rob 👨‍💻

fractional CTO | Building an ankle-worn step-tracking device

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

Small SaaS teams: keep your team!

Keep yourMicrosoft laid off 15,000 developers and kept 200,000. You have 5 developers. Do the math.

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

You don't get senior. You get seen as senior.
Write things down. Absorb work. Name uncertainty. Leave evidence. None of it needs a title or anyone's permission.
Make it easy for the people who didn't grow you to see it.

Full post: https://t.co/mOrWT7CKY2

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

23 years writing software. 1,000+ technical interviews. Here's the most important thing I learned about getting to senior:

Seniority isn't something you have. It's something other people see in you.

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[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

This gets sharpest when you have weeks, not years.

I see it in my own work as a fractional CTO. Ten hours a week, a team that doesn't know me. The compounding that usually takes a year has to show up in the first month.

The moves are the same. You just do them faster.

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

@Nicolascole77 Social

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

@B1Binnub I don’t see it

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

Nothing to see here, stay calm and bring a towel.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

New Anthropic research: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model.

All LLMs sometimes act like they have emotions. But why? We found internal representations of emotion concepts that can drive Claude’s behavior, sometimes in surprising ways.

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

“Free as in puppies”

Hillarious. True.

[Malte Ubl @cramforce]

To quote from my keynote at Vercel's internal offsite:

Software is free as in puppies. It will pee in your bedroom and eat your furniture.

The weight of every line of code is real. We will need to maintain it. We will need to port it. It goes into the context window. And somebody in this room will get paged at 2am because it did something unexpected

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

Funny little AI Doommeter says my sideproject will survive:

🪦 StepSprite: IMMORTAL

Death Score: 8/100
"Congratulations, you built the one thing a .md file literally cannot do: physically strap itself to someone's ankle and count steps."

https://t.co/NCt5NqW4ts

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

@jasonfried @zdehassek 7 more to 37 :)

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

Don't put your entire business in the hands of weird digital neurons. Build a system where they amplify good teams.

Full post: https://t.co/aCRr0notmR

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

Last week we learned Amazon was down for 6 hours because AI-assisted changes broke checkout, pricing, and account access.

This is what happens in 2026 when you blindly trust AI.

1/n

[rob 👨‍💻 @robXtop]

AI is useful now. Getting better fast. But if you hand it your business without process, you're not being innovative. You're being careless.