Zach Gollwitzer

Hand-writing code, reading technical blogs and books, listening to conference talks etc is probably one of the most important habits to maintain at some level right now (even if just 1 day / week). We all know hand-writing code isn’t practical for the demands of the modern day SWE job, as scope has 10x’d at most companies who are paying attention. That’s fine and expected, but just like we built gyms when corporate work kept us inert most of the day at a desk, we need these counter-balancing “brain gym” activities to keep clarity in both our product thinking and engineering thinking. LLMs revert to the mean, so how do we keep excellence in both our products and engineering culture? These things actively sharpen our critical thinking. They are intentionally slow. Slowness IS the feature here. Slowness allows us to chew on tough concepts for a while rather than a quick follow-up to an LLM who will spit out yet another wall of text that feels smart yet your brain is incapable of internalizing because you’ve found yourself in an endless loop of re-prompting every time something doesn’t make sense. You feel like you’re absorbing so much new information and “orchestrating” everything when really, you’re being fed mountains of options and have lost the agency to steer the ship. Clear technical thinking is the single most important engineering skill right now. The LLMs are becoming experts at implementing a clear spec. We lose our quality of outputs when the LLM-induced laziness kicks in on hour 8 of tapping the keyboard and we no longer remember what the spec was. We give into the temptation to say, “I think the LLM has it from here”. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t know your business and will introduce compounding complexity if you let it. In software, the last mile is the most important, and in the agentic era having the ability to think clearly and subtract things is the path to achieving quality software.

Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.) GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week. So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features. And as a fine purveyor of hand-crafted shit code for many years, I'm not gonna weigh in on that. 🤣

For 50 years, software engineering ran on code rationing. Writing code was expensive, so we rationed it carefully through roadmaps, RFCs, prioritization meetings, and scope reviews. This created a role: the No Engineer. No, that won't scale. No, we don't have bandwidth. No, that's out of scope. No, we need a design doc first. The No Engineer was valuable for 50 years. Every "no" saved real money. Their judgment was the rationing system. LLMs will be the end of code rationing. Code is cheap now. And while the No Engineer is explaining why something can't be done, the Yes Engineer has already shipped three versions of it. If you're a Yes Engineer, the next decade is yours.

There's a lot of confused people in this thread on why GitLab isn't an acceptable drop-in replacement for Github. I will periodically add some examples. These are UX monstrosities that make it *unusable*

Over the past month, some of you reported Claude Code's quality had slipped. We investigated, and published a post-mortem on the three issues we found. All are fixed in v2.1.116+ and we’ve reset usage limits for all subscribers.

WE DON'T HATE CLAUDE CODE ENOUGH WHY ARE WE PAYING THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS IF YOUR EVERY RELEASE IS MAKING THE HARNESS LESS USABLE?