Esteban Eid Jordán

Claude Mythos. Ten trillion parameters: the first model in this weight class. Estimated training cost: ten billion dollars. On the hardest coding test in the industry (SWE bench) it scores 94%. It found a security flaw in a system that had been running for 27 years, one that every human engineer and every automated check had missed. It found another bug that had survived five million test runs over 16 years. (It did so overnight.) It is so capable in cybersecurity that Anthropic will not release it to the public, instead it is launching Project Glasswing along with 100m in compute credits to help secure software. Only twelve partners currently have access: Amazon, Cisco, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, JPMorgan Chase, Crowdstrike, Palo Alto, AWS, The Linux Foundation, Broadcom. (I'm sure the Pentagon is on the line?) This is not a product launch: it is a controlled deployment of a system too powerful to distribute freely. Tell me this isn't (very expensive) AGI?

Documentary: non-technical founder discovers Claude Code

Me defending my O(n^3) solution to the coding interviewer.

Scaled from 1,000 to 100,000 users. Here's what broke. At 5,000 users: - Single database became the bottleneck - Added read replicas At 20,000 users: - Session storage overwhelmed Redis - Switched to JWT tokens At 50,000 users: - File uploads killed our servers - Moved to S3 with presigned URLs At 75,000 users: - Search became unusable - Implemented Elasticsearch At 100,000 users: - DNS became single point of failure - Multi-region with Route53 failover Every stage felt like the final architecture. None of them were. Scaling isn't a destination. It's a continuous series of bottleneck discoveries.

The company hired me to lead their "Agile Transformation." I don't know what Agile means. Nobody does. That's why it works. I make $425,000 a year. To move sticky notes. From left to right. On a board. The board is digital now. The sticky notes cost $80,000 in Jira licenses. Progress. Day one, I said "we need to break down silos." Everyone nodded. Silos are bad. I don't know why. But destroying them is a career. My career. I introduced "squads." Squads are teams. But disrupted. We disrupted the teams into teams. Different names. Same people. Same problems. But Agile problems now. Agile problems are strategic. A senior engineer asked what we're actually changing. I said, "The mindset." He asked what that means. I said, "It's a journey." He asked where we're going. I said, "Toward agility." He asked what agility means. I pointed at the sticky notes. They were moving left to right. That's velocity. We have velocity now. The VP of Engineering said two-week sprints don't fit their work. I said, "That's waterfall thinking." Waterfall is bad. Like silos. I don't know what waterfall is. But I know it's bad. She stopped talking. Waterfall accusations end conversations. We had a retrospective. In the retro, we discussed what went wrong. Everything went wrong. We put it on sticky notes. Then we moved the sticky notes. Into a column called "Parking Lot." The Parking Lot is where problems go to die. It's full. We don't look at it. That's agile. Velocity is up 40%. I defined velocity. I also defined the points. I also defined the stories. We're crushing it. At the things I made up. To measure. Ourselves. The CEO asked for ROI. I showed a chart. The chart went up. Charts should go up. This one did. I didn't label the Y-axis. Nobody asked. Leadership is confidence. We do standups now. Every day. We stand. For 45 minutes. Standing is agile. Sitting is waterfall. My legs hurt. But we're transforming. The transformation is now "Phase 3." Phase 1 was assessment. Phase 2 was implementation. Phase 3 is "continuous improvement." Continuous means forever. Forever means job security. I'm very secure. My contract was extended. Three more years. For "cultural impact." The culture is confused. But impacted. Agile transformation isn't about being agile. It's about transforming. Continuously. Toward more transformation. The destination is the journey. The journey is billable.

Microservices is the software industry’s most successful confidence scam. It convinces small teams that they are “thinking big” while systematically destroying their ability to move at all. It flatters ambition by weaponizing insecurity: if you’re not running a constellation of services, are you even a real company? Never mind that this architecture was invented to cope with organizational dysfunction at planetary scale. Now it’s being prescribed to teams that still share a Slack channel and a lunch table. Small teams run on shared context. That is their superpower. Everyone can reason end-to-end. Everyone can change anything. Microservices vaporize that advantage on contact. They replace shared understanding with distributed ignorance. No one owns the whole anymore. Everyone owns a shard. The system becomes something that merely happens to the team, rather than something the team actively understands. This isn’t sophistication. It’s abdication. Then comes the operational farce. Each service demands its own pipeline, secrets, alerts, metrics, dashboards, permissions, backups, and rituals of appeasement. You don’t “deploy” anymore—you synchronize a fleet. One bug now requires a multi-service autopsy. A feature release becomes a coordination exercise across artificial borders you invented for no reason. You didn’t simplify your system. You shattered it and called the debris “architecture.” Microservices also lock incompetence in amber. You are forced to define APIs before you understand your own business. Guesses become contracts. Bad ideas become permanent dependencies. Every early mistake metastasizes through the network. In a monolith, wrong thinking is corrected with a refactor. In microservices, wrong thinking becomes infrastructure. You don’t just regret it—you host it, version it, and monitor it. The claim that monoliths don’t scale is one of the dumbest lies in modern engineering folklore. What doesn’t scale is chaos. What doesn’t scale is process cosplay. What doesn’t scale is pretending you’re Netflix while shipping a glorified CRUD app. Monoliths scale just fine when teams have discipline, tests, and restraint. But restraint isn’t fashionable, and boring doesn’t make conference talks. Microservices for small teams is not a technical mistake—it is a philosophical failure. It announces, loudly, that the team does not trust itself to understand its own system. It replaces accountability with protocol and momentum with middleware. You don’t get “future proofing.” You get permanent drag. And by the time you finally earn the scale that might justify this circus, your speed, your clarity, and your product instincts will already be gone.

𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗛𝘆𝗽𝗲 𝗖𝘆𝗰𝗹𝗲 Where are you on the cycle?

A wonderfully green day for the Magnificent 7.