Edin Deljkic

Klika • 6K followers

Spotify's most senior engineers haven't typed a single line of code since December, according to co-CEO Gustav Söderström on their recent earnings call! No, they haven't stopped building (they actually shipped 50 new features lately!), but these days AI is doing the actual coding. This doesn't mean humans are out. They prompt the AI, conduct the check-ins, and merge the changes into production before they even get to the office. And Spotify is not the only one: Pinterest’s new code is at roughly 50% AI-generated. Anthropic's head of Claude Code hasn't written code in two months either. I find this shift in what engineering work becomes quite fascinating. These developers aren't writing less; they're supervising, validating, refining. New skill? Less about syntax and more about judgment: knowing what to ask for, what to approve, and what needs a human eye. I'm genuinely curious where this goes! What's your take, are your teams seeing similar shifts?

Aline Lerner

interviewing.io • 12K followers

People who hire engineers (and many VCs who back recruiting tech companies) think that there is hidden gold buried deep within GitHub profiles. We ran the numbers, and it's not true. The TL;DR is that it can’t because most engineers don’t have public commits. Senior engineers at large tech companies don’t work on open-source projects for the most part. Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++, would look unimpressive to an algorithm obsessed with GitHub activity (see the image below). Now here's the data. GitHub reported 100 million active developers in early 2023, but data on all commits in 2022 shows that only about 11 million users had any public code commits and only 8 million had more than two commits. That means that only 8-10% of engineers actually have publicly available GitHub data that an AI could use, in the absolute best case, and this counts millions of repositories with names like “hello world” and “test.” Ben Frederickson did some of his digging about the utility of GitHub in hiring and published a stellar, highly detailed report in 2018. According to Frederickson, only 1.4% of GitHub users pushed more than 100 times, and only 0.15% of GitHub users pushed more than 500 times. There is a clear power law – most of the commits are being done by a tiny fraction of GitHub’s users. A paper called “The Promises and Perils of Mining GitHub”, published in 2014, looked at GitHub activity as well, through the lens of projects rather than users. They found a similar power-law relationship – the most active 2.5% of projects account for the same number of commits as the remaining 97.5% projects. Moreover, this paper found that about 37% of projects on GitHub were not being used for software development, and the rest were used for other purposes (e.g., storage). Given these limitations, the reality is that the portion of GitHub accounts that could actually be useful for hiring is likely way under 1%. Full writeup (including links to referenced papers) is in the comments.

Joseph Zhang

CatchBack Cards • 3K followers

One underrated part of the YC W26 batch has been getting exposed to really great products built by other founders. A few companies whose tools I’ve genuinely loved using recently (I wasn't sponsored or promoted by any of these companies). Vercel Deployments, hosting, envs, previews — all the stuff I never want to think about again. It just works, and startup credits/accelerator support makes it easy to adopt early. Cursor The IDE experience is a game changer. Prompting directly in-editor, accepting changes, and easily reverting/rolling back makes iteration insanely fast. It’s become central to how I code and iterate. Anthropic Even with similar underlying models, Claude consistently gives better answers for my use cases. I’ll admit it — I hate living in the terminal (fake coder, I know), so prompting in a sidebar fits my workflow way better. Sometimes it hangs, but improvement on the frontend feels very real. SideShift, not YC, but necessary for B2C I have a love and hate relationship with SideShift because I love seeing the metrics on UGC creators, but finding good ones is a pain in the ass. Sophia and I spend way too much time sifting through applicants who aren't really worth the time to invest in. Supabase (YC S20) Auth, storage, database, RLS — all in one place and actually pleasant to use. Spinning things up and shipping is fast. RLS policies alone saved me from a lot of pain compared to other stacks I’ve used. YC credits/benefits helped early scaling. PostHog (YC W20) Product analytics that actually help you understand user behavior: event tracking, funnels, feature usage, session replays. I didn't know what PostHog was before starting YC, and now I can't imagine building without it. Mintlify — (YC W22) Docs that actually look good. Clean UI, fast setup, and it makes writing and maintaining documentation way less painful. I enjoy prompting AI to help flush out my language. ElevenLabs Insanely realistic voice generation. We’re planning to use it heavily for ad creatives and rapid iteration on audio without needing studio time, and YC startup credits make experimentation affordable. Brex (YC W17) Startup banking and cards done right. Literal best customer service (above Amex plat and Capital One Venture X concierge.) Would gladly park next round's fund in here with these guys as well. Also, the DashPass that comes with the bank account feels absolutely so amazing. The feeling of getting a BOGO deal and it being on Brex, amazing. Clerky (YC S11) Incorporation, equity, and legal docs without the usual headache. I still have to redeem my Clerky refund, oops, but I'll get that credit back when I have the time to sit down and redeem, haha. Linear I worked at McKinsey touching Jira boards before and wanted to die. Linear is just miles easier to deal with. My DMs are open to founders building tooling! We're building a platform to revolutionize the collectibles and trading card game industry and love trying things out.