Victor

Hubby, Techie, AI researcher at MIT. Searching for alpha, α != β @recursecenter alum. I split my time "btn" San Francisco, Stockholm and Barcelona.

[Mark MacLeod @markmacleod_]

Make time for exercise
Sleep like a champ
Spend time with people you love
Take up a hobby

[Federico Simionato @fedesimio]

We've officially agreed to acquire Airtable for $1.285B! 😍

[Victor @miclovich]

@anah_sahh GDPR

[Tech with Mak @techNmak]

"Do not learn to code" is the worst career advice of the decade.

People are telling college students to skip Computer Science because AI will just automate it all. Andrew Ng just killed this myth at Stanford with a brilliant analogy.

When he tried to generate images with Midjourney, he typed: "make pretty pictures of robots" and got garbage.
His collaborator, however, understood Art History. He knew the exact vocabulary of lighting, genre, and palette. He spoke the "language of art," and generated masterpieces.

Andrew Ng is seeing the exact same thing happen in software engineering right now.

AI didn't replace the need to understand Computer Science. It made Computer Science the required vocabulary to control the AI.

If you don't understand how computers actually work, you are just typing "make a pretty app" into Cursor and shipping fragile, unscalable logic.

Here is Andrew Ng's exact hiring hierarchy today:

Level 1: 10 years of experience, but codes by hand (He won't hire them).
Level 2: Fresh college grad, but highly fluent in AI-assisted coding (He hires them over the 10-year veteran).
Level 3 (God Tier): Deeply understands CS fundamentals AND uses AI-assisted coding.

When humanity went from punch cards to keyboards, coding got easier, and more people coded. We are at that exact inflection point again.

AI doesn't replace fundamentals. It multiplies them.

[CG @cgtwts]

> be Kimi
> hear “Chinese open-source models are years behind” every week
> ship Kimi K3
> top the Frontend Code Arena
> outperform Opus 4.8 on every benchmark
> Fable 5 level coding but Sonnet price
> release the weights for everyone

this is the open source ChatGPT moment.

[Victor @miclovich]

@aaryantwt @Etched a war is about to start.

[Guli Moreno @GuliMoreno]

Cuando tienes un martillo todo parecen clavos.

[Anupam Haldkar  @AnupamHaldkar]

As a Backend Developer, Slap yourself if you cannot clearly explain at least 10 of the following:

TCP congestion control algorithms
TLS 1.3 handshake internals
HTTP/2 multiplexing & HPACK
HTTP/3 + QUIC packet loss recovery
Connection pooling pitfalls
Zero-downtime deployment strategies
Database transaction isolation levels (serializable vs snapshot)
B-tree vs LSM-tree index internals
Query planner & cost-based optimization
Deadlock detection & prevention
ACID vs BASE trade-offs
Two-phase commit vs Saga pattern
Distributed locking (Redlock pitfalls)
CAP theorem in practice
CRDTs & conflict-free replicated data types
Eventual consistency anti-patterns
Kafka partition rebalancing & exactly-once semantics
RabbitMQ dead-letter queues & message ordering
gRPC streaming + flow control
GraphQL resolver batching & N+1 problem
OAuth2 token introspection vs JWT validation
Rate limiting algorithms (token bucket vs leaky bucket)
Circuit breaker + bulkhead patterns
Observability: OpenTelemetry tracing propagation
Prometheus metric cardinality explosion
Log aggregation with sampling
Memory-mapped files vs traditional I/O
Garbage collection tuning (G1 vs ZGC)
Thread pools vs virtual threads (Project Loom)
Actor model vs shared-memory concurrency
Message-driven architecture (Akka / Orleans)
CQRS + Event Sourcing projections
Outbox pattern for reliable events
Sharding strategies & hot partition avoidance
Read replicas lag monitoring
Database connection pool exhaustion
Prepared statement caching
Index bloat & vacuum strategies
Kubernetes pod disruption budgets
Service mesh traffic shifting
Serverless cold-start mitigation
API gateway throttling & caching layers
Background job queues (Celery / BullMQ) retry semantics
Distributed cache invalidation (cache-aside vs write-through)
Eventual consistency in cache
Idempotency keys in API design
Optimistic locking with version vectors
Paxos / Raft consensus internals
Byzantine fault tolerance basics
Chaos engineering principles
Database failover & split-brain prevention
Microservices observability (distributed tracing)
API contract testing (Pact / Spring Cloud Contract)
Backward-compatible schema evolution
Protobuf vs JSON performance trade-offs
Binary protocol parsing
Zero-copy networking (sendfile)
epoll / kqueue internals
Syscall overhead & context switching
Memory barriers & CPU cache coherence
Lock-free data structures
Bloom filters & HyperLogLog in practice
Consistent hashing for load balancing
Virtual memory & page faults impact
Container runtime security (seccomp, AppArmor)
Sidecar pattern limitations
Service discovery (Consul vs DNS)
Blue-green vs canary deployments
Feature flags with rollout strategies
Data pipeline backpressure handling
Exactly-once processing guarantees
Idempotent consumers in event streams

And if you only know 10 — kindly return the “Senior Backend Developer” title. 😄

[Victor @miclovich]

@compliantvc I saw a 0.5% for every transaction setup on Stripe just the other day.

[Tom Blomfield @t_blom]

Imagine replacing 90% of your employees with a team of geniuses who have no idea how your company operates.

Total chaos. Nothing works.

That’s what AI feels like today.

The missing piece is extracting all the domain knowledge from people’s heads and providing that as structured context to the models.

[Victor @miclovich]

@DigitalAges @kushalbyatnal What’s the price point you are comfortable spending?

[Shravani @shrav_10]

One of my friends at a tech company said the vibe inside offices right now is weird.

Junior devs think AI will take their jobs.
Senior devs think they’ll become outdated in 2 years.
Managers are scared companies won’t need so many layers anymore.
So everyone’s acting extra “AI-positive” publicly while privately panicking.

[Victor @miclovich]

@Sohel_2G @TheAwesomeTuvia @Shopify Not just 24 hours but have a functional business. Some app users are not real ecom businesses.

[Jayden ⛩️ @thejayden]

And that’s why quants have salaries starting at $500k+

Here’s one of the engineers explaining how they use LLMs to generate $30B+ every year.

[Uncle Bob Martin @unclebobmartin]

Morning Bathrobe Rant: AI slop.

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Here's my update to the broader community about the ongoing incident investigation. I want to give you the rundown of the situation directly.

A Vercel employee got compromised via the breach of an AI platform customer called https://t.co/7PY6gGtzgI that he was using. The details are being fully investigated.

Through a series of maneuvers that escalated from our colleague’s compromised Vercel Google Workspace account, the attacker got further access to Vercel environments.

Vercel stores all customer environment variables fully encrypted at rest. We have numerous defense-in-depth mechanisms to protect core systems and customer data. We do have a capability however to designate environment variables as “non-sensitive”. Unfortunately, the attacker got further access through their enumeration.

We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI. They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.

At the moment, we believe the number of customers with security impact to be quite limited. We’ve reached out with utmost priority to the ones we have concerns about. All of our focus right now is on investigation, communication to customers, enhancement of security measures, and sanitization of our environments. We’ve deployed extensive protection measures and monitoring. We’ve analyzed our supply chain, ensuring Next.js, Turbopack, and our many open source projects remain safe for our community.

The recommendation for all Vercel customers is to follow the Security Bulletin closely (https://t.co/BLVnic9fJC). My advice to everyone is to follow the best practices of security response: secret rotation, monitoring access to your Vercel environments and linked services, and ensuring the proper use of the sensitive env variables feature.

In response to this, and to aid in the improvement of all of our customers’ security postures, we’ve already rolled out new capabilities in the dashboard, including an overview page of environment variables, and a better user interface for sensitive env var creation and management. As always, I’m totally open to your feedback.

We’re working with elite cybersecurity firms, industry peers, and law enforcement. We’ve reached out to Context to assist in understanding the full scale of the incident, in an effort to protect other organizations and the broader internet. I also want to thank the Google Mandiant team for their active engagement and assistance.

It’s my mission to turn this attack into the most formidable security response imaginable. It’s always been a top priority for me. Vercel employs some of the most dedicated security researchers and security-minded engineers in the world. I commit to keeping you updated and rolling out extensive improvements and defenses so you, our customers and community, can have the peace of mind that Vercel always has your back.

[Huaizheng Zhang @zhzHNN]

So the CS job market in the Bay Area now has two tracks:

- LLM / World Models / Embodied AI, with massive capital investment and unbelievable salaries

- Traditional MLE/SDE roles that still require LeetCode and System Design interviews

People in the different tracks barely talk to each other.

[Uncle Bob Martin @unclebobmartin]

Morning Bathrobe Rant: AI out-codes you; deal with it.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

“Shopify loves the five-person team. We increase to eight sometimes, but we think the best team size is one, because a single author can do things that is impossible to do for teams, and hit high notes that are unreachable.

Most projects worth doing need to be done in teams. There's a magic number at five. It's sort of what military ends up figuring out too. They test these things and come to the same conclusions.

You can temporarily go up, but at some point, you have to split teams and parcel out the tasks. Each of these gradations is like a 10x loss of productivity.

Our R&D team is three and a half thousand people. It's really lots and lots and lots of small teams."

— @tobi

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

"Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer, and it is mentally exhausting.

I can fire up four agents in parallel and have them work on four different problems, and by 11am I am wiped out for the day.

There is a limit on human cognition. Even if you're not reviewing everything they're doing, how much you can hold in your head at one time. There's a sort of personal skill that we have to learn, which is finding our new limits. What is a responsible way for us to not burn out, and for us to use the time that we have?" @simonw