USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving. Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free. I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these." "They just come with the table, man." They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner. This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat. I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared. "Did we…?" "Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless." Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined. My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude." Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man. I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy. Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived. I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most. Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

You don’t get poorer because someone builds a trillion dollars of value. You get poorer when nobody does.

This is absolutely nuts.

No, you don't get it. He does not have $1 trillion sitting in cash, it is 99% stock in his companies. To make that wealth liquid would mean selling all that stock which would swiftly destroy *both* the companies (Tesla, SpaceX, others) and the wealth. If he sold it all, he'd end up with maybe $100b max, several hundred thousand people would be out of work, the companies ruined and many of their suppliers also ruined. Okay, but now Elon has $100b in cash, and can "solve the world's problems". $100b divided by the world's 8 billion people is $12 If you were in charge, several of the most innovative industrial companies in the world would be destroyed, hundreds of thousands out of work, and space would again close to human civilization for another generation. But everyone on earth could have one nice meal and you could revel in your altruism.

i don't think "sandboxes" will win as a standalone category it's just too easy to swap providers it's everything around it that will make people stay: orchestration, state, networking, observability, security, deployment workflows, pricing, reliability... sandboxes are a feature of a horizontal platform

Massive output uptick due to agentic AI. Complete flat adoption.

Cleanroom v0.10.0 is out. Shared Cleanroom servers are a lot more usable now: OIDC auth, owner-scoped access, DeepSec hardening, and suspend/resume with automatic wake-on-use. github.com/buildkite/cleanro…

Thrilled to welcome @jmwind to the Spellbook team. JML is one of the top technical executives in the world, having worked with Shopify as CTO and Atlassian as VP Engineering, bringing them both to IPO back-to-back. Over the past year, I’ve been lucky to have him as a mentor and advisor. He is one of the most impressively “30,000 foot view” “in the weeds” people I’ve ever met. In the same hour he can code a prototype and deliver deep insight about how to scale our culture & process. This makes him uniquely suited for the role he is pioneering: Executive IC. AI enables people like JML to scale themselves 100x without getting bogged down in layers of management. We aim to write the playbooks for tomorrow, rather than to execute the playbooks of yesterday. We think that org charts will change radically in the next decade, and we want to get far ahead of it. JML will pioneer the systems that scale our AI-native org, will deliver product and technical insight from decades of experience and help grow myself and our executive team. I recommend following him if you are curious how AI-native orgs will operate–he is writing a playbook for the decade to come: @jmwind theglobeandmail.com/business…

It’s wild how crowded this space is.

Developers demand a stream of new tech to learn so that they can avoid the hard ambiguous challenge of actually making useful products blog.scottstevenson.net/p/ho…

Cleanroom v0.9 is out! Private GitHub repos are easier to use in sandboxes: configure a GitHub App once, then Cleanroom handles short-lived tokens for repo fetches. Also: daemon logs, faster darwin-vz startup, more reliable repo checkouts, and better image cache recovery. github.com/buildkite/cleanro…

This has caused me so much pain in the past.

It is becoming less taboo for VCs to back direct competitors I propose a defensive pact amongst founders: "If a Major Investor hedges by investing in my direct competitor, I will hedge by starting a second company" Comment/retweet to cosign :)

Love the framing here of Labs vs FDE.

finally, a good take on taste

Deeply agree with Tobi on this

Don’t share your kernels. Or wait until the next copyfail demonstrates (again) you shouldn’t. The rate of escapes will only increase with agent-based research. Be wary of platforms that don’t rely on strong isolation just to look good on benchmarks.

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.

I feel personally attacked.

It isn't unexpected that the focus of the Bun Rust rewrite is on the anti-Zig side more than anything, since the internet loves to hate. What is unexpected and unfortunate is that leadership within Bun hasn't tried to steer the conversation away from that at all. There are so many positive and interesting takeaways from this and I'm not really seeing any of them pushed as the primary message. A positive thing that hasn't been talked about at all is how far Bun came thanks to Zig. And even if you dump it now, its meaningful for how good Zig was to even build a product to this point and impact by any metric. I would've loved to see anyone in leadership say this. On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. Its useful until its not then it can be thrown out. That's interesting! There's been a lot of talk about memory safety and no doubt Rust provides more guarantees than Zig. But I'd love to see a better analysis of why Bun in particular suffered so much rather than take the language-blame path. How could engineering as a practice been more rigorous to prevent this? What were the largest sources of crashes other programs should watch out for? How does Rust prevent them? How could Zig theoretically prevent them? That's interesting. I know the official blog post hasn't come out yet from Bun. But they're smart enough to know that that PR would stir up controversy the moment it opened, or they should've been. And plenty in the company have been tweeting and writing about it. Its somewhat telling to me in various dimensions what they chose to talk about first. I tend to think I'm pretty good at corporate PR/comms (especially when it comes to developer audiences) and I think appealing to the negative is never the right long term strategy; it does work to get short term eyes though.