Thuan Pham

@thuan-pham · 24 positions · On ppll ↗

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

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What Thuan Pham says most about

coding agents 3

Directing a swarm of coding agents is a different, multi-threaded way of thinking that costs more cognitive load, and the engineers who make the switch have doubled their output.
AI tooling has not compressed the gap between great and average engineers: it is still two or three times, and for the same reasons as before — curiosity and appetite for the bleeding edge.

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design 2

The right way to specify a rescue rewrite is a couple of scaling constraints and no new features at all, so that hardware can absorb the growth the team has no time to design for.
A technical leader should let engineers find the flaw in their own design through leading questions rather than announce it, because a discovered flaw is acted on and a reported one is argued with.

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hiring 2

A company that stops hiring new graduates because AI makes juniors look unnecessary will have no senior engineers in a few years' time.
Talent density is self-protecting: once a team is made of A players it will only hire more of them and will not tolerate anyone who is not performing.

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team size 2

The organising rule under extreme growth is that no team may block another — even when honouring it means adding to the very monolith you are trying to dismantle.
A functionally organised engineering team seizes up at around a hundred people, because every feature then has to be negotiated against every other team's bandwidth.

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