Xiangan He

6+ years of building and securing applications | building your security engineering partner

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

4 dead giveaways of AI-generated code:

- Dead/stale comments referencing old commits or bugs that no longer exist
- API calls hard-coded to fetch exactly 100 results with no pagination logic
- "God files" running 2,000+ lines instead of separated components
- Tests nowhere to be found: 3,000 lines of changes, barely any coverage

Most engineers don't catch these at review because they look plausible at a glance, hard-coded round numbers feel like reasonable defaults, and missing tests feel like a time constraint someone meant to fix.

But each one compounds. Stale comments get re-ingested by the next AI session and treated as ground truth. 

God files also become unmaintainable fast.

That’s why the cleanup process of AI code is so important.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@StevenBartlett Understanding how things work differs greatly from understanding why they matter.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@marclou @shipordie_ You shipped a feature that celebrates shipping. The recursion here is honestly sending me.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@danmartell The org chart is getting smaller while the workforce keeps multiplying.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@Markmanson Nobody can steal your mindset, although some meetings certainly test it.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@gregisenberg Deep work becomes possible when tools reduce noise instead of generating it.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@danmartell Leadership audits would get interesting if mirrors gave performance reviews.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@Markmanson The goal is not zero problems. It's problems with better stories.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

A lot of non-technical founders think Claude Code is what you get when you point the Claude API at a task.

I’d disagree.

Claude Code is a heavily engineered product, built on top of things the raw SDK doesn't give you:

- Context compaction
- Session maintenance
- Hidden system prompts
- A defined file path for session context that lives entirely outside the chat history

None of that ships out of the box. Every piece of it was built deliberately by Anthropic's engineering team.

The reason this matters is that I keep running into non-technical founders who look at what Claude Code can do and then ask why the AI feature in their own app doesn't perform at the same level. 

What they’re experiencing lives in the engineering layer around the model, not inside the model itself.

This is one of the most underappreciated advantages of working with an actual engineering team. 

We can sit across from a founder, explain exactly why the behavior they're seeing is happening, and walk them toward a realistic path forward.

A raw API integration can't do that.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@steipete From startup curiosity to enterprise claws, that is quite the evolution.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@danmartell My backup plans have probably achieved more than my original ones.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@marclou 2 paying customers beat ten thousand compliments every single time.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@gregisenberg Bookmarking feels productive until you realize nothing actually got done.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@danmartell The starting line has launched more dreams than perfect plans ever.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@Markmanson Excuses are creative, but results remain the more convincing argument.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

This might seem harsh, but I’d argue otherwise.

A founder came to me last month asking if they should bring on an offshore team to hit a 14-day ship deadline before their next funding round.

My answer was no.

The framing was: these developers are cheap, they're fast, and it's just to get something functional for the raise. 

But quality is king, and you get what you pay for.

Speed without execution quality is a liability you're deferring. You pay for it right when it matters most: in a demo, in due diligence, the first week a real user touches it.

The value of a dev shop is execution you can trust under pressure. 

If the execution isn't there, you don't actually have a timeline. You have a countdown.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@danmartell The irony is being too busy to learn what makes you less busy.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@Markmanson Turns out personal growth includes unfollowing a few older versions yourself.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@marclou Aging is realizing peace and good sleep are premium lifestyle upgrades.

[Xiangan He @xBalbinus]

@gregisenberg Strong reminder that timing matters almost as much as being right.