Filippo Rivolta

Software developer in fintech. Cofounder @ Building Code, AI & shipping things 🇮🇹

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@SahilBloom @drjeremylondon works for code too... nobody finishes "rewrite the payments module"
you finish "move this one function and keep the tests green". then the next one

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@shadcn a11y is exactly where agents cut corners... it looks right, then a screen reader hits a div with an onClick
baking it into the component behavior is probably the only way it survives

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@housecor and the 2 things are usually a null check and a variable name...
the real question, does this need to exist at all, still needs a human

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@amasad writing code on a phone still feels wrong to me...
reviewing what an agent wrote though? that fits a phone screen weirdly well

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@jasonlk same thing happens with senior devs who get promoted... the best ones still want to write code and get quietly sad in meetings
hire for what they actually like doing

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@dhh local is where it clicks for me for the boring stuff... autocomplete, renames, quick scripts
no real reason that has to leave the laptop

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@tdinh_me reading hn on a plane with no wifi is peak developer vacation... you pretend to rest and still read 40 comments about rust

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@mattpocockuk the setup skill is the smart part... half the reason nobody records demos is fighting with obs for 20 min first
if that's gone people might actually do it

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

moved daevio ads from reddit to meta today...
the reddit people were picky but the ones who landed actually read the page
curious if instagram scrollers do the same or bounce in 3 seconds

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

friday afternoon... the most senior thing i do all week is not merging the "small fix" at 4pm
it'll still be there on monday. so will i

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@kentcdodds human slop was always there... we just called it legacy code

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@paulg this is why tutorials never stuck for me... what i actually learned was always the bug i had to fix alone late at night
ai makes it really easy to skip that part. not sure that's good

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@hnshah most of what i know about code i learned by shipping something bad and then having to maintain it...
the maintaining part is where the lesson actually is

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@tdinh_me curious what goes first... usually half the bill is something someone spun up for a test and forgot about
agents are weirdly good at finding those

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@jasonlk a cap the agent can override is just a notification with extra steps...
what you actually want is it asking first and someone saying y at 3am. which nobody wants either lol

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@GergelyOrosz the thundering herd part is the scary one... you fix the thing, bring servers back, and your own clients knock them over again
retries without jitter are basically a ddos you wrote yourself

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@mattpocockuk this would save so many review rounds... half my questions on big PRs are just "ok but what happens when you click it"
a 40 second screen recording answers that before anyone opens the diff

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

building https://t.co/bisuJasFRg next to a day job teaches you one thing fast... there's no time for features nobody asked for
every hour has to point at a real user. weirdly that's made me better at the day job too

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

every big outage ends up the same way... servers come back, every client retries at the same second, servers die again
in fintech you learn to be paranoid about this
backoff with jitter is boring right up until it's the only thing that matters

[Filippo Rivolta @filirivolta]

@alexalbert__ this matches what i keep running into...
the model isn't bad, it's just missing the thing that was said in a meeting and never written down
closing that gap is most of the work now