@DevLeaderCa Yes. New features tend to produce less typing. This is one of them. I’m all in favor of less typing. Smaller context in humans and AI is key!

CSharp and DotNet developers: do you use primary constructors, totally against, or on the fence?