Senko on AI, Startups, Tech and Open Source
Amdahl's law states that the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used , and is often invoked by engineers in the context of AI productivity gains. Translated into the AI productivity debate, the argument goes something like this: Actual programming is only a small fraction of the…
A year ago I wrote that AI-assisted programming had reached a tipping point and spoke about the spectrum of AI-assisted coding: from smarter tab completions to fully autonomous app builders. A year later, the tipping point has truly been passed. By the end of 2025, the frontier LLMs were good enough to use in really complex projects and adoption skyrocketed. Today, in mid-2026, it is clear that AI…
Many companies today are facing increasing pressure to adopt AI and launch AI-based features. While AI is a transformative new technology, such pressure can be unhealthy and counter-productive. Faced with hyped-up external expectations — from customers, investors, or the general public — companies often feel the need to do something to show they're keeping up with the competition and are not being…
Experience with AI-assisted coding varies widely across different projects, teams, and individual developers. How Orgs Actually Win With AI by Laura Tacho at Pragmatic Summit showed some interesting stats on the bimodal distribution of outcomes. Stats are insihgtful but can be hard to relate to. A recent Hacker News discussion How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally? provides a…
Code reviews are an essential part of good software development practice. Typically, after a developer has implemented some code change for a new feature or a bug fix, he or she will ask a colleague to look at it to confirm it is done correctly. The second pair of eyes can spot problems the author was blind to, misunderstood, or didn't know about. This is analogous to the work editors do for…
People are mad at AI scrapers. If you operate a website, have a blog, host documentation, or put any kind of content on the web, chances are you're going to be hit by dozens of scraper bots. Some of these bots are operated by search engines (GoogleBot, BingBot), others are automatic vulnerability checkers trying to see if you have an unprotected server setup. But increasingly, they are run by AI…
AI coding tools promise faster delivery and lower development overhead but raise practical questions around security, maintainability, and long-term viability. To understand their limits in greenfield work, I built a complete SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) minimum viable product (MVP) using a fully autonomous "vibe coding" workflow. The outcome: with controlled scope and close supervision,…
Startups have always chased vanity metrics. During the dot-com bubble, it was eyeballs: visitors and free users. After the crash, we collectively got smarter and started focusing on revenue, but during the zero interest rate period (ZIRP), startups chased revenue growth at the (literal) expense of everything else. Today's AI startups do the same, stunning us with their sky-high monthly recurring…
Aside from investment mega-deals with NVIDIA, AMD, Oracle and Broadcom, which took most of the mainstream media attention, OpenAI has this year made a number of product announcements and launches that shed light on their product strategy going forward. I don't have any inside knowledge, but here are a few thoughts on what I think is going on. Platform Initially, OpenAI was all about building the…
In a previous article, I made a distinction between AI hype and pragmatic AI . One of the most persistent hype threads is the obsession with existential risk — the idea that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) could end civilization or make humans obsolete. This red-herring is far removed from any reality, and distracts from real risks and challenges in…
Startups live and die by their product-market fit (PMF). Everyone talks about it as the Holy Grail, but it can be surprisingly hard to define: the best descriptions out there boil down to "you'll know it when you hit it." That's not very helpful. Let's backtrack. What are startups? One definition: a company created to find and grow new opportunities, usually under high risk and uncertainty.…
AI-assisted programming has reached a tipping point in 2025. While LLMs have been applied to coding since before ChatGPT, these were mostly for toy, one-off, simple projects, web pages, or scripts. However, in the past several months, AI systems (both LLMs and related tooling) are becoming good enough for serious use. This shift has created a predictable divide. On one side, you have the…
In the current AI boom, like with many technological revolutions in the past, there are two distinct reasons people talk about the new technology. First, there are benefits that the new technology, once it's assimilated into society, will bring. It may improve people's lives, commercial productivity, and more. Of course, while technology itself is neutral, it can lead to both good and bad outcomes…
There's plenty of excitement about AI agents and agentic workflows, and for good reason. But actually building and deploying these systems effectively means going through some messy realities. Like for AI strategy in general, it's about making them work reliably and provide real value. Understanding AI Agents and Workflows First, let's nail down what we're talking about. You'll hear "agents" and…
Many software companies today – from Microsoft and IBM to scrappy startups – use, publish, and promote open source software. Especially in developer tooling and cloud infrastructure platforms, open sourcing your software is often considered table stakes. At the same time, it's easy to misunderstand the nuances of various open source licenses, or to have an unclear business strategy around open…
Many organizations are exploring AI integration in their products or internal processes. In a new and fast-moving field of modern AI systems, that can be hard to do for a variety of reasons: There is a lot of hype, unrealistic expectations and claims of massive benefits (such as Facebook’s plan to "replace junior developers with AI"), and bold predictions of imminent AGI (Artificial General…
There are four major risks when starting a startup, entering a new market, or developing a new product: technology risk — can you build it? market risk — does anyone want to buy it? distribution risk — how can you reach the people who want to buy it? financial risk — do you have the money to do it? The first two are addressed directly by YC’s famous " write code and talk to people ": Write…
Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it is worth. ( source ) Throughout our lives, we develop many heuristic tools (rules of thumb) to help us make sense of the world. These rules are distilled knowledge of patterns we observe (or gain insight into) or learn about:…
Kanban originated in Toyota where it was (and still is) used to organize processes in their factories, such that they can quickly respond to changing demand and keep the production running smoothly. Wikipedia has a good overview of Kanban as part of the Toyota Production System . Kanban in software development is one of the Agile processes that aims to achieve the same for the dev environment. In…
Conventional wisdom these days, especially for startups, is to design your software architecture to be horizontally scalable and highly available. Best practices involve Kubernetes, microservices, multi-availability zones at a hyperscaler, zero-downtime deployments, database sharding and replication, with possibly a bit of serverless thrown in for good measure. While scalability and high…
The post-pandemic return-to-office (RTO) mandates are still the subjects of intense debate about working in the office or remotely, with two sides often talking past each other. Can there even be a solution that would satisfy both sides? [0] The setup Assuming rational knowledge workers Alice and Bob with clear preferences, and a rational manager, Michael, let's think through their preferences,…
Video is a big part of our online experience. It drives the majority of all internet traffic, and people watch the equivalent of 3.6 billion DVDs every month. And that’s just video on demand (VOD). Live events pull even more engagement, up to 10 times that of online video. These trends make a compelling argument for including video as a key component of online presence for any brand, publisher,…
Web development is powered by open source. From the operating system all the way up to the JavaScript libraries or CSS frameworks, reuse of open-sourced results of hard work of thousands of developers helps us build our products faster and more reliable. But today there are dozens or hundreds tools, libraries and modules available for any given job, and often it is hard to pick the best one. When…
As I write this ( September 2014 ), the Internet is in panic over a catastrophic remote code execution bug in which bash , a commonly-used shell on many of the today’s servers, can be exploited to run arbitrary code. Let’s backtrack a bit: how is it possible that a bug in command-line shell is exploitable remotely? And why is it a problem if a shell, designed to help its user run arbitrary code,…