2026-02-14 08:00:00
I wanted to share one of the bits of advice that I find myself most frequently giving to teams when they’re working on a product, or founders who are creating a new company: launch it three times.
What I mean by that is, it often takes more than one time before your idea actually resonates or sticks with the people you’re trying to reach. Sometimes it takes more than twice! And when I say that you might need to launch again, that can mean a lot of different things. It might just be little tweaks to what you originally put out in the world, It might even be less than that — I’ve worked with teams that put out literally the exact same thing again and found success, because the issue they had the first time was about timing. That’s increasingly an issue as people are distracted by the deeply disturbing social and political events going on in the world, and so sometimes they just need you to put things in front of them again so that they can reassess what you were trying to say.
Many relaunches are a little more ambitious, of course. Being a Prince fan, I am of course very partial to strategies that involve changing your name. Re-launching under a new name can be a key strategic move if you think that you’re not effectively reaching your target audience. As I’d written recently, one of the most important goals in getting a message out is that they have to be able to talk about you without you. But if you want people to tell your story even when you’re not around, the most important prerequisite is that they have to remember your name. With Glitch, that was the third name we actually launched the community under, a fact that I was a little bit embarrassed about at the time. But having a memorable name that resonated ended up being almost as much a factor in our early success as our user experience or the deeper technological innovations.
There are other ways of making changes for a successful re-launch. One thing I often suggest is to subtract things (or just de-emphasize them) and use that reduction in complexity to simplify a story. Or you can try to re-center your narrative on your users or community instead of on your product — the emotion and connection of seeing someone succeed often resonates far more than simply reciting a litany of features or technical capabilities. Any of these small iterations allow you to take another swing at putting something out into the world without having to make a massive change to the core offering.
Often times, people are afraid or embarrassed to make changes to things like branding or design because they’re some of the more visible aspects of a product or service. Instead, they retreat to “safe” areas, like tweaking the pricing or copy on a web page that nobody reads. But the vast majority of the time, the single biggest problem you have is that nobody knows you exist, and nobody gives a damn about what you do. Everything else pales in comparison to that. I’ve seen so many teams trying to figure out how to optimize the engagement of the three users on their app, or the five people who come to their site, while forgetting about the other eight billion people who have no idea they exist.
This idea of launching again is really important to keep in mind because so much of the narrative in the startup world is about “fail fast” and “90% of startups fail”. When the conventional narrative from VCs prompts you to pivot right away, or an investor is pressuring everyone to grow, grow, grow at all costs, it can be hard to think about slowing down and taking the time to revisit and refine an idea.
But if you’re moving with conviction, and you’ve created something meaningful, and if you’re serving a real community that you have a deep understanding of, then it may be the case that you simply need to try again. If you are not moving with conviction to create something meaningful for a real community, then you don’t need to do it three times, because you don’t even need to do it once.
So many of the creators and innovators that inspire me most often end up working on their best ideas for years or even decades, iterating and revisiting those ideas with an almost-obsessive passion. Most of the time, they’re doing it because of a combination of their own personal mission and the deep belief that what they’re doing is going to help change people’s lives for the better. For those kinds of people, one of the things I want most is to ensure that they don’t give up before their ideas have had a full and fair chance to succeed, even if that means that sometimes you have to try, try again.
2026-02-12 08:00:00
In each successive generation of code creation thus far, we’ve abstracted away the prior generation over time. Usually, only a small percentage of coders still work on the lower layers of the stack that used to be the space where everyone was working. I’ve been coding long enough that people were still creating code in assembly when I started (though I was never any good at it!), though I started with BASIC. Since BASIC was an interpreted language, its interpreter would write the assembly language for me, and I never had to see exactly what assembly language code was being created.
I definitely did know old-school coders who used to, at first, check that assembly code to see if they liked the output. But eventually, over time, they just learned to trust the system and stopped looking at what happened after the system finished compiling. Even people using more “close to the metal” languages like C generally trust that their compilers have been optimized enough that they seldom inspect the output of the compiler to make sure it was perfectly optimized for their particular processor or configuration. The benefits of delegating those concerns to the teams that create compilers, and coding tools in general, yielded so many advantages that that tradeoff was easily worth it, once you got over the slightly uncomfortable feeling.
In the years that followed, though a small cohort of expert coders who would hand-tune assembly code for things like getting the most extreme performance out of a gaming console, most folks stopped writing it, and very few new coders learned assembly at all. The vast majority of working coders treat the output from the compiler layer as a black box, trusting the tools to do the right thing and delegating the concerns below that to the toolmakers.
We may be seeing that pattern repeat itself. Only this time, the abstraction is happening through AI tools abstracting away all the code. Which can feel a little scary.
Just as interpreted languages took away chores like memory management, and high-level languages took away the tedium of writing assembly code, we’re starting to see the first wave of tools that completely abstract away the writing of code. (I described this in more detail in the piece about codeless softwarerecently.
The individual practice of professionalizing the writing of software with LLMs seems to have settled on the term “agentic engineering”, as Simon Willison recently noted.
But the next step beyond that is when teams don’t write any of the code themselves, instead moving to an entirely abstracted way of creating code. In this model, teams (or even individual coders):
With this kind of model deployed, the software that is created can essentially be output from the system in the way that assembly code or bytecode is output from compilers today, with no direct inspection from the people who are directing its creation. Another way of thinking about this is that we’re abstracting away many different specific programming languages and detailed syntaxes to more human-written Markdown files, created much of the time in collaboration with these LLM tools.
Presently, most people and teams who are pursuing this path are doing so with costly commercial LLMs. I would strongly advocate that most organizations, and especially most professional coders, be very fluent in ways of accomplishing these tasks with a fleet of low-cost, locally-hosted, open source/open-weight models contributing to the workload. I don’t think they are performant enough yet to accomplish all of the coding tasks needed for a non-trivial application yet, but there are a significant number of sub-tasks that could reasonably be delegated. More importantly, it will be increasingly vital to ensure that this entire “codeless compilation” stack for agentic engineering works in a vendor-neutral way that can be decoupled from the major LLM vendors, as they get more irresponsible in their business practices and more aggressive towards today’s working coders and creators.
For many, those worries about Big AI are why their reaction to these developments in agentic coding make them want to recoil. But in reality, these issues are exactly why we desperately need to engage.
Many of the smartest coders I know have a lot of legitimate and understandable misgivings about the impact that LLMs are having on the coding world, especially as they’re often being evangelized by companies that plainly have ill intent towards working coders. It is reasonable, and even smart, to be skeptical of their motivations and incentives.
But the response to that skepticism is not to reject the category of technology, but rather to capture it and seize control over its direction, away from the Big AI companies. This shift to a new level of coding abstraction is exactly the kind of platform shift that presents that sort of opportunity. It’s potentially a chance for coders to be in control of some part of their destiny, at a time when a lot of bosses clearly want to get rid of as many coders as they can.
At the very least, this is one area where the people who actually make things are ahead of the big platforms that want to cash in on it.
I think a lot of coders are going to be understandably skeptical. The most common concern is, “I write really great code, how could it possibly be good news that we’re going to abstract away the writing of code?”. Or, “How the hell could a software factory be good news for people who make software?”
For that first question, the answer is going to involve some grieving, at first. It may be the case that writing really clean, elegant, idiomatic Python code is a skill that will be reduced in demand in the same way that writing incredibly performant, highly-tuned assembly code is. There is a market for it, but it’s on the edges, in specific scenarios. People ask for it when they need it, but they don’t usually start by saying they need it.
But for the deeper question, we may have a more hopeful answer. By elevating our focus up from the individual lines of code to the more ambitious focus on the overall problem we’re trying to solve, we may reconnect with the “why” that brought us to creating software and tech in the first place. We can raise our gaze from the steps right in front of us to the horizon a bit further ahead, and think more deeply about the problem we’re trying to solve. Or maybe even about the people who we’re trying to solve that problem for.
I think people who create code today, if they have access to super-efficient code-creation tools, will make better and more thoughtful products than the financiers who are currently carrying out mass layoffs of the best and most thoughtful people in the tech industry.
I also know there’s a history of worker-owned factories being safer and more successful than others in their industries, while often making better, longer-lasting products and being better neighbors in their communities. Maybe it’s possible that there’s an internet where agentic engineering tools could enable smart creators to build their own software factories that could work the same way.
2026-02-06 08:00:00
Ten years ago I wrote that there is no “technology industry”. It’s more true than ever.
There is no “tech”. There’s no such thing as “a FAANG company”. There is almost nothing in common between the very largest tech companies and the next several hundred biggest companies that happen to create tech platforms. Whatever shorthand we use for the biggest tech companies, they almost never have much in common—whether it's how they make money, what products they make, how they make decisions, who leads them, or what drives their cultures.
It’s important to make these distinctions because the false categorization of wildly dissimilar organizations into one grouping leads to absurdly inappropriate decisions being made. Let’s look at some simple examples to understand why.
Take the once-ubiquitous shorthand of “FAANG” to describe big tech. (It stood, at one time, for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Then Facebook became Meta and Google became Alphabet and Microsoft became upset about not being included, and people started trying to use other more unwieldy, less-popular sobriquets.) This abbreviation still persists because of the mindset it represents, and it is still useful in capturing a certain vision of how the industry functions. I often encounter early-career tech workers who describe their ambitions as “working at a FAANG company”.
But let’s look at what these different companies actually do. For all its complexity, Netflix is, at its heart, about streaming video to people. Meta runs a number of communications platforms and social networks. Apple sells hardware devices. They all have very large side businesses that do other things, but this is what these companies are at their core — and they’re wildly different businesses in their core essence!
If someone said, “I want to be an executive at Walmart, or maybe at A24,” you would think, “This person has no idea what the hell they want to be, or what they’re talking about.” If they were to say, “I want to work for nVidia, or maybe Deloitte," you would think, “This person is just confused, and that’s kind of sad.” But this is exactly equivalent to asserting “I want to work at a FAANG company” or “I want to work at a startup” or, worse, “I want to work in tech”.
So many have been caught off guard as tech has grabbed massive power over nearly every aspect of society—from individuals who can't figure out their career paths to policy makers who've been bamboozled by tech tycoons. It's no secret how it happened: everyone underestimated the impact because they judged tech by the same rules as other industries.
These distinctions matter even more because today, everything is tech. Or, if you prefer, nothing is technology. Instead, every area is suffused with tech — and every discipline needs people who are fluent in the concerns of technology, and familiar with the tradeoffs and risks and opportunities that come with the adoption of, and creation of, new technologies.
Now, of course, I know why it’s useful to have the shorthand of being able to say “the tech industry” when talking about a particular sector. But the sleight of hand that comes from being able to hide the enormous, outsized impact that this small number of companies has across a vast number of different sectors of society is possible, in part, because we treat them like they’re one narrow part of the business world. In many cases, an individual division of a giant tech company dwarfs the entirety of other industries. Apple’s AirPods business isn’t even one of the first products one would think of when listing their most important, most influential, or most profitable lines of business, and yet AirPods alone are bigger than the entire domestic radio advertising business in the United States. Google’s ad business alone is larger than the entire U.S. domestic airline industry combined. Things that are considered an “industry” in other categories are smaller than things that are considered a product in “tech”.
That sense of scale is important to keep in mind as we push for accountability and to understand how to plan for what’s ahead. Even building a path for one’s own career — whether that’s inside or outside of the companies we consider to be in the tech sector — requires having a proper perspective on the relative influence of these organizations, and also on the distorting effect it can have when we don’t look at them in their full complexity.
One example from a completely different realm that I find useful in contextualizing this challenge is from the world of retail: Ikea is one of the top 10 restaurants in the world. (By many reports, it’s the 6th largest chain of restaurants.) That is, of course, incidental to its role as a furniture retailer. But this is the nature of massive scale. The second-order impacts are still enough to have outsized effects in the larger world.
At a moment when we have seen that so many of the biggest tech companies are led by people who don’t know how to act responsibly with all of the power that they’ve been given, it’s important that we complicate our views of their companies, and consider that they are much more than just part of the “tech industry”. They are functioning as communications, media, finance, education, infrastructure, transportation, commerce, defense, policing, and government much of the time. And very often, they’re doing it without our awareness or consent.
So, when you hear conversations in society about tech companies, or tech execs, or tech platforms, make sure you push those who are involved in the dialogue to be specific about what they mean. You may find that they haven’t stopped to reflect on the fact that this simple label has long since stopped accurately describing the extraordinary amount of power and control that this handful of companies exert over our daily lives, and over society as a whole.
2026-02-04 08:00:00
This past week, over a series of events, the New York tech community celebrated the 30th anniversary of a nebulous idea described as “Silicon Alley”, the catch-all term for our greater collective of creators and collaborators, founders and funders, inventors and investors, educators and entrepreneurs and electeds, activists and architects and artists. Some of the parties or mixers have been typical industry affairs, the usual glad-handing about deal-making and pleasantries. But a lot have been deeper, reflecting on what’s special and meaningful about the community we’ve built in New York. Steven Rosenbaum’s reflection on the anniversary captures this well from someone who’s been there, and Leo Schwartz’s piece for Fortune covers the more conventional business angle.
Beyond the celebrations, though, I wanted to reflect on a number of the deeper conversations I’ve had over these last few days. These are conversations grounded in the reality of where our country and city are today, far beyond spaces where wealthy techies are going to parties and celebrating each other. The hard questions raised in these conversations are the ones that determine where this community goes in the future, and they’re the ones that every tech community is going to face in the current moment.
I know what the New York City tech community has been; there was a time when I was one of its most prominent voices. The question now is what it will be in the future. Because we are at a profound crossroads.
Nobody better exemplifies the best of what New York tech has been than Aaron Swartz. As I’d written about recently, he was brilliant and delightfully impossible. At an incredibly young age, he led our community in the battle to push back against a pair of ill-considered bills that threatened free expression on the Internet. (These bills would have done to the web what the current administration has done to broadcast television, having a chilling effect on free speech and putting large swaths of content under government control.) As we stood outside Chuck Schumer’s office and demanded that big business take their hands off our internet, we got our first glimpse of the immense power that our community could wield. And we won, at least for a while.
My own path within the New York tech community was nowhere near as dramatic, but I was just as motivated in wanting to serve the community. When I became the first person elected to the board of the New York Tech Meetup (later the New York Tech Alliance), it was the largest member-led organization of tech industry workers in the country. By the time it reached its peak, we were over 100,000 members strong, and could sell out one of our monthly events (at a venue of over 1000 attendees) in minutes. The collective power and impact of that cohort was immense. So, when I say “community”, I mean community. I’m not talking about the contemporary usage of the word, when people call their TikTok followers a “community”. I mean people who care about each other and show up for each other so that they can achieve meaningful things.
New York tech demonstrated its values time and again, and not just in organizing around policy that served its self-interest. When the city was still reeling from 9/11, these were people who not only chose to stay in the city, or who simply talked about how New York ought to rebuild, but actually took the risk and rebuilt the economy of the city — the majority of the economic regrowth and new jobs in New York City in the quarter-century since the attacks of 9/11 have happened thanks to the technology sector.
When Hurricane Sandy hit, these were people who were amongst the first to step up to help their neighbors dig out. When our city began to open up its data, the community responded in kind by building an entire ecosystem of new tools that laid the groundwork for the tech we now take for granted when navigating around our neighborhoods. There was no reluctance to talk about the importance of diversity and inclusion, and no apology in saying that tech was failing to do its job in hiring and promoting equitably, because we know how much talent is available in our city. Hackers would come to meetups to show off their startups, sure, but just as often to show off how they’d built cool new technology to help make sure our neighbors in public housing had heat in the winter. This was New York-style tech.
What’s more, the work of this community happened with remarkable solidarity; the SOPA/PIPA protests that Aaron Swartz spoke at had him standing next to some of the most powerful venture capitalists in the city. When it was time to take action, a number of the most influential tech CEOs in New York took Amtrak down to Washington, D.C. to talk to elected officials and their staffers about the importance of defending free expression online, advocating for the same issue that had been so important to the broke college kids who’d been at the rally just a few days earlier. People had actually gathered around principles. I don’t say this as a Pollyanna who thinks everything was perfect, or that things would have always stayed so idealistically aligned, but simply to point out that this did happen. I don’t have to assert that it is theoretically possible, because I have already seen a community which functions in this way.
But things have changed in recent years for New York’s tech community. What used to often be about extending a hand to neighbors has, much of the time, become about simply focusing on who’s getting funded to chase the trends defined by Silicon Valley. The vibrancy of the New York Tech Meetup took a huge hit from covid, preventing the ability for the community to gather in person, and the organization’s evolution from a Meetup to an Alliance to being part of Civic Hall shifted its focus in recent years, though there has been a recent push to revitalize its signature events. In its place, much of the public narrative for the community is led by Tech:NYC, which has active and able leadership, but is a far more conventional trade group. There's a focus on pragmatic tools like job listings (their email newsletter is excellent), but they're unlikely to lead a rally in front of a Senator's office. An organization whose founding members include Google and Meta is necessarily going to be different than one with 100,000 individual members.
When I spoke to the Wall Street Journal back in 2013 about the political and social power of our community, at a far different time, I called out the breadth of who our community includes:
The tech constituency encompasses a range of potential voters who remain unlikely to behave as a traditional bloc. "It's venture capitalists and 23-year-old graphic designers in Bushwick," Mr. Dash said. "It's labor and management. It's not traditional allies."
I wanted to make sure people understood that tech in New York is much broader than just, well, what the bosses and the big companies want. It is important to understand that New York is about founders, not just funders.
The distinction between these groups and their goals was never clearer to me than in the 2017 battle around Amazon’s proposed HQ2 headquarters. The public narrative was that Amazon was trying to make a few cities jump through hoops to make the best possible set of bribes to the company so that they would build a new headquarters complex in the host city. The reality was, New York City offered $1.5 billion dollars to the richest man in the world in order to open up an office in a city where the company was inevitably going to do business regardless, and the contract that Amazon would have to sign in exchange only obligated them to hire 500 new workers in the city — fewer people than their typical hiring plan would expect in that timeframe. In addition, the proposed plan would have taken over land intended for 6,000 homes, including 1500 affordable units, would have defunded the mass transit system through years of tax breaks for the company while putting massive additional burden on the transit system, and raised housing prices. (Amazon has since signed a lease for 335,000 square feet and hired over 1000 employees, without any subsidies.)
At the time, I was CEO of a company that two entrepreneurs had founded in 2000 and bootstrapped to success, leading to them spinning out multiple companies which would go on to exit for over $2.2 billion, providing over 500 jobs and creating dozens of millionaires out of the workers who joined the companies over the years. Several of the people who had worked at those companies went on to form their own companies, and those companies are now collectively worth over $5 billion. All of these companies, combined, have gotten a total of zero billion dollars from the state and city of New York. In addition, none of those companies have ever had working conditions anywhere close to those Amazon has been criticized for.
But the story of the time was that “New York tech wants HQ2!” Media like newspapers and TV were firmly convinced that techies were in support of Amazon getting a massive unnecessary handout, and I had genuinely struggled to figure out why for a long time. After a while, it became obvious. Everyone that they had spoken to, and all the voices that were considered canonical and credible when talking about “New York tech”, were investors or giant publicly-traded companies.
People who actually built things were no longer the voice of the community. Those who showed up when the power was out, or when the community was hurting, or when there was an issue that called for someone to bravely stand up and lead the crowd even if there was some social or political risk — they were not considered valid. People liked the myth of Aaron Swartz by then, but they would have ignored the fact that he almost certainly would have objected to corporate subsidy for the company.
I am still proud of the New York tech community. But that’s because I get to see what happens in person. Last week, I was reminded at every one of the in-person commemorations of the community that there are so many generous, kind-hearted, thoughtful people who will fight to do the right thing. The challenge today, though, is that those are no longer the people who define the story of the community. That’s not who a new person thinks of when they’re introduced to our community.
When I talk to young people who are new to the industry, or people who are changing careers who are curious about tech, they have heard of things like Tech Week, or they read trade press. In those venues, a big name is generally not our home-grown founders, or even the “big” success stories of New York tech. That’s especially true as once high-flying New York tech companies like Tumblr and Foursquare and Kickstarter and Etsy and Buzzfeed either faded or got acquired, and newer successful startups are more prosaic and less attention-grabbing. Who’s left to tell them a story of what “tech” means in New York? Where will they find community?
One possible future is that they try to build a startup, doing everything you’re “supposed” to do. They pitch the VC firms in town, and the big name firms that they’ve heard of. If they’re looking for community, they go to the events that get the most promotion, which might be Tech Week events. And all of these paths lead the same way — the most prominent VC firm is Andreessen Horowitz, and they run Tech Week too, even though they’re not from NYC.
On that path, New York tech puts you across the table from the man who strangled my neighbor to death.
Another possible future is that we rebuild the kind of community that we used to have. We start to get together the people who actually make things, and show off what we’ve built for one another. It’s going to require re-centering the hundreds of thousands of people who create and invent, rather than the dozens of people who write checks. It’s going to mean that the stories start with New York City (and maybe even… in the outer boroughs!), rather than taking dictation from those in Silicon Valley who hate our city. And it’s going to require understanding that technology is a set of tools and tactics we can use in service of goals — ideally positive social goals — and not just an economic opportunity to be extracted from.
We would never talk about education by only talking to those who invest in making pencils. We’d never consider a story about a new movie to be complete if we only talked to those who funded the film. And certainly our policymakers would balk if we skipped speaking with them and instead aimed our policy questions directly at their financial backers, though that might result in more accurate responses. Yet somehow, with technology, we’ve given over the narrative entirely to the money men.
In New York, we’ve borne the brunt of that error. A tech community with heart and soul is in danger of being snuffed out by those who will only let its most base instincts survive. Even our investors here are more thoughtful than these stories would make it seem! But we can change it, and maybe even change the larger tech story, if we’re diligent in never letting the bad actors control the narrative of what tech is in the world.
Like so many good things, it can all start with New York City.
2026-01-27 08:00:00
There's been a remarkable leap forward in the ability to orchestrate coding bots, making it possible for ordinary creators to command dozens of AI bots to build software without ever having to directly touch code. The implications of this kind of evolution are potentially extraordinary, as outlined in that first set of notes about what we could call "codeless" software. But now it's worth looking at the larger ecosystem to understand where all of this might be headed.
One idea that's come up in a host of different conversations around codeless software, both from supporters and skeptics, is how these new orchestration tools can enable coders to control coding bots that aren't from the Big AI companies. Skeptics say, "won't everyone just use Claude Code, since that's the best coding bot?"
The response that comes up is one that I keep articulating as "frontier minus six", meaning the idea that many of the open source or open-weight AI models are often delivering results at a level equivalent to where frontier AI models were six months ago. Or, sometimes, where they were 9 months or a year ago. In any of these cases, these are still damn good results! These levels of performance are not merely acceptable, they are results that we were amazed by just months ago, and are more than serviceable for a large number of use cases — especially if those use cases can be run locally, at low cost, with lower power usage, without having to pay any vendor, and in environments where one can inspect what's happening with security and privacy.
When we consider that a frontier-minus-six fleet of bots can often run on cheap commodity hardware (instead of the latest, most costly, hard-to-get Nvidia GPUs) and we still have the backup option of escalating workloads to the paid services if and when a task is too challenging for them to complete, it seems inevitable that this will be part of the mix in future codeless implementations.
The most thoughtful and fluent analysis of the new codeless approach has been this wonderful essay by Maggie Appleton, whose writing is always incisive and insightful. This one's a must-read! Speaking of Gas Town (Steve Yegge's signature orchestration tool, which has catalyzed much of the codeless revolution), Maggie captures the ethos of the entire space:
We should take Yegge’s creation seriously not because it’s a serious, working tool for today’s developers (it isn’t). But because it’s a good piece of speculative design fiction that asks provocative questions and reveals the shape of constraints we’ll face as agentic coding systems mature and grow.
Once you've considered Maggie's piece, it's worth reading over Steve Krouse's essay, "Vibe code is legacy code". Steve and his team build the delightful val town, an incredibly accessible coding community that strikes a very careful balance between enabling coding and enabling AI assistance without overwriting the human, creative aspects of building with code. In many ways (including its aesthetic), it is the closest thing I've seen to a spiritual successor to the work we'd done for many years with Glitch, so it's no surprise that Steve would have a good intuition about the human relationship to creating with code.
There's an interesting point, however to the core point Steve makes about the disposability of vibe-coded (or AI-generated) code: all code is disposable. Every single line of code I wrote during the many years I was a professional developer has since been discarded. And it's not just because I was a singularly terrible coder; this is often the normal thing that happens with code bases after just a short period of time. As much as we lament the longevity of legacy code bases, or the impossibility of fixing some stubborn old systems based on dusty old languages, it's also very frequently the case that people happily rip out massive chunks of code that people toiled over for months or years and then discard it all without any sentimentality whatsoever.
Codeless tooling just happens to embrace this ephemerality and treat it as a feature instead of a bug. That kind of inversion of assumptions often leads to interesting innovations.
As I noted in my original piece on codeless software, we can expect any successful way of building software to be appropriated by companies that want to profiteer off of the technology, especially enterprise companies. This new realm is no different. Because these codeless orchestration systems have been percolating for some time, we've seen some of these efforts pop up already.
For example, the team at Every, which consults and builds tools around AI for businesses, calls a lot of these approaches compound engineering when their team uses them to create software. This name seems fine, and it's good to see that they maintain the ability to switch between models easily, even if they currently prefer Claude's Opus 4.5 for most of their work. The focus on planning and thinking through the end product holistically is a particularly important point to emphasize, and will be key to this approach succeeding as new organizations adopt it.
But where I'd quibble with some of what they've explained is the focus on tying the work to individual vendors. Those concerns should be abstracted away by those who are implementing the infrastructure, as much as possible. It's a bit like ensuring that most individual coders don't have to know exactly which optimizations a compiler is making when it targets a particular CPU architecture. Building that muscle where the specifics of different AI vendors become less important will help move the industry forward towards reducing platforms costs — and more importantly, empowering coders to make choices based on their priorities, not those of the AI platforms or their bosses.
A good example of the "normal" developer ecosystem recognizing the groundswell around codeless workflows and moving quickly to integrate with them is the Tailscale team already shipping Aperture. While this initial release is focused on routine tasks like managing API keys, it's really easy to see how the ability to manage gateways and usage into a heterogeneous mix of coding agents will start to enable, and encourage, adoption of new coding agents. (Especially if those "frontier-minus-six" scenarios start to take off.)
I've been on the record for years about being bullish on Tailscale, and nimbleness like this is a big reason why. That example of seeing where developers are going, and then building tooling to serve them, is always a sign that something is bubbling up that could actually become signficant.
It's still early, but these are the first few signs of a nascent ecosystem that give me more conviction that this whole thing might become real.
2026-01-26 08:00:00
I've been working in and around the technology industry for a long time. Depending on how you count, it's 20 or 30 years. (I first started getting paid to put together PCs with a screwdriver when I was a teenager, but there isn't a good way to list that on LinkedIn.) And as soon as I felt like I was pretty sure that I was going to be able to pay the next month's rent without having to eat ramen noodles for two weeks before it was due, I felt like I'd really made it.
And as soon as you've made it, you owe it to everybody else to help out as much as you can. I don't know how to put it more simply than that. But for maybe the first decade of being in the "startup" world, where everybody was worried about appealing to venture capital investors, or concerned about getting jobs with the big tech companies, I was pretty convinced that one of the things that you couldn't do to help people was to talk about some of the things that were wrong. Especially if the things that were wrong were problems that, when described, might piss off the guys who were in charge of the industry.
But eventually, I got a little bit of power, mostly due to becoming a little bit visible in the industry, and I started to get more comfortable speaking my mind. Then, surprisingly, it turned out that... nothing happened. The sky didn't fall. I didn't get fired from my jobs. I certainly got targeted for harassment by bad actors, but that was largely due to my presence on social media, not simply because of my views. (And also because I tend to take a pretty provocative or antagonistic tone on social media when trying to frame an argument.) It probably helped that, in the workplace, I both tend to act like a normal person and am also generally good at my job.
I point all of this out not to pat myself on the back, or as if any of this is remarkable — it's certainly not — but because it's useful context for the current moment.
I have been around the technology industry, and the larger business world, long enough to have watched the practice of speaking up about moral issues go from completely unthinkable to briefly being given lip service to actively being persecuted both professionally and politically. The campaigns to stamp out issues of conscience amongst working people have vilified caring for others with names ranging from "political correctness" to "radicalism" to "virtue signaling" to "woke" and I'm sure I'm missing many more. This, despite the fact that there have always been thoughtful people in every organization who try to do the right thing; it's impossible to have a group of people of any significant size and not have some who have a shred of decency and humanity within them.
But the technology industry has an incredibly short memory, by design. We're always at the beginning of history, and so many people working in it have never encountered a time before this moment when there's been this kind of brutal backlash from their leaders against common decency. Many have never felt such pressure to tamp down their own impulses to be good to their colleagues, coworkers, collaborators and customers.
I want to encourage everyone who is afraid in this moment to find some comfort and some solace in the fact that we have been here before. Not in exactly this place, but in analogous ones. And also to know that there are many people who are also feeling the same combination of fear or trepidation about speaking up, but a compelling and irrepressible desire to do so. We've shifted the Overton window on what's acceptable multiple times before.
I am, plainly, exhorting you do to speak up about the current political moment and to call for action. There is some risk to this. There is less risk for everyone when more of us speak up.
In the United States, our government is lying to us about an illegal occupation of a major city, which has so far led to multiple deaths of innocents who were murdered by agents of the state. We have video evidence of what happened, and the most senior officials in our country have deliberately, blatantly and unrepentantly lied about what the videos show, while besmirching the good names of the people who were murdered. Just as the administration's most senior officials spread these lies, several of the most powerful and influential executives in the tech industry voluntarily met with the President, screened a propaganda film made expressly as a bribe for him, and have said nothing about either the murders or the lies about the murders.
These are certainly not the first wrongs by our government. These are not even the first such killings in Minnesota in recent years. But they are a new phase, and this occupation is a new escalation. This degree of lawless authoritarianism is new — tech leaders were not crafting golden ingots to bribe sitting leaders of the United States in the past. Military parades featuring banners bearing the face of Dear Leader, followed by ritual gift-giving in the throne room of the golden palace with the do-nothing failsons and conniving hangers-on of the aging strongman used to be the sort of thing we mocked about failing states, not things we emulated about them.
So, when our "leaders" have failed, and they have, we must become a leaderful community. This, I have a very positive feeling about. I've seen so many people who are willing to step up, to give of themselves, to use their voices. And I have all the patience in the world for those who may not be used to doing those things, because it can be hard to step into those shoes for the first time. If you're unfamiliar or uncomfortable with this work, or if the risk feels a little more scary because you carry the responsibility of caring for those around you, that's okay.
But I've been really heartened to see how many people have responded when I started talking about these ideas on LinkedIn — not usually the bastion of "political" speech. I don't write the usual hustle-bro career advice platitudes there, and instead laid out the argument for why people will need to choose a side, and should choose the side that their heart already knows that they're on. To my surprise, there's been near-universal agreement, even amongst many who don't agree with many of my other views.
It is already clear that business leaders are going to be compelled to speak up. It would be ideal if it is their own workers who lead them towards the words (and actions) that they put out into the world.
Those of us in the technology realm bear a unique responsibility here. It is the tools that we create which enable the surveillance and monitoring that agencies like ICE use to track down and threaten both their targets and those they attempt to intimidate away from holding them accountable. It is the wealth of our industry which isolates the tycoons who run our companies when they make irrational decisions like creating vanity films about the strongman's consort rather than pushing for the massive increase in ICE spending to instead go towards funding all of Section 8 housing, all of CHIP insurance, all school lunches, and 1/3 of all federal spending on K-12 education.
It takes practice to get comfortable using our voices. It takes repetition until leaders know we're not backing down. It takes perseverance until people in power understand they're going to have to act in response to the voices of their workers. But everyone has a voice. Now is your turn to use it.
When we speak, we make it easier for others to do so. When we all speak, we make change inevitable.