vibin’-3.5-turbo ◕ (taylor’s version)

🌱 shared resonant frequencies / tweets are my own opinions unless they’re also your opinions, in which case, we can share them.

[David Cramer @zeeg]

industry bros will be like "look i can commit 5000 times a day" in one breath then ask you to trust them with your passwords in the next

[Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge]

I just finished talks about my software factories at two conferences. Afterwards a bunch of people came up and told me what they were surprised about. Here is a distillation of what people thought were hot takes from my two talks.

First hot take: I tell everyone to slow down. Most speakers go on about how fast they're going, but I strongly believe in pacing AI outputs to human speeds. I regularly tell AI-pilled CIOs and CTOs to chill: almost nobody is _actually_ going fast with AI. Engineering still moves at engineering speeds, and business moves even slower. The ones pushing too hard are starting to see downtime for it.

If you don't pace your AI to human speeds, everything starts breaking around you, even at small operations like my online video game. I only have about a dozen humans working with my factory, and only a few hundred active old-timer players in the community who get along well, and still, introducing AI has still been very rocky.

My agents have, at times, overwhelmed my players with features, my accountant with emails, my merge queue with tickets, and my machines with load. Agents have pissed off my admins, resulting in name-calling, they've made messes in the game, and they've launched broken OSS without permission. The list goes on.

I can get away with all this chaos because everyone involved in my operation is very forgiving. They're excited by the potential. But even so, I had to learn to slow down, real fast. And so that's what I preach.

Hot take #2: Should you buy a software factory? Do you even need one? No. You probably don't need one. Factories take an extraordinary amount of upkeep. They turn into garbage mountains unless you put a frightening amount of time and tokens into curating them. I had to burn my previous five factories down since it eventually became cheaper to rewrite them than to fix them. So I'm not out there advocating for software factories or swarms just yet. If you do want one, be aware that it is a significant commitment of both money and human leadership to keep one running.

Several people told me that I was the only one who stood up onstage, at either conference, and said Build, don't Buy. But my experience is that software factories grow to be highly bespoke to your domain. Mine is super tangled up with my game, and I think that's inevitable. Because the factory is not just building my product, it's supporting it too. It's a company in a box. And they're easy for Claude to build for you.

Third and arguably hottest take: Next year will have a lot of human/agent and agent/agent office drama, resulting from bringing in AI employees, and it will be gloriously funny, but also frustrating.

Many of you are already on this bandwagon, but everyone next year will have a personal chief-of-staff agent. Busy people, even hobbyists, will have whole entourages of helper agents. The hot take is that people will become so dependent on these little private entourages, that they'll bring them to work. Your people will talk to my people, etc. Whole protocols will emerge for private entourages negotiating work between humans, inside companies big and small.

Nearly all humans will wind up having to start working with AI employees next year, and it'll be the beginning of the biggest cultural change we've seen in a hundred years.

So that's the hot takes. Slow down. Only build a factory if you think you really need one. And focus on empowering yourself with your own agentic chief of staff (or team). Your entourage will define how you work with others, so start by perfecting how you work with them yourself.

[David Cramer @zeeg]

this is not a kpi people. its not a flex.

7000 PRs that you havent read adds no value, adds risk, and lacks intent

like what are you trying to prove? that you dont care about your software?

[Zany🥕 @zanyfen]

Like if you trained this shit on our source code it would get worse at programming. I’m not even sure if Anthropic actually have stricter data policies when you use an enterprise plan paying API prices. It’s wild

[dax @thdxr]

i see people saying

they're moving to iac because agents
they're not using iac because agents
they're switching to a monorepos because agents
they're moving off monorepos because agents

you're all confused man everyone is doing random shit

[Thariq @trq212]

There’s 100% a kind of mania you can get into with coding agents, where it feels like you’re getting a lot done and working all the time but nothing is really happening.

I think it's often a form of avoidance of something else in life.

[vibin’-3.5-turbo ◕ (taylor’s version) @nomoammo]

@benhylak Sounds circlejerky

[Scott Stevenson @scottastevenson]

Story-driven reality hides one big thing in startups: the fact that almost nothing works

1. Almost no feature you deliver actually changes behavior in a meaningful way
2. Almost no startups have great margin payback periods for acquiring customers
3. Almost no startups have healthy revenue layer cakes

When you tear down the optimistic stories we tell ourselves, you realize that the math is almost never working at most companies.

Some management teams want to bury or hide this

Many startups never confront it, and die

[Carles Reina @Carles_Reina]

88% of VC-backed founders who exited their companies got $0. Eduardo Azevedo and Kent Smetters analysed 157,669 startups and 248,454 founders from 1987 to 2025.

Let that sink in...

[Sean Goedecke @sjgoedecke]

Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace.

[The Lunar Misfit @ExiledonMoon]

@thdxr Unfortunately, switching tools was the only part of coding I was finishing.

[Roy @usr_bin_roygbiv]

In terms of who I would hire
S:
Dota
Starcraft
Eve
OSRS
Paradox games
Factorio
A Tier:
Diablo/Poe
Traditional MMOs
Tekken
Minecraft mods

Wall of mediocrity/case by case

F:
League
Cod
Fortnite
Vanilla minecraft

It's far closer correlated to IQ than a degree is at this point

[Ken Wattana @KenWattana]

If you Moneyball your startup idea, you end up selling data

If you follow your emotional startup idea, you end up building a personal assistant

If you build something that people want, you end up forward deploying AI into car dealerships in middle America

[VCs Congratulating Themselves 👏👏👏 @VCBrags]

“In a world of AI slop, the only real moat is taste and thinking for yourself.”

- Spencer, 26, Stanford CS dropout, YC W26, building a personal assistant AI agent, lives in a Hayes Valley hacker house, into peptides, sauna socials, and posting about "new media"

[tuna🍣 @tunahorse21]

Nerd self-imposing non-existent standards on themselves and getting bitter as “slop” succeeds is a pattern I have seen over and over in my almost decade-long tech career

Halfway through my career, I realized not “playing the game” literally cost me millions ( zirp/CI investments)

I legit thought I just had to do my work and the rest would fall in line

I watched “superstars” from FAANG engineers come in, leave a slop mess of infrastructure (pre ai) and move on to the next grift

I saw PMs take credit for work that wasn't theirs and get rewarded with 2x salary

Self-imposed standards are a form of narcissism that you need to get over if you want to succeed

Being willing to be embarrassed temporarily and show humility while playing the game is an art

[Peter Piekarczyk (🥧🚗🐥) @peterpme]

Personal Software Factories are a waste of precious time

It's so natural for a software engineer to want to build their own software factory. But I would implore you to abandon that idea immediately. I'd argue it's the last thing you should spend time on, unless it's for work, at least for now.

The tough pill to swallow is that we've entered an era where everyday non-devs are applying AI in mind blowing ways and you still haven't built shit. Many of these ideas are just demos on X, but that's still better than just a system for building software.

I can see why you'd want to build one though. It's close to what you've always been good at, and it feels good to stay in your comfort zone.

It's also the first thing that naturally comes to mind: if I can build this factory, I can build more side projects and eventually quit my job! But a software factory is just an extension of what you've always done: start projects, give up on them and go back to work on Monday.

I'm not saying you should stop exploring and building side projects. I'm just saying you should stop wasting time on your factory. Just type into the chat box and see what happens.

Having AI build your app doesn't take away all the frustration. The frustration is just different: miscommunication, building the wrong thing, building the thing you thought you wanted and getting it wrong, etc.

That's all part of the building process. It's also why you like feature-free rewrites to begin with, because you already know what the end result is. When you build a real product, the end result is nuanced and there is no end.

I still think you should learn how tools like Grok Bot or Claude work. They are amazing. Maybe you shouldn't, idk, but I am. At the very least, learning how they work has stopped me from trying to build another factory.

The frontier labs are working on both models and products, and the models get better based on the user's experience of a product. The labs' number one goal is to remove friction and let you build cool stuff. I'm having a hard time competing with that. Why would I even want to?

If you're still convinced you should build a software factory and think I'm an idiot, it better be for work. Your job is the most realistic scenario you can be in when it comes to automating away your job. You understand the system deeply (or should), and it has humans, timelines and years-old messy systems.

You probably have 12 different patterns for writing the same feature and 100 different edge cases. That's exactly why building one at work would be useful. The challenge is a much harder one, but so is the reward.

You've now empowered an entire team of product managers and designers to ship features with little friction and high trust. From there, your job is to maintain that platform or even apply your other skillset to other parts of the business.

If you can't come up with something to build besides a software factory, you're not the only one. This is actually a very hard task, and it's a muscle that needs to be developed just like anything else.

Take a look around you. Start writing down your problems. Start writing down ideas. Let your mind wander. If you write down 3 ideas every day, the first 30 ideas are going to be so silly and useless, but I guarantee that will start to change as your brain starts to think differently.

Did you see that guy who de-slopped his parent's Android TV using Claude? That's nuts. He saw a problem and used Claude to come up with a solution.

What about the guy who put that fruit fly brain into the real world, where it's been flying around? How does someone even begin to come up with stuff like this? I don't know, but I'll eventually get there myself through experimentation and letting my mind wander.

Anyway, don't build a software factory.

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Every single person you meet in your daily life is fighting a hidden battle that you know nothing about

Send them a Zoom meeting link for an 8 AM call on Monday morning to finish them off

[Lachlan Donald @lox]

Have been thinking on this all weekend. I actually think I am probably wrong and that faster PRs tap out speed-wise quite rapidly. I think as merge rates climb, we probably need to go back to the 90’s and do something like sampling main branch for CI and deploy. I suspect CI on feature branches is just too compute expensive in 12 months, if not now.

I don’t always agree with @thorstenball on the details, but I really enjoy the mental gymnastics to figure out which is which. I think he’s right directionally here for high-trust projects where speed and quality are already established practices.

Gonna try this out at @buildkite.

[vibin’-3.5-turbo ◕ (taylor’s version) @nomoammo]

@shesbonky @bonez48180 she committed technical battery against him, he has an absolute defense that he was just protecting himself.

yes, he’s much bigger than her.

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

Fortunately, if you made it in before the drawbridge went up, you may be looking at permanent lifetime employment.