Jordan Hagan

Loves a good problem.

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

The RAM shortage is getting crazy. I was speccing up a platform build about ~2 weeks ago on Hetzner, then came back to it today to finish it off... oof:

AX102 — 16c / 128 GB / 4TB NVMe: €144 → €452/mo (~3.1×)
AX162 — 48x / 256 GB / 4TB NVMe: €244 → €842/mo (~3.4×)

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

Been thinking about very low cost / free alternatives to SaaS a lot recently. My thinking is tending towards downloadable desktop/mobile apps being the best fit for most single user software.

Download and run it locally. No cloud backend to worry about. No pager.

Beautiful.

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

Jeez what a buzz kill 🤣

[David @Apostle_David]

What Elon calls the future, God has already marked for fire.

Elon talks about future tech as if humanity will have the time to reach it. But God already holds the keys to mass, energy, antimatter, and every law of physics.

Man speaks of future technologies; God has already written the end. Humanity will not ascend, it will be interrupted. The age will collapse long before humanity ascends.

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

I'm confused. Software keeps going up in price. But Moores Law continues as expected, and the cost of building software has never looked better thanks to AI.

So it's not the cost to run it, or the cost to build it.

What gives?

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

I haven't heard someone say riced in years. It reminds me of https://t.co/sc8yJdVW9K, forum posts by Gentoo users in the early 2000s.

Never forget: compiling your kernel and userspace from source is the path to true performance.

Naturally, I ran Gentoo when I was a teenager.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I think the funniest recent interaction was standing in line for coffee in SF and someone stops and goes "WAIT. WAIT HERE." (no other context yet). I'm in line so I'm not going anywhere. He runs back with his open laptop to show me Ghostty riced the fuck out. It was beautiful.

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

I was at Halter back in 2017 where I lead software engineering for the MVP, alongside a lot of great people.

Every year now I continue to watch the valuation go up with each new round, and it brings back a lot of fun memories.

Great to see them continuing to kick massive goals.

[Bloomberg @business]

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is backing a company bringing AI to cow herding at a $2 billion valuation https://t.co/QHg8xT8s2c

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

@0xSammy @kelanoo We used to joke that we needed to start a pension fund for border collies for when we put them all out of business.

Now there's this as well: https://t.co/bpf5uHcfJZ

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

@0xSammy I built the software team for Halter around ~7 years or so ago, and lead the development of the MVP.

Frankly, building and funding hardware products (Halter was not my first) is hard enough without having to worry about token drama at the same time.

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

@jasperflux It brings back lots of fun memories every time they make the news! Was a great product to work on, with a great team of people. Love to see Halter continuing to kill it.

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

@0xNairolf @0xNairolf which communities do you think are the best to engage with for early stage pre-pmf products these days?

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

I don't know any VCs that are still bullish on pure SaaS at this point.

At the same time, I'm convinced we're about to enter the golden age of "mom and pop" software companies.

Maybe it's time for a new SaaS investment thesis if moonshots are no longer the way.

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

@ThogardPvP @gakonst @karpathy Bizarrely I just started playing around with some related ideas today. Have you bugged my office? 👀

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

This was a nice read. Acquired did an episode on Rolex last year as well which is a great listen if you enjoy this sort of thing.

https://t.co/ca0EuzR1kT

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The Brand Age: https://t.co/U6z3g6ZQGd

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Citadel Securities published this graph showing a strange phenomenon.

Job postings for software engineers are actually seeing a massive spike.

Classic example of the Jevons paradox. When AI makes coding cheaper, companies actually may need a lot more software engineers, not fewer.

When software is cheaper to build, companies naturally want to build a lot more of it. Businesses are now putting software into industries and tools where it was simply too expensive before.

---

Chart from

citadelsecurities .com/news-and-insights/2026-global-intelligence-crisis/

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

gshmonad🫶

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

@_gvan

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

@i_am_mar0 @preballin this is my new favourite thing

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

Supervising an AI agent feels like managing a junior (with a couple of PhDs):

- Set context and constraints.
- Review output and ask for rewrites.
- Gradually increase autonomy.

The switch from “doing” to “guiding” reduced my context-switching tax more than I expected.

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

The ROI isn’t just speed—it’s transfer.

Prompting patterns I used for:
- Survey design → also work for interview guides.
- Terraform reviews → also work for policy checks.
- Meeting digests → also work for PRDs.

Learn once, apply everywhere.

[Jordan Hagan @ephess]

You’re an expert at doing your work without AI.
You’re a beginner at doing it with AI.
Just like everyone else.

That was my hardest realisation.