Product developer at @todoist. Always learning. Building @klipstack, @pixamp and more
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Joined March 2009
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“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”
― Leslie Lamport
This quote lives rent-free in my head these days, now that delegating our writing to AI is more and more common.
Ernesto retweeted
The “as a Service” part of SaaS remains underrated.
One guy tweets that his team cancelled their @linear plan, and some people go rushing to declare SaaS and UI/UX dead.
But the guy that cancelled its @linear plan is building a SaaS with lots of UI/UX in it.
Also, this 👇 xitter.cf/karrisaarinen/status/2…
Issues created in @linear by people and via MCP are up 400% this year.
Another fast growing trend: more customers are building their own internal agents and using Linear as the shared layer for workflows, communication and context between people and agents.
As teams move faster, connecting goals, requests, reasoning and the work matters more, even if it sometimes happens after the fact in the review.
Here is one customer oriented example we can do in our Linear:
- Pick a top-10 customer. Ask the agent for a brief of their top requests and the reasoning we've captured
- Write it to a doc in Linear and decide what to build with some people
- Have the agent turn the decisions into projects and issues, carrying the customer requests and meeting notes with them
- Teams send their agents to work on them
- At the QBR, ask agent to generate a report and show the customer what has actually landed or them, how and why
Now multiple these kind of workflows 100 or 1000 times where someone is learning something worth fixing, or trying ideas and finding beta customers for it. Or just aligning across the team or cross function.
Not posting our revenue chart, but it looks a lot like this one
Guide your AI, not too much. Mostly under-guide it.
There’ll be times where you over-guide the AI. It knows better than you and is more intelligent than you.
There’ll be times where you under-guide the AI. It can go off-track, have the wrong biases, or miss context.
How well you manage this superpower is the #0 skill I look for.
User interfaces will not disappear. We're visual animals. If anything, what will happens is that they'll migrate to increasingly be generated dynamically by AI in its responses, as it is already happening in some apps. See @openuidev
How people (in the western hemisphere and western cultures at least) consider Sunday to be the start of the week is something I cannot comprehend.
Ernesto retweeted
If AI had been writing and reviewing its own code for the past few decades, and humans had only recently started looking into what it was up to and discovered an ever-growing list of CVEs, we would reasonably conclude that AI hadn’t been good at coding all along and that we should just start over.
Except it’s the other way around.
Humans have been the ones writing and reviewing each other’s code for decades. Very diligently, if I may add.
If we’re being intellectually honest and holding ourselves to the same bar we hold AI to, we’d have to admit that we haven’t been all that good at it either.
Not enough is said about the stuff you never really learned about software development but that held you back.
For me it was Dockerfiles and deployment setup. With AI, that wall is just gone, and I'm shipping things I would've abandoned before.
What was yours?
Every 'software is dead' wave killed a way of working, not the job. Today we barely read the code. We're still the ones behind the wheel, making sure what we ship works and deciding the architecture and what to build.
Something tells me we're still going to be around in 2034.
In 1994, software was dead. People told me programming was for nerds and that I should become a doctor or a lawyer instead.
In 2004, software was dead. People told me that someone from India would take my job for $5/hour.
In 2014, software was dead. People told me that no-code was going to kill every job and doom my career.
In 2024, software was dead with Devin, Windsurf, Copilot, and OpenAI o1.
We kill software every 10 years, and yet the demand for good Software Engineers has never been higher.
I recently wrote more about why I think software is not dead: ernesto.dev/posts/software-i…
Bring back skeuomorphism
If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The text and attached image are identical to those in this post from January 2026.
x.com/heliographe_/s…
Ernesto retweeted
4 years in, and I'm still mostly doing the same thing with AI:
1. Talk to the clanker about the thing
2. Agree with the clanker on how to do the thing
3. Ask the clanker to do the thing we agreed on
4. Repeat
No secret sauce or "software factory" needed.
This article was one of the highlights of today's reading ghuntley.com/access
ALT > Our job as software engineers now is to engineer systems, including safety controls, that let everyone ship to production — safely. — The craft has been commoditized, but access has not, Geoffrey Huntley