Jai Jalan

Founder at Better - Building & Scaling Software Products | Operate ( - AI for production RCA | Hands-on Operator | Ex-Microsoft | IIT Alum

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

15 years writing software. 8 years building Better.

One thing I kept seeing across every engineering team we worked with:

Senior engineers spending hours on production investigation. Not building. Investigating.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

Sat in on a client session. Three engineers. Same problem. All using AI. All got working code.

None working from the same picture of the system.

AI amplifies whatever you start with. Fuzzy spec, confident garbage.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

Another Dr. visit, another disappointment.

Called at 9 am, took appointment for 10:40 am, arrived at 10:15 am - everything as per instructions. No Dr., and still atleast 10 patient in front.

This happens everytime.

High regards for the profession, wish they would respect patient time as well.

@JainENT Jaipur.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

https://t.co/HwgdbIecFB

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

@mattpocockuk Saw this play out with 3 engineers building the same feature in parallel. All used AI. All worked from prototypes. None built the same thing. The prototype fixed the format problem. Not the shared-picture problem.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

@QuinnyPig Every time us-east-1 does this, teams find out which services had implicit single-AZ assumptions nobody documented. The AZ failure is the easy part of the postmortem.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

@rseroter Do you find debugging AI-generated code demands a different kind of attention since you didn't write it?

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

nine years running client engineering teams gave us a close enough picture of how incident resolution actually plays out to build something precise around it. curious if you think process intimacy like that can be substituted with good observation - or if you really have to live in the workflow.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

@davepl1968 opposite experience from the lazy commit side - had a commit that just said "fix." bug resurfaced months later. two senior engineers spent two days reconstructing what the original change was supposed to do. the ask-why culture in reviews prevents exactly that.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

@mitsuhiko had a client ask for a metrics dashboard before the underlying data pipeline was reliable. built a beautiful chart of wrong numbers. the real problem hid behind the visualization for another month.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

@elonmusk Something that's been on my mind

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

8/ Because the people raising the next generation shape the future just as much as the people building companies, institutions, or technology.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

What if “Homemaker” was the highest-paid offer at graduation?

Engineer: $120K
Doctor: $200K+
Homemaker: $0 salary, $0 equity, no title.

And yet it may be the role with the highest long-term impact on society.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

7/ Maybe one day we’ll see:

elite schools for home science
conferences around raising families well
awards for exceptional parenting and homemaking
social prestige around building great homes

Not pity. Respect.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

6/ In Finland, teaching is one of the most respected professions in society.

Harder to get into than law or medicine.

That happened because society collectively decided:
“People shaping the next generation matter.”

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

5/ And no - putting numbers on it doesn’t “commodify” love.

We already put numbers on:

teaching
caregiving
therapy
medicine
All deeply human professions.

Ignoring value doesn’t make something noble. Sometimes it just makes it invisible.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

4/ Imagine if society treated homemaking as foundational work instead of unpaid background labor.
Maybe that means:

10% of household lifetime income
1–5% equity in family wealth creation
retirement benefits
prestige attached to the role

Not fixed numbers. Just a thought experiment.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

3/
Modern society measures value through markets.
So naturally:

founders get equity
executives get stock
investors get returns

But the person building the foundation underneath all of it often gets… nothing.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

2/ A great homemaker doesn’t just “manage a house.”

They:

raise kids
create emotional stability
hold families together
build social reputation
enable everyone else to pursue ambition

The work is invisible until it stops being done.

[Jai Jalan @jjalan]

@simonw Forcing public-only also surfaces when different team members are framing the same problem in completely different ways. Had three engineers at a client recently, all solving the same thing, none working from the same picture. That divergence would have been visible a lot sooner.