Colin Breck

Blogged: Deleting the Wrong Part or Process: Concrete Thinking in Software Organizations blog.colinbreck.com/deleting-the-w…

Good read from @breckcs on Adapting to AI and his work in 2025. I feel a lot of the same things. Although I'll say things shifted dramatically for me with Opus 4 and Claude Code in late May 2025 and have only accelerated from there. I've produced hundreds of thousands of lines of code in the last 6 months, but most of it has not gone to production and likely never will. Although there is some very big stuff getting released soon that includes the more well reviewed and iterated on bits of this mass of work. The challenge for me this year is to figure out how to actually harness all this new found power and capability without it collapsing the entire product. And how to rework product and engineering in this new world. I feel pressure to either adapt and thrive or fall hopelessly behind to other teams that make the best use of the tools and create processes that showcase what's possible. The possibility of the 100x or 1,000x team is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. His metaphor for being in a hot dog eating contest with unlimited hot dogs feels apt. The trick now is selecting which hot dogs to actually eat. blog.colinbreck.com/adapting-to-ai…

@pauldix Thanks, Paul. This means a lot. This really resonates with me: "The challenge for me this year is to figure out how to actually harness all this new found power and capability without it collapsing the entire product. And how to rework product and engineering in this new world."

Blogged: Adapting to AI: Reflections on Productivity blog.colinbreck.com/adapting-to-ai…

For a long time great advice for founders was “don’t try to innovate on basic organizational practices.” The roles you need, executive jobs, ratios, spend in each area, and operational methods are kind of known in major classes of company. You should just copy these things and not try to go back to first principles in areas that have been tried a 100 times. Now with AI I am not sure about any of that. Does it make sense to separate PMs and engineers? What does the staffing, tech stack, and spend look like along your GTM funnel? What’s a reasonable span of control area and where do you want practitioner-managers vs people managers? We’re seeing in real-time that R&D is completely changed and nobody really knows how to run a great product and engineering org now. But are legal, marketing, early funnel sales development, and HR going to be unaffected? I don’t think so. I think founders in small startups should absolutely go back to first principles and make sure the best practices are still best. This doesn’t mean you don’t want to know how and why current at-scale companies do things, but likely it will require active push as experienced execs come in and import a playbook that may be out of date. Bigger companies are doing the same thing, but it’s harder to rebuild at scale and takes more care (though the payoff is also bigger). I suspect the normal pattern of development will be inverted in the next few years. Instead of startups adding in the structure and components of the best at-scale companies as they grow, the at-scale companies will learn from these more agile orgs. Now is the time to being the annoying founder and question everything.

How is the world's largest storage system, AWS S3 built? I found the best person to talk about this: Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, who has been heading up S3 for 13 years (!) S3's scale is something else (tens of millions of hard drives, eleven 9s of durability (!!) and heavy usage of formal methods, microservices dedicated to durability, amongst others.) Watch or listen: • YouTube: youtu.be/5vL6aCvgQXU • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5iWI2d… • Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how… Brought to you by: • @statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. statsig.com/pragmatic • @SonarSource – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review. sonarsource.com/pragmatic/?utm… Check out their latest State of Code Developer Survey report: sonarsource.com/pragmatic/deve… • @WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. workos.com

Deterministic simulation testing requires you to own the event loop: every i/o, every timer, every callback. Agents have never seen code like this. Agents are trained on code that is hostile to rigorous testing. Yet, when agents code, we want code to be more testable, not less.

"I think people don’t understand how good the models are at infrastructure because people are scared to give them access." paika.tech/blog/2026/01/1…

"The most valuable tools in this new world won’t be the ones that generate the most code fastest. They’ll be the ones that help us think more clearly, plan more carefully, and keep the quality bar high while everything accelerates around us."

For Confer, we want private AI chat to be simple, but many end-to-end encrypted apps still have a level of friction that make them feel like they’re from another era. Here's how Confer uses passkeys to make E2E encryption feel as simple as logging in: confer.to/blog/2025/12/p…

Whenever I start making something, I always feel uncertain-- right up until the moment that I encounter real difficulty. It's only once I discover that there is something difficult involved that I start to feel comfortable. Before that moment, it's hard to know that the thing I'm making is worth making. After all, why doesn't it already exist? If anyone can do it, shouldn't someone else have done it already? Is this just a bad idea that has already quietly failed many times before? But when I encounter something really difficult, that's when I know why it doesn't already exist, and overcoming that difficulty with my obsessiveness and anything else I can bring to bear becomes exciting. It feels like an opportunity; a reason that something is worth doing. When I say that I consider these to be "the last days of software development," it's because -- for a lot of my life -- knowing how computers work has been significant and valuable, because for most of my life, it has been possible to sit down at a computer, start making something, and encounter that difficulty everywhere. I don't think eliminating software development as it has been is a negative development in the slightest. I think making software easy/free to build will have all kinds of positive effects for all of us. And sure, maybe there will continue to be humans in the loop etc etc.. but I do think that this is the end of something that I invested a lot of time thinking about, in large part so I could sit down at a computer and start typing into an editor with some trepidation, until the moment that I encounter something which makes me stop and think "oh." And then smile.

I've been building Confer: private AI chat where your conversations are end-to-end encrypted so that only you can access them. It's still new, but I've been using it every day and beta testing it with friends. Let me know what's missing! confer.to/blog/2025/12/c…

I've actually been enjoying the last days of software development. There's a touch of sadness, but there's also something about knowing we're near the end that makes it novel and sweet again.

With Megapacks charging up at night, we’re adding much needed Supercharger capacity, without new grid connections being needed. Great work by the Sweden teams! More of these coming for our Swedish customers. x.com/TeslaCharging/… x.com/TeslaCharging/…

And so it begins!

15.4 GWh on Sunday alone through US Superchargers

It's amazing what Tesla can do with its vertical integration. This should make Supercharging a little more magical, especially at larger & busy sites. We'll keep refining it and enable it for all Superchargers.

Solar and Megapacks are needed to meet electrification & datacenter demand. This Supercharger is evidence of that. Our forecasts showed a severe charging infrastructure deficit along the San Francisco - Los Angeles corridor for the 2025 holidays and beyond, creating extreme urgency to bring more Superchargers online. Utility grid connections wouldn’t arrive in time. Doing nothing and letting customers suffer is not an option for @TeslaCharging. With our own solar generation and Megapacks, we have control of our timeline, delivering the needed capacity in under 8 months from construction start. Yes, the largest Supercharger in the world is powered by the sun. It’s inspiring for the Tesla teams that worked on it, inspiring for customers, and what had to be done to ensure dependable travel. Happy Thanksgiving!

@eatonphil I also recommend @breckcs’s blog: blog.colinbreck.com. I’m a bit biased as he’s my boss but nevertheless, I love what he writes.

New blog post, inspired by Rich Hickey's classic "Simple Made Easy" talk from 2011. surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/08/17/eas…

Why do you need to master at-least-once delivery and processing? One reason Software systems can guarantee safety but cannot guarantee liveness In case of failure, our only shot at progress (and eventual consistency) is to try again at-least-once x.com/DominikTornow/…