What if a codebase was actually stored in Postgres and agents directly modified files by reading/writing to the DB? Code velocity has increased 3-5x. This will undoubtedly continue. PR review has already become a bottleneck for high output teams. Codebase checked-out on filesystem seems like a terrible primitive when you have 10-100-1000 agents writing code. Code is now high velocity data and should be modeled at such. Bare minimum, we need write-level atomicity and better coordination across agents, better synchronization primitives for subscribing to codebase state changes and real-time time file-level code lint/fmt/review. The current ~20 year old paradigm of git checkout/branch/push/pr/review/rebase ended Jan 2026. We need an entirely new foundational system for writing code if we’re really going to keep pace with scale laws.

This is why I’m unimpressed by Erlang/Elixir: every major language runtime has VERY high-quality M:N work-stealing “thread” schedulers with good APIs (structured concurrency), and the “isolated processes” and “RPC” got pushed up to an orchestration layer (DC/OS, Nomad, k8s…)

Possibly the best thoughts on AI usage that resonates with my feelings. I too like to use AI in the small while coding but the main loop has to be driven by me with my fingers. I feel too nervous watching Claude agent going through my codebase and making changes without me going through the cognitive exercise of forming the mental model of the program. The only time I let the agent loose is when I am trying to understand a large codebase and asking the AI to prepare a workflow of how the code works. But that’s only a read mode operation on the codebase. Learning through fingers, as @dhh says is a great idiom to learn programming.

I wish I had the zero dependency discipline Joran and the TigetBeetle folks have because more often than not, dependencies do end up being a liability or that thing that prevents you from engineering the right thing.

GitHub Actions hosted runners now include Linux arm64 🙌 I can now build multi-platform x86_64 and aarch64 images for github.com/notconf/notconf

Python devs made the smartest marketing move humanity ever knew by saying “You can prototype in Python, and then rewrite to whatever you want” They knew economics of software way too well, prototypes are never getting rewritten, it’s too costly.

About 90% of humans -- 6.5 billion people live north of the equator.