WSJ bestselling author: Vibe Coding w/Steve Yegge. Researcher/enthusiast. Coauthor: Phoenix Project, Unicorn Project, Accelerate. Tripwire founder. Clojure.
Joined January 2009
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Holy cow. The Unicorn Project is on the Wall Street Journal bestseller lists!!!
#2 in Hardcover Business category!
And astonishingly, it’s also #8 across all Non-Fiction E-Books!!!
A DevOps book!! 🤯🤯🤯
🙏❤️🦄🌈
Paywall: wsj.com/articles/best-sellin…
#UnicornProject
Gene Kim retweeted
Only after fully spinning up an AI "chief of staff" do you realize the inane shit that filled up 80% of your workday.
Gene Kim retweeted
"We will ship that <today/tomorrow/this week>"
vs.
"I'm advocating internally to our PMs to include this on our Q4 roadmap and will let you know after our next exec review"
Gene Kim retweeted
the gap between day to day operations at AI native and establish companies continues to increase at pretty remarkable rates. i think we're past the point that incumbents will have much to sell ai natives, because they simply don't understand how they operate anymore
Gene Kim retweeted
Tonight's activity was upgrading firmware on an LG monitor. It started flashing with MacOS 27. I thought it was dying. Then reddit told me I wasn't the only one.
This is the first USB-C monitor from LG for Mac.
• LG app in App Store has no update mechanism.
• LG app stand alone Mac app crashed at 1%.
• Spent about an hour trying various Claude derived patches posted on GitHub but none of those would complete.
• Finally gave up and installed LG app on Windows which included an old .NET and it almost finished but died at 44%. Worried I bricked monitor--a flash every few hours >> bricked monitor.
• Even though it is a Turing machine I rebooted everything and tried again.
-> Firmware updated.
• Now uninstalling all these updater apps.
Gene Kim retweeted
this is why "le traditional way" to store secret which is dotenv/.env doesnt really work in agentic development anymore
you want secret vars condom for your agent to use and can deploy safely without agent read and fuckup your secret
in this case i use combination of sops+secretspec, something like infisical and openbao work as well
FINALLY found how my key got leaked and got the $90,000 bill from google
Opus 5.5 said codex had PUBLISHED MY ****ING .ENV TO CLOUDFALRE PAGES ‼️
Meanwhile codex couldn't find anything, refused to explain itself and flagged my chat for cybersecurity risk lol
Gene Kim retweeted
In March, an anonymous site rated 649 RSA Conference exhibitors and called 62% of them "cooked": replaceable by a weekend of vibe coding, or just a GPT wrapper. Six months later, vRon checked on the patients. The ten cooked stocks are up 73% on average, against 19% for the S&P 500. Four of them doubled. One cooked startup bought another for a billion dollars. Code got cheaper. Customers, data, FedRAMP and the analyst who picks up at 3 a.m. did not.
youtu.be/oarJlRJ0C5U
Gene Kim retweeted
We did the same for many years at Mailchimp. When it was time to announce the payout in December, our CFO would come out dressed as a giant pizza slice (long story).
Since we started offering employee profit sharing in 2020, we've paid out over $24,000,000 to employees.
We've never offered stock options. Not a fan of future maybe money. We pay real cash to real people so they can spend it on real things right now.
When you choose to be our customer, you're making this possible. You're supporting an independent, fully customer-funded business that shares its success with the people who make it happen.
You don't need investors, stock options, or complicated cap tables to share your success. You can just share the profits. It really can be that simple.
If you're curious, this is how the profit sharing plan works:
basecamp.com/handbook/benefi…
Gene Kim retweeted
Google's 7- and 8-year-old TPUs are still at 100% utilization, on a ~6-year depreciation schedule
(via Amin Vahdat, Google's AI Infra SVP)
Gene Kim retweeted
Second edition of the #SREBook is here!
ICYMI: For the 10th anniversary of "Site Reliability Engineering", we’ve rewritten the definitive Google SRE book! 📖
Featuring brand-new guidance on SRE for the agentic era, modern SLOs, and culture.
Get your copy today: goo.gle/SREbook
Gene Kim retweeted
The next generation of @GraalVM is shaping up nicely: fast startup, low CPU and memory usage, with no build step or project changes required! 🚀
Here’s a simple benchmark using a single-file program:
Gene Kim retweeted
😟 It's always so sad to see layoffs - especially at a company like Netflix, which has always set a high bar for hiring + engineering excellence.
If you were impacted and are interested in roles at Google / DeepMind, my DMs are open! And this is just a blip, onward and upward.
Gene Kim retweeted
I am thrilled to tell you that Swamp Club has raised $7m in seed funding from @AmplifyPartners, Encoded Ventures, @jesserobbins, and @stolinski. Swamp is a platform for building AI systems from repeatable behaviors, rather than from token-hungry agent-centric designs. More exciting to me than the money (which I'm stoked about,) or the product itself (which continues to surprise and delight me every day,) is the incredible group of people who have started solving real, practical, everyday problems with Swamp. They teach me new and exciting things about how to build with AI every day.
I'm grateful to my co-founders, who have poured every ounce of their creativity, passion, and intelligence into Swamp. I'm grateful to our users and customers (big and small) - there is no greater gift you can give to an entrepreneur than the validation that comes with voting with your wallets. And I'm grateful to our investors, who see the opportunity we see, and want to make it happen with us. It's such a cliche to say that there has never been a better time to build - but really, it feels like there has never been a better time to build. Come join the Club.
swamp-club.com/press/swamp-u…
Gene Kim retweeted
When Agents Outrun the Org Chart: SAFe Summit Keynote Video mikkersten.substack.com/p/wh…
Gene Kim retweeted
💔 Heartbreaking news this morning: @ghc was canceled for this year, very abruptly, due to funding constraints and fewer registrations.
Many young women in computer science and software engineering found their first jobs, and first internships at Grace Hopper. Not having this opportunity to connect is truly unfortunate, especially now.
Does anyone else have interest in hosting a virtual conference, as an alternative (albeit an imperfect one)? cc: @Google @GoogleDeepMind @GoogleDevs @GoogleStartups
For Women In AI, What The Grace Hopper Celebration Cancellation Means forbes.com/sites/sandycarter… #digitaltransformation #artificialintelligence
Gene Kim retweeted
Whelp I got banned on @github randomly with 0 warning or explanation after 15+ years. Not a repo taken down, my entire account removed. 100s of repos, deploys, and logins. Decades of history at various org’s. Gone.
Support ticket filed, but 2 days later no response, and no reason why… 😭😭😭
On the off chance any of my followers work at GitHub, any chance you could help escalate this support ticket, thanks 🙏
4847303
Only info I have is an automated sweep marked my account as maybe violating the terms, and requires manual review. Which I don’t think I did? But if I did on accident, I’m happy to fix & remedy any way I can.
I dont understand why they wouldn’t pull down a single repo if there was an issue. I just want my account back. I have literal years of my life and work saved there. This sucks. Trust broken.
Gene Kim retweeted
We announced next-gen SCM at Transcend in June, with Nick from Anthropic on stage. Their new post shows why: merges went from 2,500 to 30,000+ a day in four months. They built Scion for their unique needs, enterprises will need that scale on Git, governed end to end, cloud or air-gapped, without migrating their code, CI and compliance workflows to get it. That's what we're building. Latest:
about.gitlab.com/blog/scalin…
New on our Engineering blog: Creating in-house source control.
In May, we merged around 2,500 code changes per day. In September, we merged more than 30,000 per day. As a result, we became bottlenecked by developer infrastructure built for human (rather than agent) scale.
Here, we share how we built a new version control system—and fully migrated our monorepo from git—in five months: anthropic.com/engineering/re…
Gene Kim retweeted
For the last several years, it felt like the AI world was so closely paralleling the AI of Avogadro Corp. Now with all the threats of AI escaping, it feels like we're squarely in AI Apocalypse territory.
Gene Kim retweeted
Saying software is dead because everyone can create it with agents is like saying movies are dead because billions of ppl have a high res video camera in their pockets
Movies doing better than ever+more ppl make a living from videos, movies, TV than ever
(Analogy from @simonw)
Saying software is dead because anyone can build it is like saying photography is dead now that everyone in the world has a camera in their pocket
Not only is it not dead it's the beginning of the Kodak Brownie moment for software, and we will see an absolute explosion of it
It will be the first generation for who building software will feel no different than using it. This is crazy!
The quality and bar of what we expect from our everyday apps will be raised dramatically, we'll have personal software, we'll have disposable software, and agents will be the foundation for most of it
Tech has always been chaotic and evolving, the people who have been able to adapt and move in front of new opportunities have always excelled, this is nothing new, I'm seeing it now and we'll see it 10 years from now
Find the opportunities in the chaose and disruption, there are countless of them
Gene Kim retweeted
I've spent 30 years building software, leading engineering teams, and mostly hiding with computers to avoid messy humans. But now I think the CTO title is gone within 18 months. We don't need it.
The replacement is a Chief Ambition Officer.
The bottleneck we all seeing is knowing what to build, having the conviction to bet on it, great creativity, selling it, building communities, and assembling extraordinary small team of people.
The 10x engineer becomes the 10x team builder. I guess I had it backwards all along. Shit.