Dax Raad
Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Co-hosts the How About Tomorrow? podcast with Adam Elmore.
Dax Raad did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordswhat the benchmark is actually telling you is the shit you think matters does not matter
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Their wordsevery week i see a new benchmark that ranks claude code last and everyone pats themselves on the back for not using claude code and being "smarter" and it's still #1 and still growing faster than most of the other things on the list this has been going on for a year
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Their wordspeople ask us if we'll train our own model and the answer currently is no 1. we are too dumb to 2. there's plenty of other well funded efforts 3. we need to remain a neutral ground for models to battle
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open sourceAnthropicOpenAIChinaAmerica
Their wordsin this whole USA vs China thing OpenAI and Anthropic aren't relevant because they're positioned differently them building better models doesn't hurt china at all the competitor has to be - american - open source - enough compute to do inference at scale that can shift things
- 3 months earlier
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product managementideas vs execution
Their wordsBut I've always thought it's better to think a lot instead of swinging a lot. I think you could you can eliminate a lot of ideas or directions just by, you know, spending a lot of time in your head and with your team talking. Um, obviously AI doesn't speed that part up.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 1st of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsIf you add that up, you think, "Oh, we shipped a thousand features. Now that adds it to a good product." It actually adds it to a horrible product.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 2nd of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsThe moment you ship something, you're stuck supporting it forever. And by supporting, it means any future feature you build is going to like interact with it. So you still have to be very conservative with what you put out there. It's hard to undo anything. Just cuz we can ship 10 times more doesn't mean we have 10 times as many good ideas to ship out there.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 3rd of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsnone of our competitors are crushing us either. Like no one out there is using AI so well that they just like we can't even compete, right? Um, and we're in the coding agent space. All our competitors are super into AI. So you would think in our space there would be like uh a huge gap, but there there just isn't.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 4th of 24 in this recording
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open sourcedeveloper toolscompilers
Their wordsevery single dev tool we use whether it's databases, compilers, whatever eventually the open source option becomes a default option, right?
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 5th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsthe strategy that we know how to play really well is to pick one temporary bad guy and then galvanize all their competitors to push something forward against them.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 6th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsIf you get your positioning right, the world just keeps handing you wins that you didn't even expect. So like we never predicted this exact scenario but like our fundamental understanding of the position was right. like if if there is a neutral party, all these companies with billions of dollars will kind of use a neutral party to advance their own like company's interests.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 7th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsThe the biggest advantage to in DevTools is the fact that everyone working at DevTools is a programmer and programmers are horrible at B2C products. They don't realize DevTools are B2C products.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 8th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd our harness wasn't very good for like the first like five months of open code. But it was good enough. It was good enough that most people couldn't really tell a difference. And once we won enough share, then we went back and like tried to make our harness like good and smart and optimize and all those things. But uh it was inverted from what everybody else was doing. Everybody else was being like you have to build the smartest harness and that's how you win.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 9th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordscuz because we rent GPUs at scale to run the models and we still use middleman by the way. So we're not like going all the way down to the down to the floor. Even for us there are some models the sticker price and the cost to us there's like an 80% margin in there.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 10th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsThere's always negative sentiment that exists for any business that's getting hyped. They have no incentive to correct it. Um so again it's complicated because I know the training costs are a big part of it. Uh the R&D department is is hugely expensive but long-term inference makes sense as a business and I think it it always will.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 11th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsThe demand for inference is growing. So, like I don't think it's linearly growing. I think it might even be exponentially growing. But we haven't made our production of GPUs grow exponentially. That's like kind of a linear process. So as those lines intersect, there's going to be uh tightening.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 12th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsYou give them a button that lets them do their work faster. The natural place for them to do is hit that button as much as possible, do the same amount of work, and just cash in that extra time, right? Which makes total sense.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 13th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsthe joke I made was pre AI, I would spend 95% of my energy thinking about what to do and 5% of my energy doing it. Now I spend 96% of my time thinking about what to do and 4% of my time actually doing it. So yeah, it's like a 20% improvement, but dayto-day it feels as hard as ever.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 14th of 24 in this recording
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coding agentsAI and jobshappiness
Their wordsthere is a world where the net result of all these AI coding tools is the same amount of work gets done, but all the engineers are happier because their job is easier. That's not good enough for a lot of companies. So, they're just going to say go back to typing out the code.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 15th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsThat judgment, that ability to have that judgment is so distorted right now because the agent will just do the hacky thing for you. The agent will kind of deal with the hacky problems that come down the road. And it's way easier just to be like, "Oh yeah, it's a temporary fix."
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 16th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsThat prickle that feeling that you get, it's like muted now cuz someone else it's kind of like you've made someone else deal with the problem. The problem is still there and the the landmines are still going to blow up on you eventually, but like you're not you don't feel that bad feeling as much anymore. So your judgment is skewed. You're not getting that feedback loop.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 17th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsIt's like everyone is just saying mantras to themselves cuz the root thing that's going on here is we are experiencing a moment of great change. Everyone is very nervous about what that means for their own position in it. a defense mechanism is to confidently assert a future in which you're a winner. And that's almost what every single prediction that you see is happening.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 18th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsYou probably only have one good idea in your whole product. Get the user to experience that as fast as possible. Well, it sounds so easy, but if you go try every single product out there, you will see a million accidental steps they introduced from the user hearing about your product to like seeing the value in it.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 19th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsThe job of product isn't to just receive a problem and ship the immediate solution. It's to absorb all the problems and understand that there's one solution you can ship to fix 50 different problems.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 20th of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsI still believe quality is a huge differentiator. It's not just something you can decide to do. I think it needs to show up every single aspect of your company from like you have to do things that are irrational. I think that's kind of what quality comes from. like you do a bunch of things and like 50% of those things you you didn't have to do and I think very few people are willing to operate that way.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 21st of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsThe thing that I find interesting is that's not novel. This has been the thing we've always been trying to do forever. How do we get a junior engineer to ship code safely without breaking stuff? Right? How do we make patterns in the codebase? How do we make tests? Like it's it's all the old stuff that we've always wanted to do.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 22nd of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsWe're now doing it in a much heavier way because we find that these like kind of bory enterprisey uh patterns end up being pretty useful because you have a bunch of idiots on your team now. The coding agents are a bunch of idiots and they are going to work 24/7 and they're going to like ship a lot of stuff. So you need way more guardrails than you used to.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 23rd of 24 in this recording
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Their wordsBut you if you also become an expert in a specific industry, that's like a deadly combo. Um if you are like just pick any industry, let's say let's say farming, let's say you understand that farming industry really well and you're also a decent software engineer, you're probably like the top 10 people in the world for that combination that the whole industry will want to hire.
↗Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com 24th of 24 in this recording