Pratik Bothra
1.6K posts
@pratik60
Principal Engineer at @Intercom, working on @fin_ai. Into tech, TV, football, and random conversations in between. Could travel for a living.
We've been building an internal Claude Code plugin system at Intercom with 13 plugins, 100+ skills, and hooks that turn Claude into a full-stack engineering platform. Lots done, more to do. Here's a thread of some highlights.
OK, related to this: Fresh data from Uber, from Feb 2026: 31% of code is AI-authored 11% of PRs opened by agents And Uber is investing heavily in AI So outside Anthropic + AI labs, we are a far way out, probably? Source: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-uber-use…
.@ShabanaMahmood is right. Our migration system needs reform. Today, @BritishProgress is publishing our ideas to fix it. We need contributors, but we also need consent. The current system delivers neither. 🚩 Flat thresholds don't select for lifetime contributors A flat £41,700 threshold treats a 23-year-old software developer and a 55-year-old worker on the same salary as equivalent. They aren’t. The 23-year-old is earning at the 75th percentile for their age, with forty years of tax ahead of them. The 55-year-old on that salary will be below the median for their cohort, with fewer earning years left. The system screens out high-potential young workers and waves through older workers who will cost more to the state. 🚩 The system is a maze that invites gaming To figure out which threshold actually applies to you under the current Skilled Worker visa, you have to navigate this: This is incredibly gamable, meaning people who might never contribute enough to cover their lifetime costs to the state can come into the country as skilled workers. 🚩We're pricing out the workers we need most The UK charges more for its visas than any comparable economy. The Immigration Health Surcharge alone costs a family of four over £20,000 upfront. That doesn’t deter someone moving from a low-income country where the UK wage premium is life-changing. They’ll borrow if they have to. But if you’re a machine learning researcher with offers in Zurich, Toronto, and San Francisco, that lump sum matters. We are pricing out the people we should be competing hardest to attract. 🚩 The partner route is generating fiscal deficits without public accountability According to the Migration Advisory Committee, the partner visa cohort will on average generate a net lifetime fiscal deficit of £109,000 per person. The figure for comparable UK residents is a £110,000 net positive contribution, a difference of £220,000. The Minimum Income Requirement (currently £29,000) is explicitly supposed to demonstrate households can be maintained without recourse to public funds but fails to do this. The result is an implicit fiscal transfer that is neither acknowledged nor debated. If the principle is no recourse to public funds, then we should actually measure whether a household is likely to be fiscally self-sufficient over time. At the moment we don’t. 🚩 Public sector carve-outs hide long-term fiscal costs When the state can't recruit at the wages it sets, lowering the migration threshold is faster and cheaper than raising pay. A nurse recruited on a discounted threshold of £25,000 reduces the NHS staffing bill today, but if they settle and their lifetime fiscal contribution falls short, the saving is a cost deferred. Sometimes that trade-off may be worth it. But we don’t even publish the numbers. Voters are asked to accept consequences that are never clearly explained. What would a fair system look like? We propose five reforms: 1. An annual Migration Contribution Report laid before Parliament presenting route-by-route fiscal transparency 2. A points-based Skilled Worker visa built on age-adjusted earnings benchmarks, not flat thresholds and occupation codes 3. Settlement earned through contribution so that only years you meet your benchmark counts toward ILR 4. Family visas assessed at the household level to ensure no recourse to public funds and fiscal break-even 5. Abolish (or restructure) the Immigration Health Surcharge We built a tool so you can see exactly how it works: …ibutory-migration.britishprogress.org You can read the full report here: britishprogress.org/reports/a-cont…
@ciaran_lee Best Bean Bag Brogrammer I know
My favorite part about writing is that first spark of an idea. It can happen at any time, for any reason. The idea for the Opalite music video crash landed into my imagination when I was doing promo for The Life of a Showgirl. I was a guest on one of my favorite shows, @TheGNShow. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s a UK late night show where Graham Norton (the insanely charismatic and lovable host) invites a random group of actors, entertainers, musicians, etc to be on his show and we all sit there and chat like it’s a dinner party. They even serve wine. Anyway. I remember thinking I got ridiculously lucky with the group I was paired with. Cillian Murphy, Domhnall Gleeson, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, and @LewisCapaldi. All people whose work I’ve admired from afar. When we were all talking during the broadcast, Domhnall made a light hearted joke about wanting to be in one of my music videos. He’s Irish! He was joking! Except that in that moment during the interview, I was instantly struck with an *idea*. And so a week later he received an email script I’d written for the Opalite video, where he was playing the starring role. I had this thought that it would be wild if all of our fellow guests on the Graham Norton show that night, including Graham himself, could be a part of it too. Like a school group project but for adults and it isn’t mandatory. To my delight, everyone from the show made the effort to time travel back to the 90’s with us and help with this video. You might even recognize some friendly faces from The Eras Tour. I got to work with one of my favorite people in the world, Rodrigo Prieto, again! I had more fun than I ever imagined - Made new friends, metaphors, and fashion choices. It was an absolute thrill to create this story and these characters. Shot on film. The Opalite video is out now on Spotify & Apple Music. taylor.lnk.to/OpaliteMusicVi…
