Shiv 🔪

Anon operator.
Ex-SWE → building AI-leveraged systems.

Building Licencemate - about leverage, risk & sustainable wealth.

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

1/
Start here.
I’m an ex-software engineer building LicenceMate (real customers, real revenue).
I’m not here to “motivate you to quit.”
I’m here to document how the game is changing.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Nobody tells you this: Intelligence is overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They create complexity rather than doing the boring thing that works. The people you admire have a violent bias for action. Courage beats intelligence.

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

Yes

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

learn to market is the new learn to code

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

Wow!

[jack @jack]

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

####

today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

Exactly what’s happening, you’re taking high leverage decisions at a blistering pace. It’s like transitioning from Classical chess to blitz. And most of the best blitz players are the best classical players. So….

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.

Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes.

As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.

It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

Create your shorting list now!

[NIK @ns123abc]

🚨 BREAKING: IBM stock down 13% after Anthropic announced that Claude can streamline COBOL code

IBM’s entire business model:
>maintaining legacy COBOL nobody understands

>claude: “I can read it”
>IBM stock immediately drops -13%
>$40B market cap EVAPORATED

Dario strikes again 💀

[NZ ☄️ @CodeByNZ]

Claude: “I estimate this will take 1-2 weeks to complete”

Me:

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

Rethink moat

[Ira Bodnar @irabukht]

https://t.co/wQh3RL5Fx3

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

@kylegawley Cursor?

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

Good times ahead then

[Ryan Carson @ryancarson]

Old world:

1. startup founder finds a co-founder to close their skill gaps

2. raises money

3. launches MVP

4. hires a bunch of specialists to close more skill gaps

New world:

1. startup founder builds entire product with AI

2. launches and gets basic PMF

3. hires 1-2 generalists that can run teams of agents

4. maybe doesn't even raise capital

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

Yup much better risk reward ratio

[Nick Abraham @NickAbraham12]

YC realized agencies are fundamentally better businesses than ~75% of venture-backed startups.

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

@yourealazyfvck W for Apple

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

taste is a new core skill

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

@garrytan What about I can’t market

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

@WagieCapital Why’s everyone so defensive here

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

@davj I can’t count past 4

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

@bilawalsidhu It changes mate

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

Hard agree, this model of AI as a service AaaS(copyrighted) will be the new play

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Mark Cuban on the next job wave.

Customized AI integration for small to mid-sized companies.

"Software is dead because everything's gonna be customized to your unique utilization. Who's gonna do it for them... And there are 33 mn companies in the US."

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

I think this is pretty accurate, if put in one word be confident!

[Mike Scully @Mike_Scully_]

How to handle “you're too expensive” objection without dropping your price

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

@nsinghal211 Sounds scary tbh, soon the arbitrage will be squeezed

[Shiv 🔪 @sol_shiv]

@leecronin which principle?