Anders Murphy

⚡️ NEW: Block, Inc. has quietly rehired some of the 4,000 employees it laid off last month, with some workers receiving offers to return after the cuts were linked to clerical errors.

The past year has seen an explosion in coding productivity, per FT:

Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems. The official framing is "part of normal business." The briefing note describes a trend of incidents with "high blast radius" caused by "Gen-AI assisted changes" for which "best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." Translation to human language: we gave AI to engineers and things keep breaking? The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. AWS spent 13 hours recovering after its own AI coding tool, asked to make some changes, decided instead to delete and recreate the environment (the software equivalent of fixing a leaky tap by knocking down the wall). Amazon called that an "extremely limited event" (the affected tool served customers in mainland China).

What if a codebase was actually stored in Postgres and agents directly modified files by reading/writing to the DB? Code velocity has increased 3-5x. This will undoubtedly continue. PR review has already become a bottleneck for high output teams. Codebase checked-out on filesystem seems like a terrible primitive when you have 10-100-1000 agents writing code. Code is now high velocity data and should be modeled at such. Bare minimum, we need write-level atomicity and better coordination across agents, better synchronization primitives for subscribing to codebase state changes and real-time time file-level code lint/fmt/review. The current ~20 year old paradigm of git checkout/branch/push/pr/review/rebase ended Jan 2026. We need an entirely new foundational system for writing code if we’re really going to keep pace with scale laws.