Aaron Wirick

npr.orgAfter bankruptcy, he was banned from sports betting sites. Then he discovered KalshiThe dark side of the prediction market boom is becoming more clear: Experts say the sites have become go-to outlets for gambling addicts to relapse as the companies avoid state consumer protections.

This really hurts to hear. Societal incentives are incredibly screwed up

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social

"Americans are more likely to have placed a bet than to have read a book in the past year" Online sports betting increases the likelihood of bankruptcy and cientists view gambling addiction as a public health issue, linked to anxiety, depression & suicidal ideation www.npr.org/2026/10/02/n...

23 Sept

Flying to NYC today for Evolve. Looking forward to seeing some of our customers IRL

builders.cortex.ioBuilding trustworthy agents for Operational Excellence reviewsHow and why we built an agent to drive an engineering process

21 Aug

I wrote a thing on my company's engineering blog about building an agentic system and specifically how I think about Trust. This really represents the v0 model for the system and we definitely need more optimizations/improvements. It's a solid start though. builders.cortex.io/blog/trustwo...

13 June

I actually really admire Anthropic overall but I'm deeply concerned about sovereignty when running a frontier model in the US. This whole Fable drama is the realization of the risks that I and a lot of other people have expressed over market consolidation on US AI labs. Gonna get worse I think.

13 June

Man... The USG can be kinda dumb sometimes. It's not like we haven't seen a clear path towards progressively stronger AI models for the last 8+ years. It's moving fast... but nationalistic reactions are dumb.

20 May

Reminded today that duckdb is great when you need some random interconnect between random DBs on a bastion.

20 May

On my third side project in as many months and I definitely feel like it's a pretty cool time to be a builder. Undoubtedly pros and cons of AI, but it's made me more ambitious about silly projects and that is just fun.

20 May

Also pretty clear that there's a LOT of software out there with incredibly thin moats nowadays. "Oh I really like Foo but I don't want to deal with Java... Maybe I should just rewrite it in Rust/TS/whatever"

13 May

Vendor lock in is obviously going to be a thing in agentic coding and systems. You can have your own harness or adapter layer but it's hard to say no to a fixed cost subscription. CostMaxing is gonna replace TokenMaxing

Aaron Wirick reposted

rmoff 🏃‍♂️🫖🥓

@rmoff.net

5 May

Claude is a stubborn mf sometimes.

rmoff 🏃‍♂️🫖🥓@rmoff.net

Sometimes Claude has no sense of humour.

I really do wonder about the future of engineering teams and how dramatically we will see a scale down in their size. A lot of the friction we have in place right now is generally because scaling the number of _people_ working on a project means you have to create human-friendly guard rails.

Access to investment favors a certain type of engineer and a certain type of person if I'm being honest. If you don't NEED deep pockets to take big risks then we are going to see some awesome, audacious projects in the next couple years driven by small teams of highly motivated engineers.

So I am left again simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic about what the future of my industry could look like. If we listen to our better angels, it's going to be a wildly fun time to be an engineer and tackle wild, audacious projects.

On the whole, I think there's both good and bad things that come from this. Smaller teams sharpen a vision considerably, but miss out on diversity of input. Another problem here is that it means we are going to drown in possibilities. App stores were already flooded with near clones.

This all gets derailed if access to agents calls for higher premiums. We are in this weird phase right now where $200 per month gets you crazy access to frontier models. If that sharply increases, engineers are going to need strong backers to take big risks.

If that conjecture holds, I don't think you need big engineering teams (defined by anyone's definition of big). Five highly aligned and motivated people can ship a LOT at very high quality with process and agents filling in a lot of the gaps.

We've seen this story before in the industry. Individual engineers shipping packages or tools that go on to become industry standards (linux, redis, clojure, sqlite). It's not unrealistic to think that we will see even more of it as individual engineers gain increasingly greater leverage.

You _also_ need a lot of supporting apparatus and people around the engineering teams to clear the path so that the engineers can keep building. That doesn't necessarily go away but supporting a team of 5 engineers is a lot easier than supporting a team of 25.

This means that an individual engineer can ship faster and more safely because the guard rails are technical not managerial. You obviously need the conviction to put the guard rails in place.

You need to include things like "another engineer must review every PR" because of trust issues and because humans inherently make a lot of mistakes (missing checks, bad test cases, etc.). My honest to god take is that a lot of that goes away when you can build good process with agents.

29 Apr

Not to pile on, but the decline of GitHub is really sad to me. It's not like there was no more room to innovate in the space? Such a great brand completely run into the ground by a corporate overlord.

21 Apr

So... I think a lot of our assumptions about good software engineering practices are flawed. They are predicated on humans and humans ain't the only ones building software anymore. There's some things that probably DON'T matter anymore and some new things that our current practices can't handle.

21 Apr

Now if only we can figure out which are which

Aaron Wirick reposted

Justin Garrison

@justingarrison.com

1 Apr

A picture is worth 99.9 words. How's that @github.com migration from bare metal to Azure going? via Alex on Mastodon techhub.social/@ironicbadge...

10 Apr

I have a line in my global agent instructions about no random python scripts. AI usually follows the guidance, but tries to sneak them in occasionally just to keep me on my toes.

9 Apr

Still worried that the benefits of AI are forever going to be locked behind a bigcorp paywall. I thought it was wild that someone wanted $200 per month for AI. Kinda feels like we aren't even close to testing the market limits for the "best".

23 Feb

I've read some really bad takes from some well known engineers about AI agents like Claude Code. You are lucky if you've always had 10x roles with companies that had deep pockets to hire top talent. For the rest of us, $200 / month gives you crazy leverage to be more ambitious in your work.

8 Feb

It's a very exciting and scary time in software engineering. I simultaneously have a great sense of optimism and an overwhelming sense of terror at how much leverage an individual engineer has. The coin is spinning and no one REALLY knows if AI is going to end up good or bad.

25 Jan

Man watching Alex Honnold climb things is really stressful

25 Nov 2025

I don't really dabble in psychology much anymore, but every once in a while I run into a phenomenon that reminds me why I was fascinated by the field. I just had a pretty great insight into a complex graph traversal problem that fell into place while I was brushing my teeth. Gotta love the aha.

25 Nov 2025

One of my coworkers just got back from three months of parental leave. Bringing him up to speed on all the tooling changes with AI is kinda shocking. Not that it was bad three months ago but the capabilities REALLY have grown fast. I feel like a frog boiling in a pot of water.

19 Nov 2025

The more time I spend in software the more I kinda wish I had a proper CS academic background.

10 Nov 2025

I'm jealous of all the folks who get to go to kubecon this week. Have fun yall

3 Nov 2025

It's been said before but one of the best features of LLMs are that they are more than willing to try things. It lowers the required inertia to try something novel.

21 Oct 2025

Today a lot of folks found out that even though they don't personally host their stuff in AWS they are indeed indirectly an Amazon customer

20 Sept 2025

I've always been of the opinion that ORMs abstract away the data model in a way that leads to short term gains and, inevitably, long term pain. Don't avoid thinking about your data model just because it takes extra work.

28 Aug 2025

It low-key drives me nuts when people suggest using an LLM for something that good tools already solve well. Like linters. You don't need a language model to lint a million line codebase. You need a linter.