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A subscription newsletter by Gergely Orosz covering software engineering practices, industry trends, and big tech workplace insights.
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David Heinemeier Hansson said in his Rails World keynote that 37signals, the 27-year-old company behind Ruby on Rails, is done writing code by hand. Its stack now follows how well agents write each language, and other teams can measure that on their own code first.
Reality
CTOs told Gergely Orosz that CPU spot pricing, once up to 90% below list, has nearly vanished as AI workloads absorb spare cloud capacity. Teams whose compute budgets assumed spot rates now have to plan for getting capacity at all, on top of paying more for it.
Reality
CTOs and infrastructure heads told the Pragmatic Engineer that cloud CPU spot capacity, once up to 90% off, is nearly impossible to get as AI absorbs supply. At standard prices, work budgeted at the deepest spot rate costs ten times as much.
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Gergely Orosz's visit found finance, recruitment and legal teams going from roughly zero to 90% Codex use in four months, with almost half of that arriving before anyone made the tool comfortable for them.
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The gap implies each session now uses roughly a quarter fewer requests, so the compaction threshold and the prompt cache in Uber's own harness are carrying part of a saving usually credited to cheaper open models.
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Thibault Sottiaux, who leads OpenAI's Codex team, says a flagged security issue stops the merge with no exception and no human reviewer required. How an engineer overrides a wrong call is the part the interview leaves out.
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The Pragmatic Engineer reports staff and principal engineers leaving for Anthropic, OpenAI and Google despite one-off grants of $400K to $1M+. The cost saving ended. The retention damage did not.
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According to the Pragmatic Engineer, Meta has started making one-off equity counteroffers it never used to make, and UK layoff notices were reversed after staff had already begun interviewing.
Reality