Obie Fernandez

CTO @zardotapp ✤ Partner at ­✤ Bestselling Author ✤ DJ/Producer (aka Kyberian, KNBI)

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

Honored to have not one but two (!) tracks featured on the latest @ILikeItPure compilation album, including "Foreplay" another previously unreleased collaboration with @richsolarstone himself. Also kind of cool to hear "Naked" mixed in between Eelke Kleijn and Tiesto, a couple of my musical heroes!

Wanted to express my sincerest gratitude to Rich and Paula for their consistent support, mentorship, and above all such a genuine friendship. 🥰

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

You think 40s are cool? Try 50s

I’m secure and happy, in the best shape of my life, with 30 years of professional experience under my belt… and my kids are in their 20s. Let’s fucking go

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

The founder in their 40s with taste and discernment is the new gentleman unicorn founder

Because there can be 100x to 1000x of them working at their beck and call via agents and software factories all the time

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

Hate to admit it but….

[Raoul Pal @RaoulGMI]

I don't know what the hell they did with Opus 5 but it's an absolute shitshow of a model. It just endlessly makes mistakes, goes off down rabbit holes, doesn't finish tasks. Creates new tasks you never asked it for and just ends up in an endless loop. It's a mess. @AnthropicAI

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

Sometimes people ask me for career advice, and the only thing I can say that applies across basically every role is don’t work for an insecure manager.

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@GregMolnar Today? Where have you been all year heh

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@mudirshin @TheLongApe I just bought 2k shares.. accumulating

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@PratikPatel_227 That's cool.

We just switched to self-hosted Mattermost early this year and were off to the races.

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

Cracks me up that all Slack has to do is allow us to add agents without a human-in-the-loop (instead of the ridiculous backflips required to add a bot) and they wouldn't be getting their lunch eaten by the likes of https://t.co/loKvxUPlzE et al.

You don't need an entirely new platform to host your agents. You just need Slack to treat them like fellow people. But of course they won't do that, because then... they would have to pay monthly per-seat subscription fees just like human users? Bizarre.

[Naval @naval]

When software was expensive - thin, horizontal, best-of-breed software stacks extracted rents across every business.

Now that software is cheap - value moves to vertically integrated businesses that deliver opinionated end-to-end experiences.

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@simonw /goal is still very nice though

btw check DMs... ;)

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@pdp we value different things I guess

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@pdp Try adding 45 in a month

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@MarkRuffishere @pankajkumar_dev Try @zardotapp

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@hunkybill duh yeah

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@johnbarker My agent fleet orchestration platform fully provisions new bots to Mattermost via API with zero configuration needed on the Mattermost side. They simply appear. No new api keys needed or any of that nonsense, it just works

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

the human review pipeline, not agent throughput, is now the constraint

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@theo Maybe I'm cynical, but this strikes me as some twisted-ass marketing campaign

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@billeisenhauer @rob__race Aww shucks, thanks Bill

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@dneighbors My team is starting to work more and more in chat just driving autonomous AI agents on public channels. It's an adjustment but for a lot of work it's better than doing claude code on local machines

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

@Support I boosted this post last week for $100

It's the first time I've ever tried to do that and now I regret it because nothing has happened https://t.co/nF1cZwxGz8

Help!

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

Today at @rubyconf I mentioned a slew of open source projects that we’ve published at @zardotapp

Here’s the link https://t.co/DOP1UWES7n

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @Netflix's Chief Product and Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone:

1. Elizabeth believes that “systems thinking” is becoming the most important skill in the AI era. In engineering and product, this means people who can see across business domains and build the common capabilities that let many teams move quickly. In design, it means experience designers who create templates and design systems so that non-designers can ship work that stays coherent and on-brand. The underlying driver is velocity: when more people are doing more types of work at higher speed, you need to be good at building common scaffolding.

2. Systems thinking is learnable: zoom out one level from your specific problem. Given a task, step back one click—what bigger problem does this serve the business, will it scale across the product surface areas, should it become a platform capability? The companion habit: do your job in a way that helps your manager do theirs. This will force you to think about how all the pieces fit together.

3. Expect a storming phase before a forming phase. The role confusion people feel right now (“What is my job anymore?”) is the predictable middle of any transformative technology. Elizabeth’s advice: focus on high-quality source-of-truth data, guardrails on what ships, and constant internal reinforcement that humans own what they create.

4. The top AI labs converged on Netflix’s culture. High agency, high talent density, top-of-market pay, bottom-up thinking, fast experiments—the traits Lenny hears constantly from AI labs were in Netflix’s early culture deck. Elizabeth’s explanation: excellence comes from hiring exceptional people, trusting them to do great work, and holding them accountable.

5. Netflix’s culture is centered around building “excellence as an operating system.” High talent density, radical transparency, context not control, and the keeper’s test. These work together to create an environment of trust and accountability, without bureaucracy. But it’s also uncomfortable. It requires tolerating people making decisions you’d make differently, resisting the reflex to add process when things go wrong, and letting people carry the weight of their own choices. Elizabeth describes the hardest part as “being comfortable in that discomfort.”

6. The keeper’s test is as much about recognizing great people as it is about removing the wrong ones. The test—“If this person told me they were leaving, would I fight to keep them?”—is often cited in its difficult form: the moment you realize someone isn’t the right fit. But Elizabeth uses it predominantly as an entry point for honest performance conversations that are deeply positive. Most of the time the answer is “I would fight so hard to keep you,” which creates the opening to articulate strengths, discuss impact, and name what’s working. Good feedback hygiene needs a forcing function; the keeper’s test provides one.

7. Specialization is trending down—adaptable generalists are trending up. We’re shifting away from narrow stack-layer specialists (pure frontend, pure backend) toward people who can navigate fluidly across layers. The same logic applies to business domain knowledge: the mindset of “I’m a payments expert, full stop” is less valuable than “I know payments well enough and I’m willing to imagine what the future version of this looks like.” The meta-skill is learning to learn, not locking into a single lane.

8. Netflix’s approach to AI fluency is a universal principle, not a level-specific expectation. Rather than rewriting career ladders to specify what AI competence looks like at each level, Netflix added a single aspiration across all roles and levels: AI fluency. What fluency means varies by function and seniority, but the non-negotiable minimum is the same everywhere—an open-minded, experimental mindset, genuine curiosity, and comfort with ambiguity.