The Pragmatic Engineer

We find out why Meta destroyed its standout engineering culture: it feared AI-native startups doing more with less. Also: thoughts on Ramp’s AI infra, GitHub’s load doubles in four months, and more

Apple

GitHub

Ramp

Stripe

OpenAI

Gergely Orosz

We find out why Meta destroyed its standout engineering culture: it feared AI-native startups doing more with less. Also: thoughts on Ramp’s AI infra, GitHub’s load doubles in four months, and more 

The Pulse: Meta wanted to reduce teams by 60% because of AI

The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups.

Casey Muratori explains why software performance matters, how developers can write faster code, and why he challenges conventional engineering practices.

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Videogames

Game development

Why performance actually matters (but gets widely ignored), with Casey Muratori

Why performant code matters (but gets widely ignored), with Casey Muratori

A fintech company rejected the easy route and homebrewed its own coding agent – and is now a step ahead of coding agents from frontier AI labs. An in-depth look

Industry Practice Deepdive

Industry trends

Inspect

Jessica Salmon

Ivan Klaric

Why Ramp built its own in-house coding agent, Inspect

At a select few tech companies, they write most of their code with their own, custom-built, internal AI coding agents. This is different from most of the industry which uses AI coding agents and harnesses like Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, GitHub Copilot, etc. At Ramp, their own version is called

Asana completed a testing framework migration in two weeks, that they would have delayed for years more, and they’re not alone. Also: AI startups could make Gartner much less relevant, and more

Entire

Kubernetes

Cursor

Slack

Gartner

The Pulse: We need to talk about migrations with AI

Addy Osmani shares lessons from 14 years at Google and how AI agents are reshaping software engineering, developer workflows, and the skills engineers need to succeed.

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Google

DevTools

From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani

Trend: more CTOs, VPEs, and Heads of Engineering are walking away from their high-status, in-demand positions. There are many reasons, mostly related to AI, and to "founder mode"

Career

Headed for the Exit: the Great Engineering Leader Career Break

In my ~20 years in this industry, I’ve not seen as many capable engineering leaders opting out or taking prolonged breaks as now, with some high-ranking engineering leaders – CTOs, VPs of Engineering, heads of engineering, etc. – quitting their high-status roles and departing, if not into the sunset, then at least with nothing lined up.

The social media giant is offering $1M+ retainer equity grants to staff who are leaving: and even this is not effective. Also: is Grok Bot the “OpenClaw moment” for managed AI agents?

The Pulse: Meta’s self-inflicted resignation-wave

In 2025, it was rational to be skeptical about AI. In 2026, it's not, anymore. With Charity Majors, CTO and co-founder of Honeycomb.

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Charity Majors, CTO and co-founder of Honeycomb, explains how AI is reshaping software engineering and making reliability and verification more important than ever.

Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors

A shift from a focus on latency to building better AI models, owning the full stack from applications to building custom hardware, very different incentives to most tech companies in play, and more

Optiver

Engineering Culture Deep Dives

Jesse Spevack

Software engineering at a proprietary trading company: Optiver

Building better AI models getting more focus than lower latency, owning the full stack from applications to building custom hardware, very different incentives to most tech companies in play, and more

Before we start: I’ll be in New York, on 15 September, presenting the keynote at LDX3 New York, doing a book signing, and hanging out with attendees. The focus of the conference is engineering leadership at a time when things are moving very fast. See the full agenda and get tickets

Hillel Wayne explains why formal methods like TLA+ matter, how they help build reliable software, and whether AI will finally bring formal verification into the mainstream.

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formal methods

Formal methods with Hillel Wayne

A deepdive on what’s changed in how the leading AI lab makes software. Ever more code review and testing is done by AI, two-pizza teams very much alive, and more. Details from inside of Anthropic

AI Engineering

Anthropic

How building software is changing at Anthropic

Much-improved AI tooling is changing how we build software, and I want to take a peek into how the future of software engineering may unfold under its influence. What better place for that than with tech’s most “AI-pilled” teams: the AI labs themselves.

Also: Chinese open models match closed ones from Anthropic and OpenAI, AWS’s “heart-attack” billing error, and more

Spotify

Gemini

Kimi K3

The Pulse: Quitting Spotify Podcasts over reliability

The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Hit reply and share it with me.