Mann Patel

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on the atlas — 36

highlights — 40

For the vast majority of operations, read latency is indistinguishable from a monolith,
From monolith to Lakebase to LTAP: rethinking the database from storage up | Databricks Blog
Almost every one of these problems traces back to the same root cause from the monolithic architecture: the WAL and the data files are stored inside a single machine. Durability is tied to that machine's disk. Scaling and availability require physically cloning that machine. Workloads interfere because they share that machine.
From monolith to Lakebase to LTAP: rethinking the database from storage up | Databricks Blog
From monolith to Lakebase to LTAP: rethinking the database from storage up
From monolith to Lakebase to LTAP: rethinking the database from storage up | Databricks Blog
Why The Best AI Engineers Are Former Managers
Why The Best AI Engineers Are Former Managers | Tolans.com
How We Hire Engineers When AI Writes Our Code
How We Hire Engineers When AI Writes Our Code | Tolans.com
More generally, if there's no variation on "achieve such-and-such a goal with minimum effort" that seems worth doing, then you may need to abandon that goal entirely.
Half-assing it with everything you've got
Also, remember that the planning fallacy exists!
Half-assing it with everything you've got
So take the third path: remember what you're fighting for. Always deploy your full strength, in order to hit your quality target as fast as possible.
Half-assing it with everything you've got
hit the quality target with minimum effort
Half-assing it with everything you've got
Good Engineer/Bad Engineer
Good Engineer/Bad Engineer – Terrible Software
My favourite tech stack is Google Sheets
My favourite tech stack is Google Sheets | by Justin Xu | Medium
the past few months have felt unusual for me because i did quarterly (life) planning for the first time. basically i listed all the major projects i wanted to do between january-march 2026 as well as how long i thought each one would take, and then i made a schedule for when to start and finish each one (“project” here can mean any number of things, eg. interp research / going to taiwan / organizing birthday celebrations / building some writing tools with no additional details figured out at the time of planning). it’s strange because for the first time since leaving school i have a clear idea…
knowing what to do - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind
interests are emergent rather than discovered
knowing what to do - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind
The “Any Given Tuesday” Theory of AI Startups
The “Any Given Tuesday” Theory of AI Startups | LinkedIn
Doing things the slow way forces you to make smart 80/20 tradeoffs. Whether atoms or bits, most of our problems are deeper than needing more stuff.
My Claude Code Psychosis - by Jasmine Sun
The performance of coding agents is measured in degrees of agency
My Claude Code Psychosis - by Jasmine Sun
We are blind to the solutions we were never taught to see
My Claude Code Psychosis - by Jasmine Sun
I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
Engineers vote with their time, and are mostly trying to invent interesting new things. Hobbies are what the smartest people spend their time on when they aren’t constrained by near-term financial goals.
cdixon | What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years
start looking for ways to rule out ideas and actions, to conclude they won’t work or aren’t necessary, rather than chasing better versions.
How to be More Agentic - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
Increase your surface area for luck
How to be More Agentic - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
[2] Making something for your friends isn't the only source of startup ideas. It's just the best source for young founders, who have the least knowledge of what other people want, and whose own wants are most predictive of future demand.
How to Start Google
Projects aren't just the best way to learn about technology. They're also the best source of startup ideas.
How to Start Google
The Jeff Bezos API Mandate
The Bezos API Mandate: Amazon's Manifesto For Externalization | Nordic APIs |
what does success mean for me now
"What's the point?" is a common question I get asked when I talk to folks in tech about AI in software development. When I was starting out my career, companies were going from customer on-prem to… | Deepak Bhimaraju
we transitioned from boolean definitions of success ("the test suite is green") to a probabilistic and empirical one.
StrongDM Software Factory
omehow inspired someone to step back from academic competition in order to have more fun with learning
Stories From 25 Years of Software Development - Susam Pal
First of all, mistakes are fine. People make mistakes, we all make mistakes, mistakes are how we learn. If you're not making mistakes, then you're not taking enough risks to be successful. Secondly, even if making a mistake was bad, getting some people to sign off on something doesn't mean they are taking any more responsibility than if they didn't.
Hixie's Natural Log: Ask for forgiveness, not permission
Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision
Hixie's Natural Log: Reflecting on 18 years at Google
This is often called "best-of-N": run N parallel attempts (here, across different models), then select the best output.
Selection Rather Than Prediction – Voratiq
Dijkstra’s observation is that the most pragmatic path to genius (although he merely calls it competence) is to keep the problem smaller than your brain.
Replace Your To-Do List With Interstitial Journaling To Increase Productivity | by Tony Stubblebine | Better Humans
AI changes what we build and who builds it, but not how much needs to be built.
Death of Software. Nah. - by Steven Sinofsky - a16z
Here’s to the ones who dream Foolish as they may seem
Here's to the fools who dream
And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
Putting Ideas into Words
You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things. [2]
The Need to Read
Welcome to the room! Congratulations …. your days of whining are over. In this room, we deliver success, we don’t whine. Look, I’m not confused, I know you walk through fields of shit every day. Your job is to find the rose petals. Don’t come whining that you don’t have the resources you need. We’ve done our homework. We’ve evaluated the portfolio, considered the opportunities and allocated our available resources to those opportunities. That is what you have to work with. Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated. And yes – you have a hard job. You only ha…
Welcome to the Room | Jeffrey Snover's blog
To be effective, you have to be opinionated. Not by way of ideological stubbornness, but by being engrossed enough with your own thing to develop mental models about how things should work.
how to co-parent baby ideas - by Anson Yu
“how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out”
mode collapse - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind
This is why having ways to validate code will surely be even more important this year.
When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?
There’s a new programmable layer of abstraction to master in addition to the usual layers involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering.
When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?