dgaspard

@unclebobmartin @esrtweet After yesterday’s tanstack security issue, we also have security reasons to build instead of using frameworks.

The entire build vs buy/borrow mindset is lurching strongly towards build. For example it is a bigger pain for me to use cucumber than it is for me to have agents build a gherkin parser and test generator. It’s night and day. We used to look at frameworks as time savers. They aren’t anymore. You don’t need to build rails or react apps anymore. You can just build a raw app with no framework. And that app will be yours, tuned exactly as you want it, without any opinionated assumptions or bizarre tramp dependencies. (No shade on react or rails).

It can be unsettling when you notice that a technical assumption you've been making for 40 years has quietly expired. This happened to me a few minutes ago. I maintain a game called "greed". It's an old-style game from the days of character-cell terminals. Not quite a classic deserving of museum status like Colossal Cave Adventure or nethack, but worth keeping alive because it's still solidly playable. And people still are playing it, because yesterday I got a minor bug report about it. Nothing user-visible, just a silly C build problem. I fixed it. Then, because I'm generally trying to get my old C projects out of C into more modern and safer languages, I tried asking my robot friend to port it to Rust. Which it promptly did. But then I noticed something that irritated me. The Rust code had a bunch of unsafe blocks in it, which went directly against my reasons for moving it to Rust. On further examination, I discovered that it was calling the C curses library to do its screen painting. This is where I have to explain about curses. It's an ancient C library for writing TUIs. It looks in your environment for a variable named TERM, uses its value to dredge a bunch of magic strings out of a system-wide database called "terminfo" that tells it how to manipulate your terminal, and then uses those magic strings for screen painting. On modern systems, TERM is always some variant of a color ANSI terminal. In times past, when people attached a wild variety of character cell terminals to Unix systems rather than just sitting at the console, it could have been lots of other things. Those days are gone, but the habit of always going through terminfo so you can support a couple of hundred terminal types has persisted. I prod robot friend to find me a pure Rust equivalent of curses so I don't have to do unsafe and call C code. It says, yes, there is such a thing and it's called crossterm. I tell it: change this code to use crossterm. Robot friend grinds for a bit, and then tells me it can't do that because I don't have cargo (the Rust package manager) installed. This is because I never write Rust by hand. When I ship programs written in Rust, it's because I ported them from some other language and don't expect to ever touch them again without having a robot to do the code-grinding for me. This is when things get slightly strange. It tells me that instead of porting to crossterm, it has written into the greed Rust source its own little screen-painting backend the implements a subset of curses calls and (this is the important part) assumes it's talking to a color ANSI terminal. Robot friend is not an old Unix hand. It doesn't know the unwritten law of the deep magic that you always go through terminfo because...because you might have to support hundreds of terminal types that no longer exist in this century? I blink. I look at the Rust code for the back end. It is small and elegant. No more unsafe. No more dragging around a bunch of C library code. This is ... the right thing? I push it to the public repository. What sealed the deal is that code, even code in a language as rebarbative as Rust, is wet clay now. If, against all odds I get a bug report that says somebody wants to play greed on something that isn't an ANSI terminal emulator, reinstating full curses support will take a one-sentence prompt to my robot friend and mere minutes. I hadn't had to directly confront before the fact that the entire set of assumptions that made TERM and terminfo a thing are as obsolete as dial-up acoustic modems. Still, the moment when I tossed away one of the ancient laws of Unix coding felt a bit like the universe lurching sideways. Indeed do many things come to pass...

You’re buying a service, which includes accountability for maintenance, policy, legal, customer support, enhancements. It’ll consolidate the SaaS market, but not make it go away. I’d argue that was happening before AI. The SaaS industry has been bloated for about 8-9 years, when they tried to make NFTs a thing because they were out of ideas.

@PeterMcCormack @dgaspard @zerosandohs are worried your customers will do the same (build internal - custom around how they work) and render your services unnecessary?

I now understand why AI will eat the software industry. I used to have a web agency. With Claude over the last 3 days I have built and deployed a system that would have: - Taken 6 months - Cost £150-200k - Required 8 different skill sets I can't design. I can't code. I don't understand SQL, APIs, Cloud Storage - yet Claude has walked me through Github, Supabase, Vercel and it is deployed and working. A 100% custom software system - 3 days, 1 idiot. BLOWN AWAY!

@jasonlk Opposite take. Most of the problems I’ve seen come from leaders not empowering people. With more remote work and flattening of orgs, it’s about to get way worse. We’re going to have an entire industry of people waiting around.

Almost every important mistake I've made in the past 15+ years has been due to lowering the hire bar Directly or indirectly, it leads to chaos, slowdown, doubt, and confusing inputs

@PeterMcCormack @zerosandohs Kudos! Mine would start playing Fortnite after a day or two.

@dgaspard @zerosandohs My kids

@zeeg It’s not just token cost, cloud feels like it jumped in price recently, which adds to the cost of SaaS.

Anyone else employ engineers full time to reduce their datadog bill or is it just us? 😱

Who maintains everything you just built? Who understands it? Who keeps security up to date? Who fixes bugs? Who monitors it for updates? How do you know it’s secure? Who’s on the hook if it breaks in the middle of the night? What’s budget in the cloud for the custom applications you’re building? What if you need to share data from this system to the next?

@zerosandohs Internal - custom around how we work rather than a system we adapt to

@Tech_girlll Microservices was always an org/communication problem. We need to create services because communication is hard. Oddly enough services are a good way to control the blast radius of AI generated code.

Unless your product is Google, Netflix, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, GitHub, YouTube level big, you probably have no business with microservices. Most products are adding distributed complexity to problems that do not exist yet.

@davidfowl I’ve been finding that BDD, github actions, and pre commit hooks are pretty much imperative now. Every team I’ve worked over over twenty years has had a tester or a CI/CD person. Now that’s where i spend all my time.

@S_N_SH_E_ They aren’t building datacenters for less software to be written.

Be honest : Do you really believe most computer science degrees will still have the same value 10 years from now?

@zuess05 Some food for thought: if you're participating in a meeting that is not productive, you should take responsibility for that. You are part of that meeting and can influence its outcome, or lack thereof. If not, talk to your manager to skip it.

@dgaspard Unfortunately that is still the case in most Meaningless meetings

Serious question. We have an entire corporate class making $150k a year whose only actual job is to sit in meetings and ask "what is the status on this?" But if one guy with Claude can now finish a 2-week project in an afternoon... Why haven't companies laid off the entire middle layer yet?

@GergelyOrosz I agree with you, but to be fair, the investors aren't thinking that either. They're reading it as "Coinbase has figured out AI, and can safely put code in production by anyone."

When the CEO of Coinbase said "non-technical teams are now shipping production code" I assume it's things like marketing now makes copy updates to a small site w/o a dev or similar. But now half the internet thinks this caused the Coinbase outage two days later, when it did not.

Most underrated skill today: Observability. I feel you can build a career just on this and have 2 decades of guaranteed money if you learn the skill well, and I'll tell you how below. Reality: Most teams I help look at me with dead eyes when I ask them about observability. That's sad, but it's the current state of the industry: • No tracing • No structured data • No way to understand what's happening when things break Outside of the most sophisticated companies, that's still where most teams are. AI is now writing a ton of code, and people are shipping this code to production. However important observability was before, it is 10x more important today. Believe me, you don't want to be the one pushing slop into production and then guessing how it works, with no way to understand what happens. Here is your first step: Honeycomb is running a FREE, 3-day virtual event focused entirely on observability. The event is running May 12-14. Did I mention it's completely free? Everything will revolve around observability for the agent era. Register here: fandf.co/4whC5Q6 Thanks to the @honeycombio team for partnering with me on this post.

@GergelyOrosz @theharshpat Sounds like a platform engineer vibe coding infrastructure. Assume everything fails or unavailable is in the fundamentals certification.

@theharshpat 1. Coinbase’s business relies on offering a centralized option for crypto. 2. This outage has nothing to do w nontechnical ppl pushing code. It’s engineering decisions made by taking on a hard AWS dependency and no failover prep. Its why I said optics are unfortunate

Unfortunate optics for Coinbase to have an hours-long outage when customers could not trade, a few days after their CEO said how non-technical teams are shipping code to production. This outage is because Coinbase seems to have a hard dependency on AWS, and when AWS (or a part of it) is down, so is Coinbase This is a choice/tradeoff by Coinbase’s eng team.

I absolutely hate the script companies are using to lay people off in 2026 It’s bullshit and hurts America I’m not picking on Cloudflare here. Every company that has announced layoffs the last 6 months has used this script: “Business is great! We’ve never been more rich! We have so much money we have no idea what to do with it! But AI man, that shit is crazy! Sorry 14% of the company has to go!” They take 0 accountability for poor decisions made. They take 0 accountability for not being prepared for competitors or market conditions. They just blame it all on AI 80% of Americans hate AI and this is the reason. They see CEOs of AI companies saying the world is ending. They see CEOs of regular companies laying everyone off and purely blaming AI If you weren’t as familiar with AI, you’d think it was the worst invention ever This is why every state has people standing outside of data centers protesting, and they don’t even know what a data center is! We have a MAJOR marketing problem in America when it comes to AI, and if this script all of these companies are using continues we’ll have no shot of beating China

@RiverRanchBaw It looks highly likely, Pecan Island is midway between Elon's Texas and Florida space facilities on the shipping channel. It's just a matter of time before we get some good food in him. Welcome to Louisiana Elon!

Yes please

@demansou @JustDeezGuy Agreed, but once you get out of the valley, you’ll find most of our industry doesn’t level up. Leadership in a of organizations are risk adverse and fights teams leveling up.

@dgaspard @JustDeezGuy The containers question is a sign of needing to level up. Any dev that has ever shipped a single product will have dealt with a production build issue that could benefit from standardizing the application environment.

This. People telling me Kubernetes is “overengineered” and “you don’t need it unless you’re a FAANG” are telling me they don’t have basic understanding of ops challenges. And if they say “just use Docker Compose in production,” well, that’s a fire-or-don’t-hire offense.

@amix3k Actual reason behind the layoffs.

Coinbase just announced it’s cutting ~14% of its workforce. Earlier this year, Block cut ~40%. Both companies are pointing toward a similar way of working: - Smaller teams - Fewer layers - Hands-on leaders - More leverage per person - AI embedded in the work Layoffs are painful. There are real people behind these numbers. But the operating model discussion matters. My reaction is this isn’t the future for Doist. It’s mostly how we’ve worked for years. We’ve been remote-first and async-first since 2010. Most important work happens in writing: decisions, trade-offs, plans, feedback, and context. That was already good for people. AI makes it much more valuable. Written work gives AI agents and systems the context they need to be useful. It also helps people collaborate across time zones without turning every decision into a meeting. Doist has people in 40+ countries, so this isn’t theoretical for us. It’s how the company works. Our leaders are also hands-on. I still code. Ana, our Head of Design, still designs. Our Head of Product, Dominique, is deep in the product work. Leadership at Doist isn’t a path away from the work. It’s a way to help others do better work while staying close to the craft. We also organize around squads: small teams with a clear goal. Squads form, ship, learn, and reassemble as priorities change. As AI increases individual leverage, fixed and narrow teams become less useful. Adaptability matters more than perfecting last quarter’s org chart. We’re also rethinking careers. IC and leadership paths shouldn’t be separate ladders where people become managers just to grow. They should be part of a single system in which craft, leadership, and impact can evolve over time. The hard part for Coinbase, Block, and other large companies is that they’re trying to change how thousands of people work at once. That’s brutally hard. The advantage for small teams and new companies is huge as you can start this way: - Default to writing - Hire hands-on leaders - Keep teams small and fluid - Measure output, not online time - Build career paths around impact, not hierarchy This isn’t an AI org redesign for us. It’s our operating system. I’ll share more below, distilled from our handbook: 1. Hands-on leadership 2. Async communication 3. The DO System 4. Non-linear career frameworks I hope it’s useful ✨