A Sydney UI dev.
Sydney, New South Wales
Joined March 2010
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miko retweeted
normal people: i like hanging out with my friends
startup people: bullish on irl communities in the ai era
miko retweeted
On this day 13 years ago, Vine user Ryan McHenry began uploading a series of videos titled "Ryan Gosling Won't Eat His Cereal."
Ok at least it's not a notification, but guess who popped up in my For You feed?
Still not followed. Still clicking "see less often".
miko retweeted
I spent too much time on this:
CLARK: My contention is that with Claude’s new design tool, Figma has essentially been rendered obsolete, the canvas-based paradigm is most aptly characterized as a legacy artifact from the era before models could generate production-ready interfaces from inten—
WILL: [interrupting] Of course that’s your contention. You’ve never shipped anything and just watched the launch video twice. You just got finished reading some hot take, probably a Twitter thread or whoever’s got a Substack this week, and you’re gonna be convinced Figma’s dead until next month when you actually try to iterate on a flow and realize “regenerate” isn’t the same as “nudge this four pixels.” Then you’re gonna pivot to talking about how the canvas was always just a lossy interface for intent. That’s gonna last until next year when you’re in here regurgitating some take about how design tools are collapsing into a single agentic surface, you know, the post-craft utopia and the disintermediation of taste by foundation models.
CLARK: [taken aback] Well as a matter of fact I won’t, because generative design drastically reduces the need for a manual canvas in the first pla—
WILL: “Generative design drastically reduces the need for a manual canvas, especially as models get better at reasoning about layout and hierarchy…” You got that from that Figma-is-dead thread, right? The one that went viral last week. Yeah, I read it too. You gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us, or you have any thoughts — of your own — on this? Or is that your thing, you come into a bar, you skim some trending tweets over lunch and you pawn it off as your own idea to impress some founders, embarrass my friend?
[Clark is stunned]
WILL: See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in about fifty product cycles you’re gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in building things. One: don’t pick a side in a tool war you’re not actually building in. And two: the people shipping right now are using Claude and Figma and Claude Code before you’ve finished writing your LinkedIn post about which one won.
CLARK: Yeah, well I’ll have Claude build my whole product stack, and you’ll still be pushing rectangles around in Figma.
WILL: [smiles] Yeah, maybe. But at least I’ll still know how to think when the model’s wrong.
miko retweeted
after a great deal of trial and error, diverse projects and tasks, and evaluating all new hotness, i’ve come to the conclusion that the best way of agentic coding is keeping it ridiculously simple.
and anyone saying otherwise is selling something, grifting or dumb. or all 3.
miko retweeted
Jevons paradox is happening in real time. Companies, especially outside of tech, are realizing that they can now afford to take on software projects that they wouldn’t have been able to tackle before because now AI lets them do so.
We’re going to start to use software for all new things in the economy because it’s incrementally cheaper to produce. Marketing teams at big companies will have engineers helping to automate workflows. Engineers in life sciences and healthcare will automate research. Small businesses will hire engineers for the first to build better digital experiences.
And as long as AI agents still require a human who understands what to prompt, how to review when an agent goes off the rails, how it guide back, how to maintain the system that was built, how to fix the ongoing bugs, and more, we will still have humans managing these agents.
This is why all the advice you get of not going into engineering is wrong. The world is going to increasingly be made up of software, and the people that understand it best will be in a strong economic position. This will happen in other roles as well where output goes up and demand increases.
Engineering job openings are at the highest levels we’ve seen in over 3 years
There are over 67,000 (!!!) eng openings at tech companies globally right now, with 26,000 just in the U.S. We don’t know if there would have been more open roles if not for AI or if AI is actually leading to more open roles, but since the start of this year, the increase in open eng roles is accelerating even more.
miko retweeted
My favorite thing bout Claude thus far is I have apparently put off learning React long enough that it doesn't matter.
miko retweeted
Uploaded my floor plan to ChatGPT to see how to arrange my bed and wardrobe.
The result:
miko retweeted
Even Sam Altman is admitting it now.
Some companies are using "AI" as cover for plain old layoffs.
They didn't replace your job with an agent. They made bad bets, burned cash, and needed to cut headcount. Blaming AI just sounds better to investors than "we mismanaged the business."
The data backs this up. Nearly 90% of execs surveyed said AI had no impact on employment over the past 3 years.
So why the narrative?
Because "we're restructuring for AI" gets a stock bump. "We're cutting costs because revenue missed" does not.
Sure AI will absolutely change work, but right now a lot of companies are hiding behind it to avoid accountability for decisions that have nothing to do with technology.
all devs have been promoted to mgmt. no salary increase. returning to IC will not be rewarded. upside, your reports don't care about your soft skills.
downside, one day they might.
miko retweeted
It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.
Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes.
As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.
It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.