Ryan Hill

building everyday

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

Something I have been thinking about: in the past, the best engineers I knew spent a lot of time automating their work in various ways. Better vim/emacs automations, writing lint rules to catch repeat code issues, building up a suite of e2e tests so they don't need to smoke test the app manually. These kinds of things were the highest leverage activities an engineer could do, because it multiplied their own output, which in turn meant they could build more things.

I think many of these automations have become even more important now. This is true for a number of reasons.

First, infra and DevX automation speeds you up. And if you are running an army of agents, each of those agents will be sped up also. More automation == more output per unit of time.

Second, moving things to code improves efficiency. Your agent could fix an issue every time it sees that issue happen, but that uses tokens and might miss cases. If Claude instead writes a lint rule, CI step, or routine, that class of issue can be fully automated forever. This is really what people are talking about when they talk about loops -- it's about automating entire types of busywork rather than solving them one off. This isn't a new idea at all. Engineers have been doing this for a long time!

Third and most importantly, automation makes it possible for others to contribute to the codebase more easily. Increasingly what I am seeing is engineers are contributing to codebases on day one because Claude can navigate the codebase for them, and that non-engineers are able to contribute to a codebase as effectively as engineers can. What gets in the way of both of these is domain knowledge that lives in peoples' heads rather than in automation -- the stuff you used to have to learn when ramping up. What has changed thanks to agents is the domain knowledge that can be encoded as infrastructure is no longer limited to what is expressible in lint rules and types and tests; it can now capture nearly all domain knowledge, encoded as code comments and skills and CLAUDE.md rules and memories. If I put up a PR for an iOS codebase I don't know and a code reviewer rejects it because it doesn't use the right framework, or if a designer builds a new feature and it gets rejected because it doesn't follow the right architectural patterns, these are failures of automation.

Every team should be writing the CLAUDE.md's, REVIEW.md's, skills, and docs that enable agents to productively work in their codebase with zero additional context from the prompter. This sounds crazy, and at the same time is a natural extension of the stuff engineers have always done: automate, and encode domain knowledge as infrastructure. As the model gets smarter and as the harness matures, this task becomes easier. In the meantime, it is on every team to look for ways to convert their domain knowledge to infra so that Claude can write code better, so that code review catches issues automatically, and so the next person working on your codebase can contribute more easily.

[Nick @nickbaumann_]

Pro tip: when prompting Codex with really difficult /goals, ask it to "write a goal for another thread to achieve this and babysit it until it figures it out"

By doing so, you'll add built-in steering and another layer of taste verification (that's how this video was made)

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes:

1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship
2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra
3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance
4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit
5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales

Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS.

A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product:

- A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3
- A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5
- A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2

Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3

[Ryan Hill @ryanhill4L]

@reach_vb Would love a Go SDK next please!

[rahul @rahulgs]

this whole claude banning openclaw/opencode debacle is only happening because

claude code is a consumer of the actual public anthropic api, which is extremely unusual for a software application

it is a totally reasonable stance that claude code can be used with a subscription (private api)

but other harnesses need to be paid for by the token (public api)

if someone tried to build a their own frontend to the ramp private backend we'd ban them too

[cat @_catwu]

Here's a roundup of how Claude Code has changed engineering at inside Ramp, Rakuten, Brex, Wiz, Shopify, and Spotify 🧵

[ry @rywalker]

look i get weirdly fired up about this but watching a dev go from "ai is coming for my job" to "ai just 10x'd my output" is genuinely one of my favorite things happening right now

the ones leaning in are having way more fun than the ones hiding

[ry @rywalker]

agentic engineering > vibe coding

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

When I created Claude Code as a side project back in September 2024, I had no idea it would grow to be what it is today. It is humbling to see how Claude Code has become a core dev tool for so many engineers, how enthusiastic the community is, and how people are using it for all sorts of things from coding, to devops, to research, to non-technical use cases. This technology is alien and magical, and it makes it so much easier for people to build and create. Increasingly, code is no longer the bottleneck.

A year ago, Claude struggled to generate bash commands without escaping issues. It worked for seconds or minutes at a time. We saw early signs that it may become broadly useful for coding one day.

Fast forward to today. In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed. Every single line was written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5. Claude consistently runs for minutes, hours, and days at a time (using Stop hooks). Software engineering is changing, and we are entering a new period in coding history. And we're still just getting started..

[Ryan Hill @ryanhill4L]

@resend plz

[Ryan Hill @ryanhill4L]

@stoolpresidente Anyone that doesn’t have Camporosso on their list, doesn’t know pizza in Cincinnati

[Ryan Hill @ryanhill4L]

@resend Using resend daily for transactional emails to customers but need inbound to keep my users in one place!

[Ryan Hill @ryanhill4L]

@tyler_agg spy

[Ryan Hill @ryanhill4L]

@digitalAU @icreatelife Hi! Do you have any extra?

[Ryan Hill @ryanhill4L]

@benlrichards @meltyinc Great read and great ideas. Gonna give this a shot

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

When someone asks me for a meeting, I try to solve the problem at that exact moment.

I ask for the details, context, pitch, question in place, or if it’s important enough, I call them right away.

You’ll be amazed how many things you’re putting off by weeks, with the transaction costs of calendar management, emails, zooms, that can just be figured out… right now.

[Ryan Hill @ryanhill4L]

@ryolu_ any work to be done to make workspaces more friendly? So I can open both my backend and frontend code, then let one agent scaffold work between both?

Having a .cursor folder for the workspace then one per individual repo would go a long way.

[Ryan Hill @ryanhill4L]

@shadcn Try reduced transparency in the display accessibility options. Goes a long way