Kevin Smith
3K posts
@_KevinSmith
VP Eng @AxisCareUS // Champion of healthy software teams that make a big impact and happily stick around for the long haul. // I love puzzles.
When building a company, do things that do not scale, but make sure you do not lock yourself in. This might seem simple but it's usually not. Designing code and data storage for later change is crucial. LLMs usually do not optimise for this, so it's up to you to enforce it.
Chamath on how AI agents are making the "10x engineer" distinction disappear because the most efficient "code paths" are now obvious to everyone. Just as AI solved chess and removed the mystery of the best move, AI is doing the same for coding, making the process reductive and removing technical differentiation. "I'm going to say something controversial: I don't think developers anymore have good judgment. Developers get to the answer, or they don't get to the answer, and that's what agents have done. The 10x engineer used to have better judgment than the 1x engineer, but by making everybody a 10x engineer, you're taking judgment away. You're taking code paths that are now obvious and making them available to everybody. It's effectively like what happened in chess: an AI created a solver so everybody understood the most efficient path in every single spot to do the most EV-positive (expected value positive) thing. Coding is very similar in that way; you can reduce it and view it very reductively, so there is no differentiation in code." --- From @theallinpod YT channel (link in comment)
Face your world with eyes wide open, because ignorance isn't bliss, it's surrender.
BREAKING: SQUARE TO AUTO-ENABLE BITCOIN PAYMENTS FOR MILLIONS OF SELLERS Square will auto-enable Bitcoin payments for all eligible sellers starting March 30, 2026, according to an updated Terms of Service notice sent to users. The change means millions of businesses using Square could soon begin accepting Bitcoin by default, rather than opting in manually. The rollout is part of Block’s broader push to integrate Bitcoin payments across its ecosystem, leveraging the Lightning Network for fast, low-cost transactions. Sellers will still have the option to disable the feature or automatically convert Bitcoin to USD at the point of sale. With Square powering millions of merchants globally, this marks a major step toward making Bitcoin a standard payment method in everyday commerce.
im fully convinced that LLMs are not an actual net productivity boost (today) they remove the barrier to get started, but they create increasingly complex software which does not appear to be maintainable so far, in my situations, they appear to slow down long term velocity
The pattern described by former Apple designers was: show rough work, get feedback fast, improve it, show it again, and repeat. They compared it to an SNL-style cycle: early ideas, midweek critique, late-week rehearsal, then executive review.
