The Pragmatic Engineer
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Observations across the software engineering industry.
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The Pulse: Time to rethink software security because of AI?
A month’s worth of security breaches in a single day – will things get worse before they improve?
The Pulse: Anthropic builds its own source control system
Git had too many performance problems at 30,000 PRs per day, so Anthropic built its own. I talked with the team, including asking why they didn’t open source its new system, ‘Scion.’
The Pulse: new trend of building “internal vibe-coding apps” at tech companies
Ramp and Stripe built platforms for non-engineers to build internal websites and tools with, and both are taking off in those workplaces. I expect more companies to do the same.
The Pulse: Firebase’s global outage & poor response
The Firebase iOS SDK crashed after a backend change, crashing all apps which used Firebase analytics for 2-6 hours. Google didn’t update the status page, but did offer a postmortem 4 days later.
The Pulse: RoR creator sparks new “death of coding by hand” debate
In his Rails World keynote, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) declared the end for writing code by hand for professional work – at 37signals at least. Is this change now unstoppable?
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.
In the directory since 25 Sept 2026 · last checked 9 Nov 2026 · RSS