Recent Articles
The Pulse: Meta wanted to reduce teams by 60% because of AI
An in-depth report by Reuters details how Meta’s leadership decided to slash team sizes by 60%. Zuckerberg changed his mind, and now the company is stuck with low morale and culture turned mercenary.
The Pulse: We need to talk about migrations with AI
Asana migrated off testing framework Enzyme in two weeks: without AI, this work would surely have been kicked down the road. Airbnb and Uber share similar stories and AI seems excellent at migrations.
The Pulse: Meta’s self-inflicted resignation-wave
In what was predictable: Meta’s layoffs and forced reassignments pushed engineers not impacted by either to look for a new job. Meta is now offering large equity retainers, and it doesn’t seem working
The Pulse: Grok’s CLI caught uploading all your local files to the cloud
Devs discover that Grok CLI pushed all local files, .env files and git history have been pushed to a GCP bucket, unencrypted. SpaceX’s initial reaction? Blame the devs
The Pulse: Bending Spoons' Acquisition Strategy
In only 5 years, Hopin went from zero to a $7.7B valuation, and back to zero again. Also: Bending Spoons’ startup acquisition model.
The Pulse: Quitting Spotify Podcasts over reliability
Spotify’s podcast platform has become chronically unreliable since the company’s leadership started boasting about AI adoption. Competitors haven’t had similar issues, so I offboarded from Spotify.
The Pulse: New trend - concern about massive increase in code review load
Top of mind for engineering leaders: what to do about the growing code review load, and how devs are starting to review code less thoroughly than before? Many questions, but few proven solutions.
The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun’s rapid Rust rewrite with AI?
To a sceptic, spending $165K to migrate Bun from Zig to Rust sounds very expensive. But to a realist, shortening a 1-2 year migration down to 11 days opens amazing new opportunities for devs. However, a thoroughly-tested project is required to pull it off.
The Pulse: Interesting AI coding stats from Cursor
Power users generate 10x as many lines of code vs the median, most of the AI spend is coming from input tokens not output ones, and almost half of AI changes are accepted without manual review by devs (!!)
Inside Pollen’s Collapse: “$200M Raised” but Staff Unpaid - Exclusive
Exclusive details about the collapse of the formerly high-flying startup. Could tech employees have known sooner they were on a sinking ship?
The Pulse: a new trend, smart model routing
Are there any ‘intelligent’ router solutions out there which select the right model for the right task? I looked into it, and there are a few options.
The Pulse: Antigravity 2.0 takes ‘IDE’ out of its new IDE
Feedback about the redesigned IDE is overwhelmingly negative due to bugs, poor UX & model support, and eating through Gemini token quotas. Also: a clue that Antigravity’s own devs use other tools for their work?
The Pulse: Forward deployed engineering heats up again
Massive demand for the role at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The latest version of the FDE role looks like the consultant / solution architect role done by many early-junior engineers.
Google Cloud deletes Australian trading fund’s infra
A $124B fund in Australia would have lost all data stored with Google Cloud, had they not relied on a third-party backup. A rare blunder from GCP, where regional replication did not stop the deletion – and a just as rare statement from Google Cloud’s CEO taking the blame.
The Pulse: Did capacity shortages turn Anthropic hostile to devs?
For the past few weeks, Anthropic has continually upset devs with its “dumber” model, and by removing Claude Code access from some paid accounts. After securing lots of compute from SpaceX, could the reason have been to conceal capacity issues?