jd:/dev/blog

Salvatore Sanfilippo thinks AI changes how software gets distributed, not just how it gets written: repositories become templates rather than finished products, users become developers, projects carry several branches instead of one polished release.

AI didn't lower the bar for art.

Your LLM is not a colleague, and the moment you start talking about it like one, you are setting up an excuse you will eventually use.

Steve Yegge deleted the wrong thing.

GitHub Actions runs your tests when you push.

The dirty secret of running a company on AI is that the AI stopped being the bottleneck.

For fifteen years, the smart move in developer tooling was to build on top of GitHub.

Mitchell Hashimoto thinks merge queues stop working once you point a swarm of AI agents at your repository.

I haven't read a full pull request diff line by line in weeks.

Everyone agrees Europe finally has the cloud it needs to quit the Americans.

I started shipping a Rust binary last month.

Armin Ronacher's Build It Yourself got reposted again after the latest wave of npm supply-chain attacks, and it landed again.

Frontier LLMs corrupt 25% of what you delegate to them in long workflows.

<img src="/images/blog/the-ai-free-lunch-flyers.jpg" alt="A stack of food delivery flyers from mid-2010s Paris" style="float: right; width: 180px; margin: 0.25em 0 1em 1.5em; border-radius: 4px;" /> Around 2014, I lived near the Belleville métro in Paris.

In twenty years, I've used four different code review tools.

Every software team runs the same pipeline: write code, test it, review it, merge it.

If you've used Alembic on a team with more than one developer, you've seen this error: FAILED: Multiple head revisions are present for given argument 'head' It means two migrations landed with the same down_revision, and Alembic doesn't know which one co…

Last week, I got a cold email from Elif.

A reader emailed me last week.

Eighteen months ago, I wrote How to Be a Great Software Engineer.

From where I sit at Mergify, the trend is obvious: same teams, same repos, no headcount changes, but more pull requests and more CI jobs than a year ago.

I have seven Claude Code terminals open right now.

Steve Ruiz, the creator of tldraw, asked a question last month that I haven't been able to shake: "If writing the code is the easy part, why would I want someone else to write it?"

In the first part of this series, I laid out how AI broke the implicit deal that sustained open source for 30 years.

Tailwind CSS is more popular than ever.

In part 1, I covered why Entire raised $60M and what problem they're solving.

The former GitHub CEO just raised $60M at a $300M valuation for a seed round.

A year ago, I thought AI-assisted coding was going to be a nice productivity boost.

I was watching the news this week.

The tech industry has a new consensus: AI will kill junior engineering jobs.

Last week, a founder reached out for advice.

GitHub just announced pricing changes for GitHub Actions, and as expected, parts of the CI ecosystem panicked.

I read Pierre Chapuis’ post Inexorable Progress last week, and a line stuck with me: “You cannot stop the flow of progress.

Last week, I spent two days with an old friend.

Turning 42 felt like a good time to pause and reflect.

A few weeks ago, we released a new feature at Mergify: autoqueue.

I’ve always loved the em dash.

Six months ago, I wrote a blog post titled “The Collapse of Social Platforms” At the time, it felt like a distant horizon — something you could see coming if you squinted into the future.

Last week, I was with my team at our Mergify on-site — what we call our MAHOS (Mergify All-Hands On-Site).

I first encountered OKRs at Datadog.

For the last 80 years, computers have been calculators.

This Sunday, I made the mistake of opening LinkedIn.

I recently read Linear’s excellent blog post on why quality is so rare, and it resonated deeply with me.

Every few months, a new wave of engineers proudly announces their exit from the cloud.

It was a casual Friday.

Over the past quarter, I’ve had conversations with a handful of engineers working at French software companies — from early-stage startups to more established players.

There’s an uncomfortable truth in French tech.

Startups love to talk about iteration.

Hiring is easily one of the hardest jobs I’ve had to do at Mergify.

Welcome to the third post in our “we-built-something-and-killed-it” series.