co-founder and CEO of Hex (hex.tech / @_hex_tech) - former @PalantirTech @formationbio - personal site: barry.ooo

Joined August 2011
274 Photos and videos
Fable 5 broke our evals! It fully saturated our own "Shorelane" test set, so we had to scramble to create new ones for @_hex_tech It's the first model since 4.5 to show a meaningful step forward – and a big step toward more complex and long-horizon analysis tasks.
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A few years ago I went on a walk with @bernhardsson around NYC, when he explained the ideas that became @modal. I was energized by his technical depth and vision, but also... uncertain about how big this could get. Cloud compute primitives already exist... what's the long-term edge? Well, it turns out the answer was "insanely strong execution, deep customer empathy, and showing up at the perfect moment for agents" – and their parabolic growth proves what's possible when you put all of that together. Seeing @modal's journey as a friend, angel investor, and customer has been wild and inspiring and I'm so so pumped for them!
Today we're announcing our Series C funding: $355M at a $4.65B valuation, led by some great investors @generalcatalyst and @Redpoint. We've had insane growth in the last year, but we're still very early. So proud of the team and what we have built so far!
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when I first heard of @baseten they were basically a competitor but then I met @tuhinone and I liked him, and when I heard they were pivoting to inference, I was relieved because I didn't want to compete against him and then he hired @DannieHerz and I was angry because I wish I had thought of it and now they're a critical partner for us as we embrace our own many model future at @_hex_tech I'm so happy for all their success and very excited to share what we've been working on with them!
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The most wondrous and terrifying part of 2026 is the opportunity to re-invent whole swaths of @_hex_tech. We're in the process of throwing away features we spent years on – and deeply replacing agents. Generative data apps are a first step – with much more coming soon!
introducing in @_hex_tech: Generative Data Apps backed by code, so you can build anything you want! a dashboard, an editorial, a customer prezo - you name it, you can build it 💜 integrated with your data team's context built w/ governance, security and observability top of mind
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In 2026, all: Loops are “agents” Backends are “engines” UIs are “canvases” Apps are “context layers” Engineers are “members of the technical staff” Collections of markdown files are "moats" What am I missing?
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Izzy is a singularly talented AI thinker and tinkerer, and this interview makes me heart-swellingly proud of all the work he and the team are doing at @_hex_tech 💜
🎙️Introducing Max Agency Max Agency is a new podcast where we go deep on how the best agents are actually being built: architecture decisions, tradeoffs, evals, and everything in between. Each episode, I sit down with engineering leaders who are doing this work in production. Our first episode features Izzy Miller (@isidoremiller), AI Engineer at Hex (@_hex_tech). Hex has been shipping data agents since before most teams were even thinking about them, starting with single-cell text-to-SQL and graduating to a full Notebook agent that can work autonomously for 20 minutes on a complex analysis. Izzy has a lot of perspective on what it actually takes to get agents working well in production, and what breaks along the way. A few takeaways from our conversation: - Keep your eval sets small enough to hold in your head: Izzy runs 30-50 handcrafted "traps" with multiple repetitions, rather than hundreds of variants. If you can't explain why your agent fails each one, your eval set is too big - Day zero performance is almost irrelevant: The more interesting question is how the agent compounds. Izzy is building a 90-day simulation where the warehouse evolves and the agent has to accumulate understanding - You can catch agent errors without seeing the raw outputs: By running an LLM-as-a-judge over production usage and clustering the results, you can surface places where something likely went wrong, without needing to read individual conversations Watch the full episode on: - Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=Xyh1Eqcj… - Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… - Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1BJ…
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Agents are hanging out in the terminal, and now @_hex_tech is joining the party 👯🎈 Hex CLI is extremely useful for everything from propagating dbt model updates, to BI migrations, to everything in between It's a new level of malleability, observability, and control for teams – and I'm very excited to keep pushing here! Try it out now: brew install hex-inc/hex-cli/hex
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Slack’s new AI stuff is somehow both too prominent, and not discoverable enough Don’t know how they do it
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Today @_hex_tech is introducing the boldest redesign in the history of software. As agents transform software, everyone is questioning the role of UX. Will it all become vibe-coded slop? Or will it simply disappear? At Hex, design is the heart of everything we do – and we believe in beautiful UI as much as ever. Today we're introducing a preview of Pure Glass – a new language that evolves our UI, replacing harsh borders with frosted edges, and harsh contrast with clear translucency. No one asked for this – but we're doing it anyway, and are so excited to unleash this on our users this coming fall.
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I love this band of weirdos - come join us!
the @_hex_tech brand & design team have once again truly outdone themselves i'm OBSESSED with our new careers page, there's so many fun details and easter eggs
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software engineering in 2026
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People gave me shit for this but the opportunity to be the new "hub" for all the coding agent spokes is massive If Cursor shipped cloud repos & code review there would be an absolute stampede Meanwhile, I was feeling masochistic this morning an tried to use Github's chat 💀
The Cursor vs. Claude/Codex feels very flawed and missing the bigger picture The labs have ~infinite money and specialized talent, and are going to win on coding models – that's a runaway train. Composer is impressive, but ultimately more for margin protection / defense than playing to win that game. But to quote Stringer Bell, "there are games beyond the game" and I believe Cursor's destiny is different: becoming the new Github – the place where the whole engineering process lives. Their real competition is with them and Linear, not the labs. Bugbot is a great start. We find it super valuable, no matter what coding agent is used, and is a nice wedge into Cursor getting beyond the coding itself. And of course acquiring @graphite. PR review is the single most essential workflow in Github and very ripe for disruption – Cursor is in an amazing position for this. More on the horizon. The cloud sandbox thing is going to be huge. The new Automations thing aims at GH Actions. And it wouldn't surprise me to see them start getting more into security, observability, etc. Could Anthropic/OpenAI try to compete here? Sure. But I don't think customers want them to. I want my coding agent to be a coding agent and would be happy to pay for another model-agnostic system that sits across the whole menagerie and help me manage it. My prediction is that in a year we'll look back at the "Claude Code is great, therefore Cursor is cooked" discourse as misguided, and understand Cursor as playing a different game entirely.
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there's something truly sublime about cluely being scammed on their SOC 2
Delve, a YC-backed compliance startup that raised $32 million, has been accused of systematically faking SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance reports for hundreds of clients. According to a detailed Substack investigation by DeepDelver, a leaked Google spreadsheet containing links to hundreds of confidential draft audit reports revealed that Delve generates auditor conclusions before any auditor reviews evidence, uses the same template across 99.8% of reports, and relies on Indian certification mills operating through empty US shells instead of the "US-based CPA firms" they advertise. Here's the breakdown: > 493 out of 494 leaked SOC 2 reports allegedly contain identical boilerplate text, including the same grammatical errors and nonsensical sentences, with only a company name, logo, org chart, and signature swapped in > Auditor conclusions and test procedures are reportedly pre-written in draft reports before clients even provide their company description, which would violate AICPA independence rules requiring auditors to independently design tests and form conclusions > All 259 Type II reports claim zero security incidents, zero personnel changes, zero customer terminations, and zero cyber incidents during the observation period, with identical "unable to test" conclusions across every client > Delve's "US-based auditors" are actually Accorp and Gradient, described as Indian certification mills operating through US shell entities. 99% of clients reportedly went through one of these two firms over the past 6 months > The platform allegedly publishes fully populated trust pages claiming vulnerability scanning, pentesting, and data recovery simulations before any compliance work has been done > Delve pre-fabricates board meeting minutes, risk assessments, security incident simulations, and employee evidence that clients can adopt with a single click, according to the author > Most "integrations" are just containers for manual screenshots with no actual API connections. The author describes the platform as a "SOC 2 template pack with a thin SaaS wrapper" > When the leak was exposed, CEO Karun Kaushik emailed clients calling the allegations "falsified claims" from an "AI-generated email" and stated no sensitive data was accessed, while the reports themselves contained private signatures and confidential architecture diagrams > Companies relying on these reports could face criminal liability under HIPAA and fines up to 4% of global revenue under GDPR for compliance violations they believed were resolved > When clients threaten to leave, Delve reportedly pairs them with an external vCISO for manual off-platform work, which the author argues proves their own platform can't deliver real compliance > Delve's sales price dropped from $15,000 to $6,000 with ISO 27001 and a penetration test thrown in when a client mentioned considering a competitor
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I love imagining the customer for whom SOC 2 was vitally important – but who was also paying an enterprise contract for Cluely
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most savage book acknowledgement of all time, no notes
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as of last week, agents are creating more cells in @_hex_tech than humans directly
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it's not just that the takes are AI generated — it's that they're bad (and here's why it matters)
It’s not X — it’s Y I cannot unsee how so much of the writing on this site (and online, in general) is increasingly AI-generated. It’s still pretty easy to recognize. Probably not for long tho Just alarming that ppl outsource even typing 3 sentences for a reply on this site…
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