The Pragmatic Engineer
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Observations across the software engineering industry.
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The Pulse: a new trend of CPU shortages
After a GPU shortage and memory shortage driven by AI companies, we’re now experiencing a CPU shortage, thanks to AI agents using a lot more CPU with tool usage.
The Pulse: tech companies move to open AI models
Uber, Pinterest, Stripe, Coinbase, Ramp, and AT&T are making large savings on their AI bills by dropping proprietary models and using smart model routing.
The Pulse: Meta wanted to reduce teams by 60% because of AI
An in-depth report by Reuters details how Meta’s leadership decided to slash team sizes by 60%. Zuckerberg changed his mind, and now the company is stuck with low morale and culture turned mercenary.
How software engineering is changing: an essay challenge
The pace of change in software engineering is only accelerating, especially since January of this year. This is all to do with the industry-wide adoption of LLMs, AI tooling, and AI infrastructure. At The Pragmatic Engineer, we always want to capture as much of what’s going on
The Pulse: We need to talk about migrations with AI
Asana migrated off testing framework Enzyme in two weeks: without AI, this work would surely have been kicked down the road. Airbnb and Uber share similar stories and AI seems excellent at migrations.
Why you're not getting a response to your podcast pitch from me (or others)
This email is a response to the 50+ podcast pitches that arrived in my inbox just last month, and keep arriving in growing numbers, from PR agencies and marketing teams at various companies. It's also a message to tech founders building stuff for developers: focus on building something
The Pulse: Meta’s self-inflicted resignation-wave
In what was predictable: Meta’s layoffs and forced reassignments pushed engineers not impacted by either to look for a new job. Meta is now offering large equity retainers, and it doesn’t seem working
The Pulse: Grok’s CLI caught uploading all your local files to the cloud
Devs discover that Grok CLI pushed all local files, .env files and git history have been pushed to a GCP bucket, unencrypted. SpaceX’s initial reaction? Blame the devs
The Pulse: Bending Spoons' Acquisition Strategy
In only 5 years, Hopin went from zero to a $7.7B valuation, and back to zero again. Also: Bending Spoons’ startup acquisition model.
The Pulse: Quitting Spotify Podcasts over reliability
Spotify’s podcast platform has become chronically unreliable since the company’s leadership started boasting about AI adoption. Competitors haven’t had similar issues, so I offboarded from Spotify.
The Pulse: New trend - concern about massive increase in code review load
Top of mind for engineering leaders: what to do about the growing code review load, and how devs are starting to review code less thoroughly than before? Many questions, but few proven solutions.
The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun’s rapid Rust rewrite with AI?
To a sceptic, spending $165K to migrate Bun from Zig to Rust sounds very expensive. But to a realist, shortening a 1-2 year migration down to 11 days opens amazing new opportunities for devs. However, a thoroughly-tested project is required to pull it off.
The Pulse: Interesting AI coding stats from Cursor
Power users generate 10x as many lines of code vs the median, most of the AI spend is coming from input tokens not output ones, and almost half of AI changes are accepted without manual review by devs (!!)
The Pulse: a new trend, smart model routing
Are there any ‘intelligent’ router solutions out there which select the right model for the right task? I looked into it, and there are a few options.
Pollen tried to remove my article about CEO Callum Negus-Fancey and CTO Bradley Wright, and Google is assisting with it
In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it: Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April
In the directory since 25 Sept 2026 · last checked 25 Sept 2026 · RSS