I've managed fully remote engineering teams for ~7 years, from small teams to rapidly growing orgs spanning 10+ countries.
I've developed some pretty strong opinions about what makes remote work actually work:
<rant>
1. YOU MUST GET "THE TEAM" TOGETHER ONCE A QUARTER, NO EXCEPTIONS. The faster the team/company is growing, the more critical this is. If you follow no other piece of advice follow this one. Remote work is built on a foundation of trust which for most humans can only be built in person. Think about a person you know well who has extremely dry humor. Would you be able to detect that characteristic if you met them for the first time over SMS or slack? Bonds are built over dinner, a beer, an in person hackathon. And those bonds carry forward to the rest of the time spent remote. **for some definition of "the team" - can be a mix of immediate team, org, company-wide, all are useful at different cadences.
2. Managers must be pros and must be highly technical. Many non-technical managers rely on lazy half-ass signals like "who left the office last". As a remote manager you literally have no option other than to inspect the concrete outputs to understand what is going on. This tip is also very useful to non-remote teams 🙂
3. No juniors except for exception cases. Exceptional cases are obviously exceptional. Gotta build the muscle before you play on hard mode - for mere mortals at least. Don't expect someone to learn "how to remote" and "how to engineer" simultaneously. It is too much.
4. Establish a physical center of gravity, ideally 20-30% of staff. Company can still be fully remote and have "an office" where company events are held, some fraction of local employees cowork once a week even if on different teams.
5. Regardless of critical mass, all meetings must be remote first. None of this conference room with 10 people dialing into a zoom meeting with 3 other people nonsense. 100ms latency of conversation is real and you are at a disadvantage if you are trying to interject remotely into a room of in person attendees.
6. Hire managers into the critical mass (or who are willing to travel a lot). There will be lots of good reasons for the manager to make their way in on occasion (once a week, twice a month) to the home of critical mass for one reason or another
7. Onboard senior hires and leaders in person. I have seen new leaders, ICs, managers, design/pm/marketing leaders crash and burn over lack of building good relationships in the first 3 months. If you're bringing on a new leader for god's sake make sure they spend a few days in person with the other leaders they have to collaborate with.
8. Hire within a deliberate, manageable timezone range!!! This becomes more important the more varied the experience level is within your team. Is it possible with absolute engineering pros and remote veterans? Yes! But you need to ask yourself if your team is ready to coordinate work across Australia, UK, NYC, SF, Japan, and India timezones. Think hard about this one. My team is US west coast through Czech Republic. Teammates spanning every part of the US, Brazil, UK, Portugal, Denmark, and more.
8.a. Have a clearly established schedule for "time the whole team must be online". For us this is 8:30 - 10:00am Pacific, but many Europeans choose to work shifted schedules to have more overlap with their peers. I advertise this upfront in every hiring manager screen. Make expectations clear and let people decide. We're all adults and we're more likely to commit and make things work when we make a decision with complete information.
9. Onsite time is precious. Don't waste it on ordinary meetings. Use it for strategic conversations, solving hard problems together, hackathons, and high-bandwidth planning. This is where you build the relationships that make the next three months of remote work successful. For fuck's sake please do not fill a week making people stare at a projector while you read powerpoints!!!
Take the advice or don't.
</rant>
let me break down “software is dead” for you
the latest argument is “you just tell your agent what you want, and your agent will vibe code software on the fly to get that done, so no one will need real software any more”
sounds reasonable, until you realize it costs tokens, compute, and wall clock time to build those software on the fly
so instead of one-click launching an app, the bet is people will prefer to write a prompt, wait for 15 minutes, then get something that may or may not do what they want, and at the end of the month pay more $$$ for the token spend, higher than all their software combined
that’s literally the argument
and if we look at the world in aggregate, most people would just end up building the exact same “personal” software repeatedly
oh - your agent just spent 3 days and $500 of tokens vibe coding your terminal multiplexer? mine just did exactly the same! let’s celebrate how personal our terminal multiplexers are!
sorry - i just don’t see that as being a happy scenario for anyone, other than people who profit from telling others how to waste $ on tokens
to be constructive, here’s what i believe as the future state -
- high quality software that takes high cost to make will continue to thrive. just like good restaurants don’t compete with your air fryer and microwave
- most of those software will be offered headlessly for people to use via their agents, and they can continue to monetize such usage. this is already the case with products like jira, linear, stripe
- human-facing software will all offer dynamic UI that can be adjusted with natural language on the fly so they can be personalized easily, but their core doesn’t have to be rebuilt by every user repeatedly
instead of “software is dead”, i believe good software becomes “strong core, headless service, fluid interface”
which future do you think is more likely?
If you want to know who survives AI, look at what happened to Hollywood in the 1970s.
Movie Studios used to enforce tight “shooting ratios”; usually 5:1, maybe 10:1 TOPS. As in, for every 5 feet of film shot, at least 1 foot had to end up in the final cut (35mm was expensive!)
In the 70s, there was a rapid elimination of production constraints. Improvements in film cost and camera portability made the old studio rules…obsolete. Why not take multiple angles, roll simultaneously? Set could have 3, 5, even 10 cameras rolling at once. Shooting ratios *exploded*, 50:1, even 100:1 (Apocalypse Now)!
Of course, it also *radically* changed the workflow. Editing use to be the quiet, thankless job in the studio years (30s-50s). Suddenly, they became the most important people on the totem pole!
How do you find the masterpiece hiding in the (literal miles) of film? A ton of the footage was…trash, of course. But as each individual camera because *less* important, it opened up directors to take on significantly higher risks.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Insane shooting ratios were still *kinda* a niche in the 70s. More traditional directors stuck with only slightly inflated shooting ratios (15:1, 30:1 common); it was the more experimental pioneers (Coppola, Scorsese, etc) that hit the big 100:1 numbers. The huge ratios were still crazy.
Until they weren’t.
You can probably guess what happened in the early 2000s. Digital cameras reduced the cost of individual footage to a complete non-constraint. Effectively free, don’t even cut on set, just keep the camera rolling.
Suddenly��*EVERYONE* starts shooting 100:1. Entire new forms of content get created, like Reality TV, where ratios can hit 500:1! Massive shift of human labor to the editing side.
I’d say, we’re currently in the “1970s Hollywood” of AI. It can be easy (and cheap!) to produce things (code, tools, etc), but YOU have to be the ruthless editor. It’s the “miles of film” problem all over again. Hollywood solved it by throwing massively more resources on the editing side, and editing became a “constantly talking with the director about vision/direction” job, instead of a “hide in the back office and do your work” job.
It’s a hunch, but I’d bet that filmmakers closer to the experimental 1970s “ratio explosion” directors handled the later 2000s digital shift *much* better, because the underlying principles were the same. They’d certainly be ahead of the curve predicting it, and (hopefully) were less surprised when the digital ratios did hit.
I’m not saying AI is exactly the same problem. But it’s a good idea to look at parallels in history where rapid elimination of constraints changed an industry, and how that industry handled it 5, 10, even 50 years later!
When something starts to get cheap…helps to imagine what would happen when it’s free!
I’ve spoken to over 50 people 1:1 over the last several months to better understand how they code with AI.
It’s an absolute mess.
Here are the top 8 mistakes I see.
0:00 - Intro
1:19 - Mistake 1: Talking to 2026 models like they’re 2025 models
2:43 - Mistake 2: Devising funky metaphorical factories to orchestrate your agents
3:59 - Mistake 3: Treating context as sacred
6:02 - Mistake 4: Treating previous conversations as sacred
7:59 - Mistake 5: Having a todo list
10:00 - Mistake 6: Using funky tools
13:47 - Mistake 7: Stressing over code quality
24:27 - Mistake 8: Using branches and worktrees
‼️ Linus Torvalds told Linux kernel developers this week that Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects and that AI is now a clearly useful tool.
He says AI's usefulness was still arguable a year ago but no longer is, and that the doubters simply haven't used the tools. Nobody is forced to use AI, but he will ignore anyone trying to stop others from using it. Anyone who wants an anti-AI project, he says, can fork the code or walk away.
In 2024, Torvalds dismissed AI as mostly marketing. By this January he was shipping AI-generated Python in his own hobby repo, and the kernel now accepts AI-written code under disclosure rules.
This indie dev is making a hide-and-seek game where you literally paint your own body to blend into the environment
- Your artistic skills are key to survival
- Pose to blend in
- Up to 10 players in public or private matches
Would you play this? It's called MECCHA CHAMELEON.
@thsottiaux Trying desperately to make this progress widget to be a thing meanwhile half the time it’s bugged and on latest update it takes a good chunk of the screen on top of it.
@Raphel@BessWisty The popularitt of mastery emotes was because of the same exact reason. They were FLASHY. That was the whole selling point. Now that is gone the usability of the emote is godwater
@WallyWackyford If hell thought Angels were invincible they wouldn't have known that was Angel's blood. My question is, since Vagie are Charlie were sleaping together how come she never questioned the wing scars of Vagie's back?
@ThatBirdguy1313 @Leach88871@Abyssal12402@kiwisb_ It doesn't matter what you think, yours is still a theory. We only know that Angelic metal is made specifically for that. Adam holy blasters could be just that. Powerful beams of light
@kiwisb_ Adam was killed by Angelic metal. Sir Pentious was.. blasted by holly light and.. disintegrated? Technically he was not kill by angelic metal. Therefore he was respawned. That's my theory. Adam is dead for good