Daniel (dB.) Doubrovkine (parody of myself)

I promise, I’m a very serious person.

@digitalartchick Here are all the digits of pi from memory: 0123456789

I wish I'd documented our explicit principles for building with AI when we started adopting it. Treating it as a simple tool rollout is a mistake. We need to be more strategic. I shared this with my team yesterday. It reflects my current beliefs, though some may be outdated in 4 weeks. Building with AI: blog.abuiles.com/blog/2026/03/1… TL;DR: 1. Start from intent, not code. 2. Better planning matters more when building gets cheap. (hat tip to @chintanturakhia on this and 1) 3. Optimize every PR for reviewer comprehension. 4. Small diffs are a quality strategy. 5. Faster builders make good reviewers more valuable. (hat tip to @dblockdotorg ) 6. The author still owns quality. 7. QA starts before the code is “done.” 8. AI should help us produce better code, not lower standards. (hat tip to @simonw) 9. Knowing what to ship matters more than just shipping. 10. Optimize the system, not just the individual. 11. Production is the only real test. 12. Do not outproduce your senior judgment. (@dblockdotorg ) 13. Leave the system better than you found it.

I wrote up the details in code.dblock.org/2026/03/12/ai-… I think it's a simple and practical example of how AI has almost introduced a hard to see catastrophic failure. For now, human oversight of A.I. assistants remains critical.

I’ve seen PRs that are subtly very broken. For example github.com/dblock/slack-s… introduces a cleanup job that looks totally ok, but ignores that slack api is rate limited and exercising this implementation will have a high failure rate, and take down the entire system as the rate limit is global. If you ask the AI to solve it, it will make it worse and handle rate limit with a back off and sleep, which blocks the entire async pool execution, permanently rate limits the client calls for a long duration, and downs the whole system.

@dblockdotorg @claudeai "plausible-looking, locally coherent, globally wrong" => it describes pretty well what i've been seeing with some big MRs. They look well in practice but end up sneaking small issues.

Great post by @dblockdotorg! A lot of people is buying into the idea that because you can then you should ship it all in one go. The increase in slop is real which is putting a huge cognitive overload on experienced judgment. “Teams are shipping more code, but a greater fraction of it is AI slop: plausible-looking, locally coherent, globally wrong.” I’ve seen this, big pull request end up introducing a lot of bugs or regressions that should have been easy to capture with a small/local change.

Blogged: Right-Sizing Engineering Teams for AI code.dblock.org/2026/03/11/rig…

@AutismCapital Big companies offer DCP, deferred compensation plans. It’s deferring income to later when you don’t have any, or until you really need it, taking money out of the active economy to reduce taxes. Self own.

🚨BREAKING: Washington State passes their first ever income tax. Incomes over $1M/year will be taxed at 9.9%. Married couples share A SINGLE $1M exemption, so if combined incomes are more than $1M, you're getting taxed. This will obviously eventually extend beyond millionaires. What comes for others, will eventually come for you! RIP Washington state!

I used to pride myself for writing clear code that was easy to understand and extend. Today, I must admit the A.I. is as good, or sometimes even better than me at it. I used @GitHubCopilot with claude-sonnet-4.6 to one-shot 3 features for my pet S'Up project sup2.playplay.io, a Slack standup bot. I deliberately planned the work in my head before asking A.I. to do it as an experiment, and the LLM devised a simpler solution every time than the one I was originally thinking. In github.com/dblock/slack-s… it picked a very elegant design that extended a homegrown scheduling system to add "nth week of every month" and cleverly reused "unset" to flip the scheduling mode. In github.com/dblock/slack-s… it recognized that I had built support for applying global settings to channels in some generic way and avoided rolling out a lot of duplicate code I was originally planning. In github.com/dblock/slack-s… it needed a little bit of nudging to get the feature to work for users with different settings, but the code is incredibly trivial.

@Microsoft @Azure @obie it's a not dissimilar from @ShopifyEng Roast, curious what you think?

Check out Conductor, an open-source YAML-driven multi-agent orchestrator from one of my sister teams @Microsoft @Azure. It focuses on agent-to-agent routing, human gates, and structured execution patterns. github.com/microsoft/cond…

In today’s shocker, Meta is to "create a new applied AI engineering organization aiming for an ultra-flat structure of up to 50 employees to one manager". I would have chosen a more romantic number and applied the golden ratio, rather than a measure that feels like a spreadsheet’s idea of efficiency. code.dblock.org/2026/02/04/the…

@marcelfahle Aren’t there European regulations for this?

So, tabs or spaces?

Has anyone started a very expensive software developer consultancy that contractually guarantees that no code is written by AI, yet?

@juliknl @ZohranKMamdani This is how my condo board operates in Manhattan, yet I’m the only Swiss.

@dblockdotorg @ZohranKMamdani When we visited Verbier a year or so ago a local resident complained that it took him 20 or 30 years to get a permission from the commune to buy a property (and he was generations-local!) I think the demand there is roughly 10x the supply. NIMBY to 11.

In Verbier, Switzerland 🇨🇭 busses are free and snow is cleaned immediately. Why can’t we have that in communist New York @ZohranKMamdani?

@andruyeung NY CTO Club is also Chatham House Rules. Related to dinner concepts, many tech leaders that attend also accept marketing/corp dinner invitations just to have dinner together and not have to organize or pay.

I was invited to a c-suite dinner where they emphasized "Chatham House rules." Never heard the term before, so I looked it up. It means a salon-style dinner where you can use information from the room, but without revealing who shared it. Any other quirky dinner concepts I'm missing?

@MurrayHillGuy1 Is Equinox Hudson yards its own neighborhood?

NYC Neighborhood based off Hot Girl Rankings S Tier: West Village A Tier: Murray Hill, SoHo, Nolita, East Village, Williamsburg, DUMBO, Upper East Side (milfs) B Tier: Flatiron, NoMad, Gramercy, Lower East Side, Chelsea, Tribeca, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, Hell’s Kitchen C Tier: Park Slope, Greenpoint, Kips Bay, Union Square, Midtown West, Lincoln Square, Seaport, LIC, Midtown East D Tier: Upper West Side, Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill, Downtown Brooklyn, Astoria, Sunnyside, Forest Hills, Yorkville, Battery Park City F Tier: Bushwick, the Bronx, “East Williamsburg,” anywhere with a community garden and a hand-painted “Free Palestine” & “Hot girls for Mamdani” sign in the window

@andruyeung Wait till they build the new port authority!

New York City Neighborhood Ranking S Tier: Nomad, Flatiron, West Village, Greenwich Village, Soho, Gramercy Park A Tier: Tribeca, UWS, Central Park South, Chelsea, Williamsburg, Lincoln Square B Tier: Seaport, FiDi, Greenpoint, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, Dumbo, Union Square C Tier: UES, LIC, Downtown Brooklyn, Midtown West, Murray Hill, Midtown East, Washington Heights, Kips Bay, LES D Tier: Bushwick, Bedstuy, Chinatown, Astoria, “East Williamsburg” No-Go List: Times Square, Port Authority area

Adopting @heroku at @artsy in 2011 via git push Heroku master was like catching a train in full speed. It saved us mountains of time and money. End of an era. I’ve long migrated to @digitalocean app platform. It’s cheap, reliable, and has similar workflows. Here’s how. code.dblock.org/2023/01/15/mig…