Peter

I love programming, lifting weights and reading books.

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@mattpocockuk I’ve been using it to get back in the interview grind and results have been great. It’s constantly finding stuff for me to practice at the edge of my ability.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Trusting any single AI vendor seems like an increasingly high risk for any team or company.

When using models: use it behind a router where it's trivial to switch providers as soon as one tries to force unacceptable T&Cs like Anthropic with Fable. When using harnesses: do the same. Use ones where models are trivial to switch out, like OpenCode, Factory, Cursor and many others.

Putting all your dependencies on one provider increasingly feels like a massive business risk that makes little to no sense to take.

Unless you have a hobby project, of course. Then convenience is all that matters. But if you're a professional, make it dead simple to offramp from one provider to the other!

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@GergelyOrosz Nico’s post was written on 4 hours of sleep and it shows

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.

And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.

Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.

This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.

I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.

Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.

With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.

My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.

There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.

Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.

I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.

Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

[Addy Osmani @addyosmani]

https://t.co/jKCIAEzai7

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@randomrecruiter Over half my team got cut for “budget reasons” on the same week the parent company announced a mid 9 figures AI infra deal

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@NateHelmig @ThePrimeagen Mythos /goal make no mistakes

[gaut @0xgaut]

he's become fully reliant on LLMs to code. now increase the price by 1000%

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

I think we need to acknowledge that VC, in general, rewards (and has always rewarded!) growth above anything else. This is why "fake it till you make it" is how many VC-funded startups succeed, and then get glorified for it.

AI is a tool that allows to build software that LOOKS correct from the outside, even though it's barely held together by duct tape from the inside. The bet is that startups embracing it will have the time and space to fix it up.

Just look at Delve: a Y Combinator complaince startup that sold compliance, but did none of it; it was a full-on marketing play. They still raised $30M+, and it was perhaps bad luck that a disgruntled customer exposed the actual reality (no real AI usage like claimed, no working integrations, and def not much complaince work beyond rubber stamping).

In another world, they raise another $100M in a few months, then proceed to fix the inside to start to match the external, outrageous promises (and tone down those promises)

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@0xlelouch_ I really enjoy your writing. Always filled with high signal advice and ideas

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@wesbos Waaaaaaait a minute pal! Only pay to find the issues after you /simplify the slop you summoned into existence

The order of the tokens matter or so my local VC said

[dax @thdxr]

genie is out of the bottle

everyone hitting the magic button

button puts your brain in a state of laziness

that seeps into all your processes and they get skipped

we talk about this all the time and still our team is struggling with it

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@oliverhenry Wow I just came across this and it would be very irresponsible on my part not to try it out

[dax @thdxr]

everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code

here's what things actually look like

- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping

- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life

- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend

- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon

- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real

- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@Jacobsklug @openclaw @Lovable OS

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@AJA_Cortes I’m trying to research reta but don’t know where to source it. Do you know a good one?

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@mattpocockuk Sign me up

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@wagslane Simply the best learning platform out there. Nothing compares.

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@mischavdburg Linux

[Peter @PeterAltMe]

@budapp Let’s see if it can really replace me this time 😂
Send some gas to try it out please