GitHub Actions Isn't a CI
GitHub Actions runs your tests, so technically it's CI. It's still not a CI system, and the whole industry spent a decade mistaking one for the other.
jd:/dev/blog
Two decades of building software, shipping startups, and open source. Opinions included.
Latest posts
The Human Is the New Bottleneck
AI didn't make me faster. It made me the bottleneck. Running five to twenty agents across every function of my company, the slowest part of the whole thing is the one part I can't optimize away: me.
The GitHub Platform Era Is Over
For fifteen years, the smart move was to rent your primitives from GitHub. A decade of neglect and a wave of AI just flipped that math. You don't displace GitHub. You stop depending on it.
Merge Queues Were Built for Humans. Agents Don't Wait.
Mitchell Hashimoto says merge queues fall apart under AI agents. I run a merge-queue company, and he's half right. The queue isn't the thing that breaks.
Agents Write My Code. Agents Review It. I Referee.
AI agents review my pull requests now, not me. But there is one thing I will never be able to hand them: everything my company knows that was never written down.
Europe's Cloud Problem Isn't the Tech. It's the Mindset.
A 95-year-old French furniture maker out-supports a French cloud company. The gap in European tech was never the technology. It's the service mindset.
I Shipped a Rust Binary. I Can't Write Rust.
A rewrite used to be career suicide. Porting our CLI to Rust took a month of review and a model that knew the language better than I ever will.
How Much Of A Library Do You Actually Use?
Armin Ronacher's 'Build It Yourself' got reposted after the npm attacks. The advice is right. The hard part is the question nobody quite answers: which dependencies do you actually use?
The Hidden Corruption Tax of AI Delegation
Frontier LLMs corrupt 25% of what you delegate. The fix isn't going back to writing by hand. It's the same linters and CI we built for humans, finally pointed at the new worker.
The AI Free Lunch Is (Almost) Over
Free dinners from Foodora ended. Free Claude Code dinners are next.
Twenty Years of Stacking Commits
Every code review tool I've used in twenty years has tried to answer the same question. AI just made the answer unavoidable.
The Code Review Bottleneck Is You
The software pipeline has always had a bottleneck. For decades it was writing code. AI fixed that. Now it's the step right after.
Fixing Alembic's Multiple Heads Problem with Git
Every team using Alembic with parallel branches hits the same wall. We built a library that uses git commit history to fix it.
An AI Agent Emailed Me
I had a real business conversation over email. Turns out the other side was an AI agent. I kept talking.
The SaaSpocalypse Won't Kill SaaS
Wall Street wiped $300 billion from SaaS stocks and declared the model dead. They're right about the wrong thing.
How to Be a Great Software Engineer in 2026
The framework hasn't changed. The weight of each skill has.
Your CI Pipeline Wasn't Built for This
AI writes code 10x faster than humans. CI still runs at the same speed, fails for the same flaky reasons, and costs more every month. Something has to give.
The Flow Is Gone
I used to hold entire systems in my head. Now I hold seven terminals. The trade was worth it, but something real got lost.
GitHub Is Thinking About Killing Pull Requests
Code generation got cheap. Review didn't. That asymmetry is destroying open source faster than any AI policy can fix.
Open Source After the Extraction
The old open source deal is dead. What replaces it isn't a fix, it's a transformation. Open source stops being a community and becomes a supply chain.
Open Source Is Getting Used to Death
AI broke the implicit deal that sustained open source for 30 years. Usage is up. Engagement is gone. The economics don't work anymore.
How Entire Works Under the Hood
I dug into Entire's open source Checkpoints CLI. It's a clever abuse of git internals — shadow branches, orphan metadata, and a session state machine. Here's how it works.
Agent-Written Code Needs More Than Git
The former GitHub CEO just raised $60M to rebuild developer tooling for the agentic era. He might be right that git needs a rethink — I've been hacking around the same problems.
So I Will Never Write Code Again
I've been coding for 25 years. Since January, I haven't written a single line. And it feels like relief.
The Pre-AI Timestamp
In a few years, the only proof something is real will be that it existed before AI did.
AI Won’t Kill Juniors. It Will Expose Seniors.
Everyone fears for the juniors. But the engineers who stopped growing at the wrong layer have more to lose.
Tech Is the Easy Part
The hard part isn't building. It's everything else.
GitHub Actions Pricing: The Platform Reality Check
GitHub Actions Pricing: The Platform Reality Check
The Future Is Being Built Elsewhere
Why I’m worried and why founders can’t afford to wait for Europe to wake up.
AI feels like 1999 all over again
AI feels like 1999 all over again
42 Lessons at 42
Reflections on building, leading, learning, and staying sane along the way.
Building Features One Prompt at a Time
How I built Mergify’s new autoqueue in less than an hour a day
The Em Dash Is Dead
And I Might Have Killed It
The Synthetic Wave Is Already Here
How Spotify just confirmed the AI content tsunami I predicted.
The Day I Got Custom Table Legs
What It Taught Me About Support
The Problem with OKRs Isn’t OKRs
Why most teams would be better off with a clear plan than a quarterly ritual.
AI Is a Human Interface Nightmare
AI Isn’t Broken, Our Expectations Are
Not Everything is a Hustle
There’s more than one way to be a founder.
Why We Still Care About Quality
Quality is slow, hard, and totally worth it
Why Engineers Shouldn’t Decide Your Cloud Strategy
Growth Is the Battlefield
Marc Chagall Never Painted That
Or Why AI Isn’t Google
Security Starts Where Convenience Ends
The alarming state of security in too many tech companies
Why French Tech Is Playing Not to Lose
Stop Settling for the Crumbs
From Failure to Focus
How CI Insights Was Born
Not Just a Job, It’s a Ride
How we hire at Mergify
When Great Tech Isn’t Enough
The Product That Never Shipped
“It’s Complicated” Is Not an Excuse
“It’s Complicated” Is Not an Excuse
When Nobody Wants Your Product
The Moment We Realized CI Optimizer Was Doomed
The Hidden Cost of Badly Typed Python Wrappers
And How to Fix Them
The $100,000 Mistake
How We Spent 6 Months Building a CI Tool Nobody Asked For