design 7
- VMs are the wrong cloud abstraction because they bundle CPU and memory into fixed-size units.
- Cloud abstraction problems cannot be fixed by adding more abstraction layers on top.
David Crawshaw
Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.
David Crawshaw did not write this page.
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What David Crawshaw says most about
AI agents 4
- A person directing an AI agent rather than writing code themselves has no incentive to actually read the resulting code or engage seriously with reviewer feedback.
- Making the person who directs an AI agent also own the deployment removes the principal-agent misalignment that agent-driven code review creates.
LLMs 3
- Local AI models will eventually catch up to frontier models once frontier progress hits diminishing returns.
- LLMs will push software development toward more specialized code, fewer generalized packages, and more readable tests.
code generation 2
- Code review as a review mechanism depends on reviewers being able to infer effort from reading code, and AI-agent-generated code erases that signal.
- Making code easier to write will lead to much more software being created overall.
coding agents 2
- A person directing an AI agent rather than writing code themselves has no incentive to actually read the resulting code or engage seriously with reviewer feedback.
- Code review as a review mechanism depends on reviewers being able to infer effort from reading code, and AI-agent-generated code erases that signal.
developer tools 2
- Software upgrades that invalidate previously learned knowledge make programmers worse at their craft.
- The right moment to migrate from an ad hoc data store to SQL is the moment you first need an index.
the cloud 2
- VMs are the wrong cloud abstraction because they bundle CPU and memory into fixed-size units.
- Cloud abstraction problems cannot be fixed by adding more abstraction layers on top.