A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
Regarding the Danfoss refrigeration systems hacked in France:
The username is `admin`, and the password automatically changes every day to... the current date.
Yes, today's date.
The French supermarkets affected in today's attacks had exposed all its refrigeration controllers directly to the internet.
Every single device reportedly used the same password: today's date...
There's also a documented authentication bypass: sending a POST request to /xml.cgi can bypass the login entirely.
Via: GossiTheDog
it’s clear we need to retire the term vibe coding because the models now produce better architecture & way more coherent code than an average software engineer.
perhaps even better than top software engineers too because unlike a human, ai has a much much larger context window.
this ain’t vibe coding at all. it’s precision engineering.
it's very interesting how many replies i've gotten about maintainability and clean code being still important. i would argue that that is no longer true and we all need to update our priors on what Good Code really means in 2026.
clean code has always come at a cost - performance. indirection and making code readable/understandable for a human is not free, it often comes at the cost of worse performance. we have historically been okay with this because of Moore's Law and the fact that most code is not on the hot path.
these principles also came from a time where humans maintained code. it made sense to optimize for humans then, but it makes less sense now when agents are already writing all the code. we will in fact probably discover and come up with new principles: principles of agent friendly architecture (i plan to write more thoughts about this soon)