Ethan Glenn

Builder

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

In a word of AI business hype @leerob has another based take that I completely agree with.

[Lee Robinson @leerob]

"Engineering, product, and design are all merging into a 'builder' role"

Yeah... I'm not so sure. This feels like an oversimplification and podcast talking point. Reality is a lot more complex.

Even with 1000 "Member of Technical Staff" titles, someone still has to wake up and care 100x more about Product or Design than anyone else. It is their Main Thing™

That's not to say MTS titles are universally bad, but I think they're an example of this 'builder' talking point that's become bastardized.

AI and coding agents have made generating code easy and yet... you're in for a world of pain if non-engineers ship a bunch of slop and don't have great engineers to tame the complexity.

The SF hivemind has a tendency to overfit what works at startups for every company. And to be fair, sometimes this is true! Startups can be a leading indicator for how the industry is changing and often cause disruption.

However, it is going to be incredibly hard to disrupt the extremely human parts of corporate jobs. You really think there's going to be a PM who also does some engineering and design on the side at JPMorgan Chase?

This is true for the simple parts of most jobs, like people wanting to have ownership over something and do good work, move up a career ladder, support their family, get paid well, make an honest living...

And also the hard parts: internal politics, some critical business system that has a bus factor of 1 which has been running for 15 years and isn't documented anywhere because it's that guy's job security. The real world has a lot of this stuff.

It's easy to pontificate about all roles collapsing but it's actually really nice to have a specific person or team who is an expert in one thing that you can work with. I don't expect that to change. Further, I think AI disruption to knowledge work will take decades to play out because it is more fundamental to the human condition (e.g. sociological/organizational) than pure intelligence.

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@leerob Lee you have the tendency to say things that resonate exactly with how I'm feeling. How do you do it? 😂

On a side note this is super true and I've felt all of this recently.

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@codingstark Ya true. I mostly use Vercel or Firebase App Hosting (Cloud Run)

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

Working with Opus 4.8 this last week has been a dream. It's at least just as good as 5.5 if not better in most cases for me. Huge improvement from 4.7. Great work @ClaudeDevs

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@josesaezmerino Not been my experience. Codex still does weird things and always ends up writing useless tests I never asked for. Claude does what I ask. If your budget is $20/mo then Codex might be better for you, but anything after I think Claude performs better.

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@kentcdodds Claude: "1-2 Weeks"
Me:

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@codewithantonio I can just tool my existing backend endpoints using Google's ADK, and now I don't have to manage a whole separate tool for accessing the platform. Just did this for a client a few months ago. Now everything goes through our existing auth and infra.

[Nathan Clark @nathanclark_]

it’s in gemini, just create it in ai studio. oh, that’s for your personal google one account. for workspace you need gemini business. no, not gemini advanced, that’s ai pro now. unless you need ai ultra. oh agents? you do that in spark actually. no, not gemini api managed agents, that’s different. for coding use jules. unless you mean the agentic ide, that’s antigravity. no, that’s the old antigravity, download the new one. actually gemini cli is being deprecated, use antigravity cli. no the flash model is smarter than the pro model. unless you need pro. if it’s video, use flow. no, flow uses veo. no, nano banana is images. actually that’s in gemini now. unless you’re in search, then it’s ai mode. no, research is notebooklm. anyway it’s all very simple.

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

I was pretty vocal online and offline about my dissatisfaction with Claude and Claude Code a few months ago, but I have to say the last three weeks have been awesome! Redeemed @ClaudeDevs @claudeai

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@karrisaarinen @kunaljeweller @linear The desktop app resource usage is crazy high.

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@schanuelmiller @tan_stack @tannerlinsley Ya I'm still working on it. I'm thinking it has to with how components are mounted on navigation. The weird thing that React Router didn't have this issue and all the tests passed.

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

Trying to migrate a client site to TanStack Router, and it's causing all our existing E2E Playwright tests to fail. @tan_stack @tannerlinsley any tips?

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@schanuelmiller @tan_stack @tannerlinsley It has to do with the shadcn (radix) modals. Finding and element in Playwright and clicking a button in the modal broke. It had to do with `.click()` I keep getting timeout errors. For some reason `.click({ force: true })` makes it work for some reason.

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@kentcdodds DataThink might be interested! Let's chat

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@BacLeodiv Never left.

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@stats_feed Working with project managers

[Swizec Teller @Swizec]

The other day @kentcdodds asked me "How do you talk to customers if you dont' have customers yet?"

and in the moment (it was early) I forgot my typical answer 👉 if you can't find customers to talk to, how will you find customers to sell to?

Talk to people first. Build 2nd

[Ethan Glenn @eglenn_dev]

@collinsworth55 I was there yesterday. Beautiful temple!