Last week I tried out a lot of coworking spaces: Canopy, Tandem, Temescal Works. We’re trying to find a space between Oakland and SF with nice outdoor walks.

I’m having a great time being a technical cofounder to my (everything else!) cofounder. It’s fun explaining what I am doing. And we have fun shouting “Monolith!” and “Skateboard [MVP]” all day long.

An example of an explanation I gave: one of our client advocate tools is a Twilio-powered Voice Conference Bridge where we can dial in any number of participants which helps shadow and assist our clients in their welfare application journey. We wanted to add DTMF tones for dialing extensions and navigating IVR systems. Unfortunately, the Twilio API that I used initially (Create a Conference Bridge, then create a Participant Call) doesn’t support DTMF tones so I had to flip the logic to a different API (Create a Call, then add it to a Conference Bridge as a Participant). Figuring that out was a couple hours of reading docs and SDK code, feeling confident I wasn’t overlooking something, creating a runner script to bench test it, and finally putting the pieces into their production-ready places which was only like 20 lines of code at the end. That’s where the time goes.

I had several conversations about “the AI memo”. I’ll paste the two themes I talked about, in the words I put into the Rails Perf Slack:

I don’t know what Shopify’s culture is, but I imagine the pronouncement itself could be useful, for Tobi.

As a leader, you say “everyone must… unless you get an exception from me” to learn by forcing exceptions to roll up to you directly. It’s a shitty way to learn, but power is shitty. (I mean “learn” in the very personal sense). It’s a tactic. The flip side is then as a leader you debug the need for the exceptions and that leads to a better policy.

GitHub’s CEO said (not published) something similar (internally) 2 weeks before I left. I sweated it for a day, then DMed him and said “as a manager, I’m not aware of any LLM api that is approved for my use for internal admin stuff?” and he pointed me to the GitHub Models product that is totally unreferenced on any of the internal docs about staff AI tools. I poked that enablement team to add it, and I dunno if the CEO actually followed up with anyone to debug the low awareness (the story of my DM got retold at a different meeting as one about security, but it was really my complete unawareness and its absence on any of the tool lists that were intended to be the starting place for staff to integrate AI into their work).

TLDR: in a culture of opennness (safety to DM the CEO about the policy) and learning (the policy is the start not the end of discussion). I could see the pronouncement to be catalytic.

And

I appreciate that FOMO hype (“don’t be left behind”) has been largely absent [in this Slack community], though I find it elsewhere and a huge distraction.

I think a lot in this thread could have the word “AI” replaced with “Rubymine” and it would be an equally familiar discussion between folks who use it, folks who are curious, and folks who are happy with their current code editor and wish others would stop pushing Rubymine cause it’s slow and costs money and makes developers lazy, analogously.

I share that because I don’t think it’s a new experience to be like: “both of us are producing software but our moment-to-moment experience is wildly materially different” (eg “here is my elaborate process for naming and organizing methods so I can find them later” vs “I cmd-click on it and I go there”). … and then people debate whether that difference matters or not in the end.

When I think of my own experience in The Editor Wars I think the only meaningful thing is to go pair with somebody and observe their material experience producing software in situ, fumbles and all.

I did my first Deep Research this week; it was good A1.

Week one of my startup journey and I already made a successful Rails PR with a bug fix. I didn’t think it was a big deal but it got backported too 💪

On Saturday I did what I’m trying to make my standard 10-mile hike: Stinson Beach to Muir Woods loop (Steep Ravine up, Bootjack down, Ben Johnson up, Dipsea back down). Shandy and fries at the end.

Sunday was a swim (the Bay was a balmy 57F/14C !) and the treat of a Warriors day game with Angelina’s geospatial colleagues, and dinner and ice cream and showing them all our favorite park walks.

I’m still reading Spinning Silver; it’s good and long! I have not played Witcher 3 since writing about it last time, or really anything.