Where developers discover what's next
Your new tab
- Tweets 21,293
- Following 174
- Followers 57,215
- Likes 30,702
If product engineers build the product, who builds the agents, harnesses and infrastructure under them? In the same Davos answer where Satya Nadella said LinkedIn's roles became "full stack builders," he said the infrastructure is built by "the systems engineers at the back end."
From episode 3 of Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. The full episode is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
1
782
Shopify, Amazon and Cloudflare say they're hiring more juniors than ever, and Amazon's CTO calls the junior decline "a myth." SignalFire's data, from a VC firm, has new-grad hiring at 12 big tech companies down 65% against 2019, and down 76% at early-stage startups.
From episode 3 of Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. The full episode is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
1
684
In 1970 the US had 300,000 keypunch operators and 176,500 programmers. By 1974, a government survey found 14 of 136 computer sites had merged the programmer and the systems analyst into one job. Full-stack and DevOps came decades later, so merging dev jobs is nothing new.
From episode 3 of Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. The full episode is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
2
644
In an RPG you pick a class, and then a build. Software engineering used to have lots of classes, like web, backend and DevOps, each with its own stacks. The take here is that it's all converging into two classes, product engineer and system engineer, and the specialty you have now becomes your build.
From episode 3 of Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. The full episode is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
1
631
In 2019, about 1% of Hacker News "Who is hiring?" posts asked for a product engineer. By mid-October 2026 it was 9.5%. Linear's CTO says engineers will have to become "mini PMs" who talk with customers.
From episode 3 of Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. The full episode is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
2
630
Is everyone a product engineer now?
@satyanadella says LinkedIn combined four roles and said they're all "full stack builders." Claude Code's creator, @bcherny, thinks we'll start to see the title software engineer go away. On the new Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast, we check that against our own count of every Hacker News "Who is hiring?" post since 2019, and go back to 1974, when the US government saw programmers and systems analysts starting to merge into one job.
Then we get to the second role Nadella named in the same answer, who's still hiring juniors, and what to learn now.
1
2
799
Companies pushed AI with leaderboards, tokenmaxxing and AI use in performance reviews. Then Duolingo took AI use out of its reviews, Amazon shut down KiroRank and Shopify renamed its leaderboard. Even if your company counts tokens, it's still your name on what you send.
From episode 2 of Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. The full episode is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
744
Who are the most hated people in tech right now? The ones who forward AI output from one chat to another, on Slack, WhatsApp and GitHub, without reading it. They're called meat proxies.
From episode 2 of Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. The full episode is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
1
1
819
You ask why they made that call in their PR, and it turns out Claude decided. "If I wanted to talk to Claude, I would do it myself."
From episode 2 of Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. The full episode is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
569
Someone filed an AI-written crash report on Ghostty. A commenter called it unhelpful and overly verbose, so they replied with more of the same. The maintainer told them to "stop being a g*ddamn meat proxy and use your own language skills," and banned them from contributing.
From episode 2 of Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. The full episode is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
1
626
A third of the people who got AI slop from a coworker don't want to work with that person again. Saying "Claude said" doesn't cover you either.
From episode 2 of Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. The full episode is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
2
747
You ask someone why they built their PR that way, and they tell you Claude decided.
They're called "meat proxy" now. On the new Off the Leash, daily dev's podcast, we get into why they're the most hated people in tech right now. Who's to blame, the person, the AI or the company? What does it cost you? And what is it doing to open source?
We go through the Hacker News post that made the term blow up, @AntonZaides on the "I don't know, Claude wrote this" pandemic, curl's Daniel Stenberg on the human in between, the token leaderboards at Amazon and Shopify, and the Ghostty maintainer who banned a contributor for doing it. It ends on how not to be one.
2
2
865
Agents write the code now. Some teams don't even read it.
So should you still write code by hand?
Episode 1 of Off the Leash, daily dev's new podcast: we start from @dhh's Rails World keynote and go deep. Would you ship code nobody has read? How do you learn the job when an agent does the typing? How much of the job was ever typing?
With @jarredsumner's 11-day Bun port to Rust, @simonw on StrongDM's no-review AI team, and @Swizec auto-merging 15% of PRs.
Yes, the hosts are AI. We'd use humans, but we've seen ourselves on camera.
2
4
1,424
