Denis Stetskov

Engineering Manager | Writing about tech reality, not hype | From the Trenches newsletter

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

Volkswagen: $52B. 9 million cars. $320B revenue.

Cursor: $50B. Wraps API calls around a model it didn't build.

The economics say utility. The multiples say magic.

https://t.co/ACxsfRpSqa

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

Anthropic's whole brand was one binding safety pledge.

The month it got expensive, they deleted it.

Then filed for an IPO at $965b, and 3 days later said the industry should slow down.

The rule was theirs when it sold. Once it cost them, it's the industry's problem
https://t.co/GnoQKo8KLZ

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

Uber burned its AI coding budget in four months, then capped engineers at $1,500/mo per tool.

It rebuilt the exact ceiling it spent a year tearing down.

The bill never measured productivity. It measured who burned the most tokens to win a leaderboard.

https://t.co/NR2GM64rvQ

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

@billbrown Still on 4.5/4.6 ;)

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

Opus 4.8 is out. Does anyone still care?

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

@badlogicgames Cause nothing changed from 4.5

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

@GergelyOrosz @thdxr Mo Salah?

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

96% on Anthropic's stage Monday. 99% at Investor Day Wednesday. It went up before the slides changed.
Broke down every primary source behind Spotify's AI coding narrative.
What Honk actually does, what 15 years of infrastructure look like, and why none of it transfers.
https://t.co/i6fQtis31V

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

canvas got hacked through a free teacher account. 30 million students. patched it once, hackers came back a week later. put a ransom note on the login page. during finals. the entry point was a feature nobody thought to audit. it always is.

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

GM just fired 600 IT people and is hiring "AI-native developers" instead. They call it a skills swap. The people who know how GM's systems actually work leave. The people who know AI but have never seen the systems arrive. The knowledge just vanishes. Nobody notices until production breaks.

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

Shell shortage nearly cost Ukraine the war. FPV drones fixed that. Then Russia put them on fiber optic cable and they became unjammable. Now AI data centers are buying up the same fiber. Price went from $4 to $50/km. A Starlink terminal costs less than one spool.
https://t.co/VSDzgCMohy

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

Palantir CEO is in Kyiv today meeting Zelensky. 100+ companies training 80+ AI models on real combat data. drone interception, target detection. While Silicon Valley argues about benchmarks, Ukraine is testing AI where failure means people die.

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

@GergelyOrosz Why this is bothering you? We earned what we deserved

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

https://t.co/kOlmOmr2X3

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

We trained AI on 518 million GitHub repos.

Most of them are student projects, abandoned prototypes, and unreviewed Stack Overflow pastes.

Then we were surprised that the output is mediocre.

The model isn't broken. It learned exactly what we taught it.

https://t.co/8u2V6egtvz

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

@GaryMarcus We told them, no one wanna listen

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

@OwenGregorian wow, thank you

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

@GergelyOrosz Amen

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

@GaryMarcus https://t.co/W0cIzSB3rn 70 opened position in SE

[Denis Stetskov @ftt_tech]

@GaryMarcus He is mentally disabled. Makes no sense to take his opinion seriously.