Jonah Back

engineer and explorer - starting something new

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

@endingepidemic @GMN_watch Let’s just say $OPEN continues to be my largest non-SPY position ;)

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

@RealOpenArmy @GMN_watch Nope. Bringing AI to the community in the US that is the most underserved by it - real small businesses.

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

One of the biggest unfair advantages for startups right now imo - they get an absurd amount of subsidy on Claude Code (probably Codex too). Big companies are paying per token because managing 100s of Claude Max subs isn’t a thing.

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

When you’ve been holding the laptop open too much to let Claude do its thing

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

Crazy to hear so many public companies claim they're ahead on AI. Paraphrasing earnings from earlier today - "we're the defacto choice for legal services w/ ChatGPT"

reality....

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Lots of engineers think AI codegen is only good enough to do little bug fixes here and there

If you tell them you can ship 15k LOC of ai gen code to prod they think you have lost your mind.

It’s so so early. And also those engineers are living in 2025.

[Deedy @deedydas]

I’m not exaggerating, I hear from so many big software cos which don’t use Claude Code/Codex.

CTOs are asleep at the wheel. Engineers are typing code by hand. Fixing a bug a day. Like it’s 2024.

If youre at these cos, demand change or leave. Now. You’re in for a rude awakening.

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

@yk222610 @fahdananta Absolutely!

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

It’s time to build in San Francisco again

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

Excited to be a part of this journey with the Deeptrace team - killer team and killer product

[andy lee @andys_lee]

Excited to share that @deeptraceai has raised $5M to identify and fix every alert in production.

This round is co-led by @felicis and @matrix, with participation from @ycombinator.

As AI generates more of the world’s code, the real leverage shifts to systems that help engineers understand and run it in production. Deeptrace is that reliability layer.

Today, teams like @opendoor, @mintlify, and @phantom use Deeptrace to automatically investigate every alert in production and proactively catch issues before they turn into incidents.

If you’re looking to automate on-call and use agents to monitor prod, please reach out!

[Austen Allred @Austen]

The cruelest thing you can do to an engineer is require them to use AI to code and at the same time restrict them to using crappy models and tools.

I understand why it happens but would be so frustrating.

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

Sort of telling with buyback authorizations re: how companies think of their future.

In a world where every pure SaaS company is at an all time high disruption risk, you’d think that money might be better spent on creating AI native experiences

#AtomsNotBits

[Paras Doshi @paras_doshi]

Most data teams are still building dashboards nobody looks at.

We killed 1,400 of ours.

Replaced them with a semantic layer you can talk to. Built custom AI tooling that replaced SaaS we were paying six figures a year for. Every person on this @Opendoor data team has unlimited tokens and AI agents running alongside them daily.

Real estate is the largest asset class on earth and the transaction still feels like 1997. That's the data problem we wake up to. Pricing millions of homes. Optimizing tens of millions in ad spend. Building models that move real dollars, not slide decks.

Our CEO's (@nejatian) mandate is "default to AI." Not a slogan. How we actually operate. Opendoor might be the most AI-native public company you haven't been paying attention to.

Small team. Absurd talent density. Embedded across the entire C-suite. You touch pricing, marketing, product, sales, operations — all of it!

We're hiring across Agentic Analytics Engineering and Data Science. Seattle or Toronto.

If this is the kind of data team you've been looking for, stop scrolling and apply:

Agentic Analytics Engineering: https://t.co/rvld2dRSCJ

Data Science: https://t.co/hEH9UefNGK

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

rly excited 4 this one!

[Kaz Nejatian @nejatian]

We just went live in production on a new feature.

It was a busy day but nothing feels as good as shipping products.

[Kaz Nejatian @nejatian]

Last shirt said "Faster." Sneak peek at what this one says. Limited drop at https://t.co/CLod0wEehF now powered by @shop.

Don't miss Q4 Financial Open House tomorrow 2/19 at 2pm PT on X, Robinhood, and YouTube. https://t.co/l2r2AuyTix

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

@maelan_sdmr Beyond time savings (which is definitely a secondary benefit), the main thing is iteration and learning speed. When things are fast and inexpensive you can change them often. When they are slow and expensive you don’t want to touch them.

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

One of the most underrated things about AI driven automation. Mistakes are easy to fix. We had a bug in our assessment process yesterday. 3 months ago, that would’ve meant 2am pages, lot of overtime and delayed offers. Today we basically just hit ‘retry’ after a fix.

[Jeff Escalante @jescalan]

For anyone in a software engineering leadership/management position, this is the time to see if you can figure out how to shelve that responsibility for a while and return to being a full time IC.

Software engineering has changed more in the last few months than it has in the previous decade. The skills, experience, and perspective that you built to get you to the leadership/management position you're in now are becoming irrelevant extremely rapidly. If you are not able to adapt right now, you are going to start becoming bad at your job very soon, if you have not already.

You're trusted to lead because you built the skills and judgement over time direct the boat confidently. But the boat that you were driving has suddenly been replaced by a completely different boat which you have never worked on before, so it's time to shift down and re-build your expertise before taking the helm again.

🫡

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

@Ryan_G_Lambert @Opendoor Definitely not pioneers here - I’ve long been inspired by Stripe’s try at BYOT https://t.co/QzUAbu0iVX

[Jonah Back @jonahback]

We’re doing a fun thing @Opendoor a lot more recently. Instead of beleaguering folks - esp founders - with typical tech interview loops, we’re just building in person together. 2 weeks of side by side crafting, focusing on delivering customer value.