Building @usePatina. Helping teams ship with AI that actually knows their business. Previously Dir. Eng at Mudflap.
San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2008
- Tweets1.8K
- Following1.5K
- Followers386
- Likes344
Piers Rollinson retweeted
Most of the influential twitter folks criticizing software factories work at companies that make coding agents and don't have a factory platform (Warp has both). So there's a natural thing happening here that's like "we don't offer a factory thing, therefore that thing must not be real."
But this is backwards: it's the coding agent market that is commoditized and the factory challenge is what matters.
The challenge right now isn't how to build a good coding agent or local agent workbench or even a personal swarm of agents, it's how do you scale coding agents efficiently across an organization so that every engineer on your team can get the most out of them and the business itself can be confident that this new magic technology they are spending a ton of money on is being deployed efficiently and securely.
Every platform team I talk to wants a solution for this; no one is clamoring for more coding agents or better local workbenches.
Piers Rollinson retweeted
A huge amount of the Anti-AI code sentiment massively overestimates the quality of human code outside of a very small set of open source and high quality company codebases. Human Slop is everywhere and can trivially be improved on by any opus level model.
I love this idea. I've used a similar approach for providing feedback to existing designs. which works great (Especially over lots of screens).
Just ask for a 'review pack' that you can annotate.
In this example, I annotated on an iPad, but you could just as easily create a printable version.
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Here is an example prompt:
Collate the existing design screens into a review pack that makes it easy for me to understand the flows and give feedback using my iPad and Apple Pencil.
Please include:
- An overview map showing how the screens connect, grouped by user journey or feature.
- Larger views of each screen, with readable text and enough surrounding space for handwritten annotations.
- Clear screen names and reference IDs so feedback can be traced back to the original designs.
- Relevant states and variations, with missing screens or unclear transitions flagged.
Prefer an annotation-friendly PDF unless another format would make reviewing on an iPad substantially easier. Keep the designs intact; this task is to organize them for review. Include brief instructions for annotating and returning my feedback.
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Piers Rollinson retweeted
Great line from the CTO of Proton. I’m paraphrasing and stealing it :
Your job is not to use agents to help you write code. Your job is to lead the agents to help them write code.
Piers Rollinson retweeted
Here is Proton CTO's AI manifesto, that I obtained multiple copies of 404media.co/manifestos-fear-…
I was not expecting this.
Day 25/
We are doubling all usage limits for all Pro 100/200/500 tiers and Business Premium, effective today.
We heard your kind feedback and won’t be reducing usage limits for Pro 200, so your Work and Codex usage will stay the same. We’re also going to continue offering extended limits for dots for now, and usage of your dot will still continue to be separate from your default usage.
And we'll of course also keep shipping better models and other efficiency improvements that increase your effective usage over time.
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This is one of the things I see engineering leaders overlook when rolling out AI coding agents:
no dedicated team on the org-level problems.
Someone needs to own the rollout, learn from it, and pass what they learn to the rest of the org.
keeping up with AI is a full-time job. that's why every company needs a frontier team:
the frontier team's job is to keep up as models change. everyone else's job is to use what they learn
we made one @Every and it's completely changed how we work:
0:00 Introduction: Why every company needs a frontier team
2:42 Why the best frontier teams have pirates and architects
4:57 How Head of Evals @hammer_mt builds personal benchmarks
6:46 How Opus edited an explainer video using Slack messages and meeting notes
10:20 Working with AI means protecting other people’s attention
12:26 Why a frontier team needs a “wrangler” like Arielle Shipper
18:58 Why senior editor @jackcheng built a tabless browser
24:37 How resident writer @kplikethebird teaches her AI writing plugin who the reader is
30:51 Inside engineer @JannikJung’s personal AI orchestrator
35:41 Compound engineer @kieranklaassen uses AI to build power tools
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Piers Rollinson retweeted
An alternate data point. This has been my best year selling self-paced video courses, which has been 98% of my income since 2022.
A great course reorients the learner in the world. It doesn't just give them new knowledge, it makes new things possible.
Also, course creation is curation. It takes a spread-out graph of information, finds the most impactful nodes, and linearises it. This means courses are fast-tracks - they get you to where you need to go faster.
So, in the AI world, what is worth learning?
For me, that has meant finding techniques which are:
- Harness-agnostic
- Model-agnostic
- Language-agnostic
...that benefit the agent and increase output quality. Because they're everything-agnostic, you can drop into any codebase and succeed.
This is a huge space. I've explored a small part of it: software fundamentals, module design, increasing test quality.
But there is SO much more there. User interfaces, company process, leadership, observability, product design.
But you've got to make the right course. I wouldn't make my "Total TypeScript" course now (sales have dropped off a cliff). That one focuses too much on API's, learning language features, aspects which are easy to ask agents about.
Instead, I'd make "TypeScript for AI", focusing on the actual things you need to know to make a productive TS codebase for agents (and it would rock, too).
It boggles my mind when people say courses are dead. The hunger for information is very much alive. Go feed it.
AI destroyed my industry. Real thing. I teach people. Always have. At one point I was earning 100k a month selling online coding courses.
Today I can’t make money with training videos if I wanted to. My peers have the same issue: AI is killing video courses. Why learn a tech skill when AI can do the work?
It’s frustrating. But it’s also an opportunity. Now I do more human coaching than ever before.
I spend way more time helping people reach outcomes (vs just a skill).
I’ve had to adapt. I have anxiety from time to time and working closely with people often drains me. But I’ve had to evolve how I work.
The same with coding and SAAS. Everything is changing.
It’s ironic, with AI I’ve personally been forced to be more human and connect at a more human level in order to connect with people and sell products. People are less tolerate of noise and slop.
I’m 40 and learning new things is harder. But I have to. And honestly, I’m having more fun learning AI than struggles and hardships.
All to say is that I’m navigating this changing world like everyone else and I think there is no need to group people in buckets of “Pro AI vs Against AI”
We are all people. And just because things are hard doesn’t mean they are wrong.
Piers Rollinson retweeted
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
Piers Rollinson retweeted
In the obsession with AI, too many founders, leaders, managers seem to have forgotten that an engineer with motivation + drive + focus + AI >> hundreds of AI agents without any of those
The best products and companies are built by people and teams like that, and will continue to be so
Ask yourself, again, why the AI labs hire the best of the best (some of the most driven people in the industry; founders, CTOs etc) if people aren't making the differrence when everyone has access to similar tools already
Piers Rollinson retweeted
The answer to “the artifact that a product manager produces” is … a story?
No. It's simpler and bigger than that.
A story is not a product. Code is not a product. UI is not a product. Requirements are not a product.
It's the INTEGRATION that makes it a product. The artifact of a PM is ... the product!
The reason why it sometimes feels like the PM artifact could be the spec, or the story, or the scope ... is because those are all things that set boundaries on what to integrate.
a16z.com/product-management-…
Piers Rollinson retweeted
the right way to use model capabilities is not to ship 10x more features to prod
it's to spend more time understanding your users, trying experiments, building prototypes, learning about things you don't understand so that you can ship things that actually work
Piers Rollinson retweeted
“People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter.”
We are turning an entire generation of technical experts around the world into the equivalent of retirees pushing a button in front of casino slot machines.
Essentially the brain rot of doom scrolling social media is coming for your development team…
This will have lots of long run implications on companies. Most important of which, is that it will make existing moats even more brittle.
The value of automated software is not making the software faster.
It is understanding your intention and making the software BETTER.
Better edge.
Better design.
Better alpha.
But if you don’t slow down and map out your intention, you will just make your shitty code faster.
We built 8090’s Software Factory to do this: when execution is a costless commodity, what really matters?
Over time, companies will realize that it’s:
1. Intention
2. Governance
3. Verification
4. Evidence
This is what will separate orgs consuming tokens and companies encoding their edge. This generally requires top down leadership from the CEO to the CFO/CIO.
Bottoms up tool adoption only increases costs and accelerates slot machine behaviors.
Good luck to all the players.
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
Something that I've been using @bot for: handling school comms. It digests newsletters, monitors messages from teachers and keeps on top of what I need to act on (RSVPs, filling out forms, etc)
Here's a template for working parents: x.ai/bot/DlHv5bM529QdYfJCHB7…
We’re inviting one Grok Bot user to a Starship launch. You could win the invite by sharing the ways you've integrated @Bot into your work. The invite includes a plus one.
How to submit and some examples we love:
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This is the way.
It’s also why I still believe there are ways to differentiate yourself in the age of AI.
AI raises the floor, but there’s still a lot of room to go above and beyond.
One of the biggest differences between how I do programmatic SEO and the examples I see is attention to detail.
I spend days extracting, cleaning, and enriching data sources and figuring out how to display it.
I can't abide stuff like text being formatted as Llc instead of LLC and every piece of data has to be shown in the most user-focused way possible.
AI does all of the work but I am very meticulous in content, design, data, and structure.
My focus is alway "how can I make this page as valuable, intuitive and easy to use as possible". I use keyword research to help inform the content but I don't build pages with Google or AI search in mind - it's always about the people who are using it.
(Especially important since many of my users are not young or technical at all!)
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Piers Rollinson retweeted
wrote down some of the design thinking behind Grok Bot.
persistent roles, clear state, scoped context, coordinated teams — an interface designed to move you from operating AI to delegating work.
x.ai/news/designing-grok-bot
This is so cool.
We have a huge news to share today!
Today we are unveiling the first truly accessible RL robot - welcome Microduck
A 25 cm tiny open-source biped with 15 actuators and packed with sensors (camera, speaker, LiDAR, NFC, bluetooth, wifi, etc) that you train yourself with reinforcement learning.
It's also playable out of the box with more than half a dozen fun and playful pre-trained policies to have it walk, sit, crouch, roller-skate, pick up objects with its articulated beak, and recover on its own.
And all for less than $400.
See all the details, play with the simulator and order it at: pollen-robotics.com/microduc…
(video with sound on 🔊)
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