Will Hopkins

i like distributed systems and motorcycles

compute @vercel, prev. @freestyle_dev, yc s24

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

Claude deceives us

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

Many such cases

[Thanos @gentengineer]

@QuinnyPig I know a guy he would unironically mention Layer 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... in every conversation

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

My team is goated

[Vercel Developers @vercel_dev]

Sandbox now supports drives in early access

▪︎ Storage separated from compute
▪︎ Mount on any path with 𝙳𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎.𝚐𝚎𝚝𝙾𝚛𝙲𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚝𝚎
▪︎ Keep agent memories across sandboxes

Sign up ↓ https://t.co/o0ODXM6MZa

[Evis Drenova @evisdrenova]

re: 996

the whole point is that you're not supposed to require it, it's supposed to just happen

if it happens, then you have a winning culture - the people really care

if you have to require and enforce it, you'll get mediocre performance from performative employees

[dax @thdxr]

if you're setting up a new linux machine pick btrfs instead of ex4

trust me

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

My only take on this is that it’s kinda annoying when I want to check out what games are popular rn and end up having to scroll through pages of anime porn to get to the normal non-porn games

[Pirat_Nation 🔴 @Pirat_Nation]

A new report has revealed a heated debate inside Valve over pornographic games on Steam.

According to former employees, Valve’s top lawyer suggested the company take a stronger role in moderating adult content on the platform.

Gabe Newell reportedly disagreed, saying, “What the f*** do I pay you for if that’s your opinion?”

The quote comes from accounts shared by former employees and has not been publicly confirmed by Valve.

If this is true, Gabe Newell is even more based.

[Andrew Qu @andrewqu]

I’m not even burnt out but this refreshed me

Must read!

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

When I founded my last company, we paid ourselves minimum wage in SF. About 64k/year. While we ended up shutting down, if we had hired we would have been paying 200k+. After all, you need to make your company attractive to work at- being a founding engineer is a huge risk, and as much as people want to believe that the mission and long-term potential of 1-2% equity are that attraction, they just do not offset the expectations of that position without a somewhat attractive salary.

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

Founders definitely shouldn’t have excessive salary- the equity should be the motivator. For the founding employees though, using this logic will result in employee churn as people inevitably realize they’re being underpaid and were naive for accepting founder pay with less equity

[Preston @metapreston]

In 2014, Peter Thiel wrote that a startup employee's salary should not exceed $150k

That's $204k today.

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

Every devtools company is suddenly trying to become the everything company.

Is this feature creep at a global scale, or are tightly integrated ecosystems that much of a moat in the current AI-driven market?

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

@senjoregg @valigo Tbf delaying the development of computers would also delay the creation of GraphQL which I think we can all agree would be a win

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

Boris Cherny says his best tip for getting the most out of Claude Code is to use auto mode.

I would say my biggest tip for getting the most out of Claude Code is to switch to Codex.

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

Why does codex like do call configuration “knobs”? Where did this come from? There’s no way anyone actually has a ‘struct Knobs’ in any codebase but I’ve seen codex try to do this like 3 times

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

Personally have experienced this kind of thing from the opposite perspective- if the office sucks to work at (uncomfortable, dirty, etc.), I’m gonna be in the office less

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

Spending some money is absolutely worth making your company a comfortable, enjoyable place to work for your employees, especially if you’re expecting early-stage hours and commitment

Also it’s SF, nobody is buying brand new Aerons

[Marc Randolph @marcrandolph]

One of my reliable signs that an early-stage company is in trouble: I walk in a few weeks after their seed round closes, and every employee is sitting in a $1,000 Aeron chair behind an automatic standing desk.

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

@spencerpogo @owenology Yeah, solved by giving each person a separate hosted repo with auth instead of just a template to clone

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

@owenology Also for the record, don’t use ai to cheat. It will make you retarded

I just don’t like tracking like this

[Will Hopkins @illothy]

@owenology So there’s an unauthenticated telemetry endpoint? Just spam it with inaccurate reports, they’ll stop paying attention real quick