Otto Hilska

Founder and CEO of @SwarmiaHQ. An experienced software engineering leader. Angel investor. Previously @Flowdock & @smartlyio.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

For 15+ years I've built engineering teams off roughly the same playbook. This spring, our team doubled its output with no extra headcount — and I realized the playbook itself had to change.

So I got hands-on. Between meetings (I do still have a day job as CEO) I shipped 100+ PRs to production, to feel where the old way breaks. The short version: the engineer's job is shifting from delivering a product to delivering the system that delivers the product.

I wrote up what we changed: how to move from local to global optimizations, what happens to quality when agents write almost all the code, and whether different types of work now need different processes.

https://t.co/U8gZe63miz

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@bcherny One thing that's painful with the current version: diffs are very limited. I can't find a way to see the staged files vs. whole-branch diff. It also shows deleted files as full diffs by default, expands package-lock.json style files, etc.

Otherwise, great job!

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@zeeg If agents would get you out of any kind of technical debt, every large company would be currently moving like a startup. But none of them are.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@jasonbosco Ask AI to come up with a weekly architecture quiz for your developers. ✅ Solved.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@___4o____ The three main reasons for downtime:

1. You changed something and broke it.
2. Critical infrastructure was down.
3. Usage increased more than expected.

AI slop could cause issues with nr. 1, but you have to appreciate how much scale these products are getting. Not an easy job.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@claudeai Our small team shipped 874 PRs last month, so that's a solid $20k monthly bill. The ROI calculation is going to be interesting, because code review doesn't only exist for finding bugs — you also need to verify that the software does something valuable.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

Here's a typical flow of signing into Deel:

1) Login with Google on desktop
2) Google wants my physical 2FA device
3) Deel wants another 2FA from mobile app
4) Mobile app updates and loses login info
5) Login with Google, enter password
6) Google wants my physical 2FA device on mobile
7) Use Authenticator to log in on mobile
7) The auth notification has disappeared
8) Send it again and tap it on mobile, still doesn't work
9) Use Authenticator to log in on desktop
10) "Your login session has timed out, try again"
11) Go to step 1

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@GergelyOrosz I’ve found that asking about dates is a pretty good line of questioning in an interview.

If you’ve spent a lot of time writing software, either you’ve faced some of these challenges or your code is full of bugs.

https://t.co/5y9JsLy1Hu

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@karrisaarinen @zeddotdev @claudeai Same thing here, and I’m having the time of my life. 😀

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

If your bottleneck is not writing code, it will be something else. Reviewing code, releasing changes, training your own customer-facing teams, or ultimately your customers’ tolerance for change.

[kyzo @ky__zo]

guys at @cursor_ai can you please slow down with changing the ui every 2 days?

i'm like constantly confused between the agent and editor, feels like the buttons change every day. just make a decision and stick with it becaus re-learning ui every day suuuucks

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@ivanhzhao @andyorsow I copy meeting notes (multiple levels of bullet points) from Notion to Slack quite often, and the indentation needs to be manually fixed. Can’t tell if Slack is the problem, but it works from Google Docs to Slack.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

Measuring AI coding tool productivity hits the same hurdles we've faced in developer productivity for a decade.

Well-meaning and easy-to-measure metrics turn out to be misleading.

When someone says that AI writes 90% of the code, it may sound like you can now reduce your engineering headcount by that much. But that's not what it means.

In reality it doesn't matter who wrote the code. Someone had to understand the context, drive the process, and check the work. AI likely saved you some time from writing the code, but the AI didn't do it by itself.

Focusing too much on AI-generated code might also cause some cultural issues. "I didn't write this code, it was AI." You should be clear that the developer and the team still owns all code they ship, no matter how the code was written.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@SuominenJyrki En tiedä Woltin yhtiörakenteesta tai talousluvuista mitään, mutta luulen että tuon yhden entiteetin tilinpäätös ei anna tarkkaa kuvaa koko liiketoiminnasta. Olettaisin, että se on mm. syönyt paljon tuotekehitystä, mutta ei muissa maissa tehtävän bisneksen tuottoja.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@amix3k This was my experience as well. I came back this year to find that the apps are really smooth and get the job done.

If only Slack save-for-later would sync both ways automatically.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@Morett_the_best Happy to answer any questions about Swarmia. :) I'm also based in NYC.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@mwbank @signulll Many would benefit from joining a tech company in an adjacent role, such as a Technical Support Engineer or Sales Engineer.

Use that to learn the product inside out. Engineering teams will appreciate a junior developer with strong domain knowledge.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@zeeg I remember begging Sendgrid to enable HTTPS for their app some 10+ years ago. They eventually did, but I can’t believe I had to ask.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@RoniArvonen Hyvä lista. PRH:lle voi myös ilmoittaa, että sinua ei saa lisätä minkään yrityksen luottamushenkilöksi ilman erillistä suostumusta, joka annetaan sähköisellä lomakkeella.

Sinne voi myös kertoa että yrityksen muutosilmoituksia voi antaa vain sähköisesti ja vahvasti tunnistettuna.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

@artman I recently installed a new MacBook from scratch. Within the first five minutes, one of the setup screens froze so hard I had to 'kill -9' it – nothing else worked.

Still, the "Turn On Reactions" popup has to be the worst feature.

[Otto Hilska @mutru]

We've all seen reports that Claude 3.7 is... eager to generate code.

I just asked it to initialize a new repository with a specific name. It used the repository name to figure out what the app was supposed to do and then implemented it.