Phil Calçado

All this talk about using only end-to-end tests for AI-written code makes me think the real winner of the AI race is going to be Buildkite.

AI agents like Meta’s Muse are on your side in exactly the same sense HR is on your side.

Of course the model already knows all those books. But knowing every trick in the book doesn't make you an engineer. philcalcado.com/2026/10/17/e...

Claude is such a political animal I’m convinced it was trained on promo packets and perf reviews.

Any startup that hires enough ex-Googlers ends up with an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Google infra www.anthropic.com/engineering/...

The situation in America is such that every four years we vote on whether we’re allowed to say “Merry Christmas” or “artificial intelligence.”

Vibe-coded apps are free as in beer to build and free as in puppy to own.

Bending Spoons is the new BSoD

AI can easily 10x the impact of everyone on your team. Unfortunately, 10 × -5 = -50

Two Cybertrucks a block apart in Carroll Gardens. Haven’t seen two of these things in a day since 2024. I hope this ain’t no motherfucking bad omen.

Jev and the System One models in its wake: you either get it immediately, or you can’t see why anyone’s excited about a model that can’t write a sentence. If you get it, you’ve probably spent years torturing LLMs into production. Slides from today’s session: philcalcado.com/downloads/je...

Twitter is Skype Mastodon is IRC Threads is MSN Messenger Bluesky is Yammer I will not elaborate.

From what I’m seeing of Jev in real-world applications, a lot of us are about to learn the hard way that you can’t just multiply probabilities 😬

Reviewing a 4,000-line agent-generated PR in 2026 be like:

AI commoditizes SaaS the way VB and Delphi commoditized 90s CRUD apps. When building gets cheap, design is the differentiator. Yet most of what ships is commodity agents writing commodity code behind commodity UX. Katie Dill’s is a breath of fresh air www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLvF...

I feel like every day I find out about another internet comedian I like who lives and/or was raised in Carroll Gardens

We might have used up all the world’s water, but we finally got DHH to stop writing code. Worth it.

Nobody writes a $3M seed check for a classifier, so at my last startup we called ours something else. What was actually under the hood, and why @typesafeai.bsky.social's launch caught my eye: philcalcado.com/2026/09/15/c...

Email wasn’t replaced by Slack but by four hundred Google Docs on the same topic, all named 'Untitled'. I mean, if we’re writing memos like it’s 1954, we could at least bring back the pneumatic tubes.

shut up, claude, nobody cares

The hardest part of being a senior engineering leader is making enough room to do the job philcalcado.com/2026/08/18/t...

when the coffee shop puts on a bossa nova playlist and you’re the only Brazilian within a five-mile radius

Being Brazilian in an American coffee shop means everyone else gets pleasant bossa nova ambience while I’m forced to understand that this man has been singing “sun, love, sea, you” on a loop for three minutes

Being Brazilian in an American coffee shop means everyone else gets pleasant bossa nova ambience while I’m forced to understand that this man has been singing “sun, love, sea, you” on a loop for three minutes

For ten years I've run the same RFC process for how engineers make technical decisions. In just a few months, AI broke its foundational assumption that a good document meant somebody had done research work So I wrote an update for an AI world—as an RFC, obviously philcalcado.com/2026/07/10/w...

Captcha-Driven Development

Commodity code, which is what the majority of SaaS applications are made of, is rarely the hard part indeed. Unfortunately, this often also reflects on the products being commodity... Wrote about this distinction a while ago, and I think it’s even more relevant now: philcalcado.com/2025/02/27/a...

I've user PagerDuty for, what, at least 15 years? I have no idea what any of the buttons in their terrible UI does except ack and resolve.

Funny that we’re rediscovering ASD-STE100, as it’s basically how most AIs have talked in fiction, and in the movie Her the whole plot was what happens when they don’t.

There's a joke I'm not smart enough to make in here somewhere

If people are this upset about Little Italy(!!), I can't wait to see how these bots go when the new version of the map shows Carroll Gardens as a French enclave

IMMIGRANT SONG is today's jam.

I mean, you don't have to tell me that the Anthropic 's Claude Code team doesn't review their AI-written code--it's pretty obvious. Just this week they broke--again--the copy and paste inside the IntelliJ terminal.

the existence of forward-deployed engineers implies the rest of us are backward-deployed engineers

hoje tem 🇧🇷

hot take: Slack is ok for chat and terrible as an email replacement the fragmentation creates more "quick meetings" because eventually the only way to know wtf is going on across channels, threads, and DMs is to summon everyone into a call and no, AI won't solve this

Anthropic’s whole vibe went from ethos to mythos pretty quick huh

Having AI do the research and write your tech spec is like keeping a pristine, never-even-opened copy of The Power Broker on your living room bookshelf.

TTRPG studios and professionals are already under so much hardship, it's incredibly sad what is happening to @paizo.com paizo.com/blog/paizo-r...

my favorite part of tech keynotes is the AI demo just sitting there like okay what are the SF gang doing today are we planning a trip are we planning a party are we choosing a restaurant are we breaking up with bae where we going AI fam

I’ve been in this industry for twenty-five years and have seen all sorts of companies and projects. You know what I have never heard? Someone saying, “You know what I really like about working here? Cross-team collaboration.” philcalcado.com/2026/06/01/c...

OH: Stop trying to square a round pig

It's disheartening to watch so many companies that were building genuinely useful infrastructure and platform primitives for AI products pivot to AI coding agents.

* “I slopped it and here’s what I got” means: Take it or leave it. * “I did some research and here’s what I think” means: I researched, formed a view, and used whatever tools helped me get there. Maybe one of those tools was AI. Maybe it wasn’t. From philcalcado.com/2026/05/31/n...

AWS making S3 strongly consistent in 2020 quietly killed a lot of distributed systems sacred cows. A whole class of designs that used to require databases, queues, or coordination products suddenly became "just a bunch of files in S3." www.opendata.dev/blog/ingesti...