Avery Duffin

Software Engineering Manager, Software Engineer, Electrical Engineer, Artist, Rock Climber, Swimmer, Religious, Husband, Father

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

The new "Left on Read" or "Soft Ghosting"

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

Being a good leader sometimes means being a good follower.

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

Are engineers dead? Probably not.

[Suni @suni_code]

97% vibe coder will fumble during interviews if asked what this is.

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

@hirschibar I stoped at mobile, can you summarize please?

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

Dogfooding Opus 4.7 the last few weeks, I've been feeling incredibly productive. Sharing a few tips to get more out of 4.7 🧵

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

Are we a John Deere Company?

[Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge]

I was chatting with my buddy at Google, who's been a tech director there for about 20 years, about their AI adoption. Craziest convo I've had all year.

The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power users, 20% outright refusers, 60% still using Cursor or equivalent chat tool. It turns out Google has this curve too.

But why is Google so... average? How is it that a handful of companies are taking off like a spaceship, and the rest, including Google, are mired in inaction?

My buddy's observation was key here: There has been an industry-wide hiring freeze for 18+ months, during which time nobody has been moving jobs. So there are no clued-in people coming in from the outside to tell Google how far behind they are, how utterly mediocre they have become as an eng org.

He says the problem is that they can't use Claude Code because it's the enemy, and Gemini has never been good enough to capture people's workflows like Claude has, so basically agentic coding just never really took off inside Google. They're all just plodding along, completely oblivious to what's happening out there right now.

Not only is Google not able to do anything about it, they don't seem to be aware of the problem at all. I'm having major flashbacks to fifty years ago as a kid at the La Brea Tar Pits, asking, "why can't they just climb out?"

My Google friend and I had this conversation over a month ago. I didn't share it because I wanted to look around a bit, and see if it's really as bad as all that. I've been talking to people from dozens of companies since then. And yeah. It's as bad as all that.

Google is about average. Some companies at the bottom have near-zero AI adoption and can't even get budget for AI. They may have moats and high walls, but the horde is coming for them all the same.

And then there are a few companies I've met recently who are *amazingly* leaned in to AI adoption. One category-leader company just cancelled IntelliJ for a thousand engineers. That's an incredibly bold move, one of many they're making towards agentic adoption. In my opinion, that company is setting themselves up for a _huge_ W.

As for the rest, well, it's the Great Siloing. Everyone's flying blind. With nobody moving companies, no company knows where they stand on the AI adoption curve. Nobody knows how they're doing compared to everyone else.

Half of them just check a box: "We enabled {Copilot/Cursor} for everyone!" Cue smug celebrations. They think this is like getting SOC2 compliance, just a thing they turn on and now it's "solved." And they don't realize that they've done effectively nothing at all.

All because of a hiring freeze.

[Shubham Saboo @Saboo_Shubham_]

This is getting way too real!

I can now get on a video call with my OpenClaw Agents to chat with them face to face.

All i need to do is to send them a Google meet invite.

[Ryan Carson @ryancarson]

https://t.co/72MBLeCASo

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

Stories like this make me wonder more and more what the future software company will look like. Why buy software you can build in a day?

[Roman Elizarov @relizarov]

🧵 The software has changed. Here’s a story that blew my mind today.

I replaced a paid software package, AIDA64, that I had been faithfully licensing with a custom version I wrote in less than a day using Codex.

Read on.

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

Do you cringe when you see em or en dashes in an email? And is it more professional to strip away AI signatures, even when the content is AI-generated?

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

@ryancarson said on O'Reilly AI Codecon today said that a solo dev should spend at least $200 a month for AI and a startup should pay at least $1k to $2k a month per developer. If you are a solo developer trying to get a startup off the ground, do you need to spend that much? #AI

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

When the process isn't always a one size fits all. Do we do this at work all too often? We shouldn't assume every team is a copy paste for how we should work.

[Gain of Fauci @DschlopesIsBack]

I’ve probably watched this over 100 times now and the ending still kills me every time 😂😭

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

Any ChatGPT fan fiction out there that describes what the future water situation will be like with all our AI use?

[Sasquatch Unfiltered @sasquatchvlogtv]

This one is pure comedy gold 😂

[TraderSZ @trader1sz]

Stop what you are doing and watch this

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

Human Effort vs. AI

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

I know I'm late here but this blows my mind that Clawde helped plan a success military operation reducing the operation size.

I'm not sure how I feel about the governments decision about Claude.

https://t.co/6wWAG3OaDi

[Aaron Levie @levie]

This is counterintuitive for some, which is why there’s a paradox named after it. But if you lower the cost of something that was previously supply constrained, demand for that thing goes up. Software engineering is just one of the easiest examples to contemplate.

The process goes like this: every small business, every IT team, every large enterprise sees that engineering can now drive vastly more output. They then start to consider all the new things they can build or automate. They even test building prototypes themselves.

They only get so far with that approach because they realize there are still 50 other tasks that go into building software and maintaining it. So they start to hire more engineers to do that work. All of this for work they never would have considered automating or having software for if AI didn’t exist.

So yes, automating tasks, in plenty of fields, will lead to demand for experts, not less.

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

If English is your second language, are you at a disadvantage when it comes to using AI? Thoughts?

https://t.co/v34R0jPVc0

[Avery Duffin @DuffinAvery]

Will AI make us dumb and lazy?