Craig Johnston

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Craig Johnston

Craig Johnston

@cjimti

Software engineer. Kubernetes, Go, infrastructure tooling.

Los Angeles Katılım Mayıs 2009
3.2K Takip Edilen5.8K Takipçiler
Craig Johnston retweetledi
Darren Shepherd
Darren Shepherd@ibuildthecloud·
So I went to the MCP Dev Summit and hated it. But that was all my fault. But coming away from the summit, I'm very optimistic about the future of MCP. I think I finally solved in my head how to make this crap actually work. There are basically three approaches for tool calling. CLI, MCP, and roll your own. I think all three approaches have a valid use case for now. As time goes forward MCP is actually the best long-term solution. I don't feel like arguing with you on why. But just like Doctor Strange I've played out all the scenarios in my head and MCP seems to be the only one that makes sense. We might have to kill half the world first but it'll work out.
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Craig Johnston
Craig Johnston@cjimti·
@ibuildthecloud Nope, most of what I have learned over the last 30 years was from studying open source.
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Karthik
Karthik@karthikponna19·
be honest, which one is best for coding ?
Karthik tweet media
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Craig Johnston
Craig Johnston@cjimti·
Oracle has 1000s of employees, so why did they need to buy the open source MySQL? They could have “intented” their way back the as well. So it was only the developers holding them back? lol nope
Dustin@r0ck3t23

Larry Ellison just told every software engineer on Earth their job description is dead. Not evolving. Dead. Ellison: “The code that Oracle is writing, Oracle isn’t writing. Our AI models are writing.” This is not a startup demo. This is one of the largest infrastructure monopolies on the planet telling you it already replaced the people who built it. For fifty years, building software meant translating human intent into machine instructions. Line by line. Bug by bug. Sprint by sprint. That entire layer is gone. Ellison: “We don’t write the procedure. We declare our intent.” That sentence just made the entire engineering labor market flinch. The procedure was the job. The procedure was the paycheck. The procedure was what made a developer valuable. And now the machine does it without being asked twice. Ellison: “We just tell the model what we want the program to do, and then the AI comes up with a step-by-step process to actually do it.” You are no longer paid to build. You are paid to think. And most organizations have no idea how to evaluate that. The companies still hiring armies of developers to grind through codebases are paying salaries the machine already made worthless. Not in years. In seconds. When a company worth hundreds of billions hands the keyboard to the machine and tells you the output is better, the debate is not winding down. The debate is over. The enterprise that wins this decade does not write the best code. It removes the human from the process entirely and runs on intent alone. The programmers who survive are the ones who realize the craft is no longer typing. It is architecture. It is judgment. It is knowing what to build and why. Everything else now belongs to the machine. And the machine does not negotiate severance.

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Craig Johnston
Craig Johnston@cjimti·
@r0ck3t23 @DavidUlysse1 And SQL was going to replace the data analyst. No executive is going to vibe code the next MySQL. Also a reminder that “intent” still requires human interpretation. Oracle is using AI, but so am I.
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Dustin
Dustin@r0ck3t23·
Larry Ellison just told every software engineer on Earth their job description is dead. Not evolving. Dead. Ellison: “The code that Oracle is writing, Oracle isn’t writing. Our AI models are writing.” This is not a startup demo. This is one of the largest infrastructure monopolies on the planet telling you it already replaced the people who built it. For fifty years, building software meant translating human intent into machine instructions. Line by line. Bug by bug. Sprint by sprint. That entire layer is gone. Ellison: “We don’t write the procedure. We declare our intent.” That sentence just made the entire engineering labor market flinch. The procedure was the job. The procedure was the paycheck. The procedure was what made a developer valuable. And now the machine does it without being asked twice. Ellison: “We just tell the model what we want the program to do, and then the AI comes up with a step-by-step process to actually do it.” You are no longer paid to build. You are paid to think. And most organizations have no idea how to evaluate that. The companies still hiring armies of developers to grind through codebases are paying salaries the machine already made worthless. Not in years. In seconds. When a company worth hundreds of billions hands the keyboard to the machine and tells you the output is better, the debate is not winding down. The debate is over. The enterprise that wins this decade does not write the best code. It removes the human from the process entirely and runs on intent alone. The programmers who survive are the ones who realize the craft is no longer typing. It is architecture. It is judgment. It is knowing what to build and why. Everything else now belongs to the machine. And the machine does not negotiate severance.
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Craig Johnston
Craig Johnston@cjimti·
@ibuildthecloud The joke is on the corps that interviewed and hired l33t coders with no soul. A passion for the implementation has always been the killer skill.
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Darren Shepherd
Darren Shepherd@ibuildthecloud·
I'll be kind of honest, it sorta sucks that everyone can barf code now. I'll get used to it, but it was nice to have a skill people couldn't easily reproduce in the worst way possible. I'm sure I have something valuable to offer, but code isn't it anymore.
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Mitchell Hashimoto
Mitchell Hashimoto@mitchellh·
@jarredsumner Alright, this is the kick in the ass I need to dramatically improve the performance of our image protocol implementation (its very slow, nothing has really pushed it yet, but I bet this will).
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Jarred Sumner
Jarred Sumner@jarredsumner·
modern terminals are very capable
GIF
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Craig Johnston retweetledi
Rhys
Rhys@RhysSullivan·
MCP sucking is a harness problem, not an MCP problem MCP unlocks behavior that is fundamentally impossible to get via CLI or APIs Bad auth, too much context usage, all get solved with an execution layer - your agent writes code to progressively discover and call tools
Garry Tan@garrytan

MCP sucks honestly It eats too much context window and you have to toggle it on and off and the auth sucks I got sick of Claude in Chrome via MCP and vibe coded a CLI wrapper for Playwright tonight in 30 minutes only for my team to tell me Vercel already did it lmao But it worked 100x better and was like 100LOC as a CLI

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Craig Johnston
Craig Johnston@cjimti·
@haveibeenpwned My question is why did Canadian Tire have any of my data to begin with? I didn't even know they existed till today.
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Craig Johnston retweetledi
Kent C. Dodds ⚡
Kent C. Dodds ⚡@kentcdodds·
Sometimes people will ask me what MCP servers I use and be surprised to find I actually don't use a lot of them. In general, I think MCP is relatively uninteresting for software developers. Let me explain why.
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Grant Slatton
Grant Slatton@GrantSlatton·
yeah sex is cool but have you ever done a tiny refactor that started a refactoring cascade and suddenly tons of cruft in the codebase fell into place as if the abstractions were written by god himself
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Craig Johnston retweetledi
Adam Wathan
Adam Wathan@adamwathan·
I don’t think AI is lowering the barrier to entry as much as it is giving the very smartest people an even more enormous advantage.
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Craig Johnston
Craig Johnston@cjimti·
@mfranz_on @odtorson It's not MCP. It's your use case. You don't need MCP because MCP doesn't solve your problems. That's fine. But that's independent of the value of MCP.
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Marco Franzon
Marco Franzon@mfranz_on·
@odtorson @cjimti Agree that for a rest api server probably mcp is better that using curl from a cli, but I mean cli is more than enough imho
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Craig Johnston
Craig Johnston@cjimti·
This is like saying we don't need APIs when we have SQL. I don't need an MCP for GitHub. GitHub already has a well-documented API. But my clients need custom MCPs for their data warehouses. The API describes the how. A custom MCP describes the WHAT and the HOW. MCP is not just tools (that's all it's evaluated on), it's also prompts, resources, elicitations, and sampling and that can be highly dynamic and contextual, something APIs don't typically do. imti.co/mcp-defense/
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Marco Franzon
Marco Franzon@mfranz_on·
@cjimti I saw ofter the notion mcp, the slack mcp... but if you have a proper cli what is the point of mcps?
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Craig Johnston
Craig Johnston@cjimti·
@navneet_rabdiya @ibuildthecloud Mutation testing is essential, AI loves to construct tautological tests. Vaporware and noops also bite, and dead code confuses future sessions. Anyone claiming they are "vibing" without strong test harnesses are BSing you.
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Navneet
Navneet@navneet_rabdiya·
@ibuildthecloud tbh TDD's value isn't in writing tests first - it's in catching edge cases early. Even with AI, you still need explicit failure scenarios. Found this out when AI happily generated tests that only covered the happy path but missed all the timeout/retry cases
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Ryan Carniato
Ryan Carniato@RyanCarniato·
I never thought this day would come. Thanks to AI, we've hit the inversion point where TDD is something that actually saves time instead of wastes time. What a world we live in.
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Craig Johnston
Craig Johnston@cjimti·
@sm0olr @fiftynifty I’ve been developing software professionally for over 30 years and I get the same criticism in every era of rapid change.
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Samuel Robertson
Samuel Robertson@sm0olr·
@fiftynifty it's wild, people drawing mad conclusions about me and calling me a trash engineer who's propped up by AI writing code for me. I'm like okay even IF that is true, I've been using AI heavily for ~1 year. How do you explain the other 9 years of my career where I didn't use AI?
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Samuel Robertson
Samuel Robertson@sm0olr·
I made the mistake of commenting on a post on reddit about my AI workflow. The replies have been truly eye-opening in regards to how anti-AI people still are, even other software engineers. I just can't comprehend the mindset and total unwillingness to try new tools.
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Keşfet

@ibuildthecloud @karthikponna19 @r0ck3t23 @DavidUlysse1 @mitchellh @jarredsumner @haveibeenpwned @GrantSlatton