Adam Hutchinson

engineer @linear

paying attention

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

This is great.

AI mostly agrees with whatever direction you give it. Instinct and taste differentiate.

[Juliette @shedsgns]

i've been thinking a lot about what AI means for creativity, design, and building your own things, so sharing some thoughts on the topic
read: https://t.co/Kdi15UfQW4

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

@Bulvarpress Fun level in first light

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

Talk is cheap, but silence is expensive:

https://t.co/wl1rumDeYE

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

Interesting observation from writing and sharing publicly:

It gets the flywheel moving.

Each thing you share builds the muscle. The next idea comes more naturally. The little voice telling you not to do it gets quieter.

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

Sad

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose".

Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups.

- The company works 7 days per week.

- Founder (@nico_laqua) lives and sleeps in the office.

- He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7.

- 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo.

Today I went behind the scenes with Nico, who has used this culture to scale the company to a $2.6BN valuation in just two years.

My condensed notes below:

1. If You Are Not Working 7 Days Per Week, You Are Going to Lose:

Whatever you can get done in 5 days, you'll get more done in 6 and 7. If you are trying to solve the world’s hardest problems, a standard 5-day workweek will not cut it.

2. Work Trials Repel the Mediocre:

Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock-watchers.

3. Lead from the Front Lines

You can’t demand 7-day weeks while sitting on a yacht. Nico sleeps 3–4 hours a night on a mattress inside the office. If you want your troops to bleed, you have to be in the trenches with them.

4. Culture Only Means One Thing: Winning

Forget superficial jargon like "hackers" or "ex-founders." Strip away the corporate fluff. A great startup culture is aggressively optimized around one single word: Winning.

5. Lifespan vs. Victories

Building something world-historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50, or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. "I would rather measure my lifespan in victories."

6. Reject the Comfort of "Quiet Quitting."

If you are operating in a hyper-growth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every single week, you are quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility.

Corgi isn't for everyone—and that’s exactly the point.

[Soleio @soleio]

Hari Seldon.

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

We were titans

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Sony was so suspicious of this game they sent someone to the studio to check the footage wasn't faked. A tiny team had built a PlayStation game too big to fit inside the console, then taught the machine to read it off a spinning disc, piece by piece, as you played.

The PlayStation came with two megabytes of memory. After the basics took their cut, only about one and a quarter megabytes were free for the level you were playing. One photo on your phone is bigger than that. Crash levels held far more than that, so they could never sit in memory all at once.

The fix came from one of the studio's programmers, Andy Gavin. He built a system that grabbed the level off the disc in tiny chunks as Crash ran, always pulling in the next stretch of the world a beat before you reached it. Then he went further and arranged the data on the disc by hand, so each piece sat right where the laser would land at the moment the game needed it. Lean in close and you could hear the disc drive whirring and clicking without a break, feeding the game as you moved.

That nonstop reading is what worried Sony. Every move Crash made meant the drive had to fetch new data, and a disc drive can only be read so many times before it wears out. A Sony exec asked how many reads finishing the game would take. It was more than the drive was built to survive. He went quiet, told the team to keep that to themselves, and helped get the game approved anyway.

Even with all that, the game barely fit, right up to the final days before the deadline. The team kept rewriting the same lines of code in slightly different ways, shaving off a few bytes here, a few there, until the first game fit with about four bytes left over. Four bytes is not even enough to spell the word Crash.

Warped, the 1998 game on screen, was the third and most ambitious version of all this. A jet ski level, a biplane, a motorcycle, a tiger ride along the Great Wall of China, all running on the same little machine that could barely hold one ordinary level. It sold around 7 million copies. The three original games together passed 21 million and turned Crash into one of the best-selling Western game series ever in Japan, a market Western games almost never cracked.

A studio that had to trick a console into running its game built one of the best-selling series the original PlayStation ever had.

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

AI is ever so slightly better. Soon it will be ever so slightly better again.

[Theo - t3.gg @theo]

Opus 4.8 is here. It's pretty good. Is Anthropic back on top?

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

@threepointone Linear, thankfully, is a great place to work

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

Great place to be

[Cristina Cordova @cjc]

Everything above Linear on this list is 5X to 1,290X our size in headcount. If you believe small teams build better software, we're hiring. https://t.co/S6tAljq11R

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

@ConnerBean 👀

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

Haven’t opened GitHub for a while

[Linear @linear]

Code review, but faster.

Introducing Diffs. A new way to review PRs, directly inside Linear.

• Realtime updates
• Guided reviews with Al (beta)
• Focused notifications
• Iterate with coding agents
• Threaded comments

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

@sandislonjsak Communication is part of being a good engineer.

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

@romxdev Yep, https://t.co/bsn5cwzEbV

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

Sheeeesh

magick the-curse-of-taste-og.png \
-resize 1200x630^ -gravity center -extent 1200x630 \
-colorspace sRGB \
-strip \
-interlace none \
-quality 85 \
the-curse-of-taste-og.jpg

https://t.co/UVL0yTaQBV

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

So much inconsistency in Gmail's header.

Some hovers are instant, others animated.

Even the background colors differ between icons.

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

Wrote a bit about it https://t.co/X0z64daHZG

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

Fought for my life to get an og image to render.

Turns out you have to get the magick spell right

https://t.co/V3HpKHzb7R

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

Sort of feels like splitting up code to match the org structure is a one way ticket to runaway complexity

Had fun with this a while ago

https://t.co/bsn5cwzEbV

[terminally onλine εngineer @tekbog]

they are called microfrontends with backend for frontend architecture underneath and you can see big tech political struggles in that UI right there

each engineer, designer and pm had to make giant compromises for that user experience

big tech is beautiful

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

A decade ago I interviewed at Intercom.

I was asked for an example of a product I thought was really great.

I picked Slack.

It does its job incredibly well. The surface area is still tight and well considered.

Despite countless competitors and industry shifts, most people still default to it instinctively. That says a lot.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

I’d say Slack. Haven’t really experienced those issues you mention. Unless my internet is very bad.

iMessage/whatsapp overly phone and counterparty focused so I’m more often wondering if the message actually got delivered or not and if the problem is me or them.

Slack is more of a server and it doesn’t send the message if it doesn’t work.

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

Good teams revisit where they’re going just enough and how they’re getting there all the time

[Adam Hutchinson @adjohu]

@daveyheuser