Software Collaboration in the AI Age
Let's start with two observations: ## 1. GitHub Is Dying (and so Is the Traditional SDLC) With the rise of AI coding agents, software…
spiess.dev
Philipp Spiess – Codex at OpenAI. Somewhere between AI and UI. Prev: Tailwind Labs, Meta, Sourcegraph, React DOM.
Latest posts
Agents as Commodity
AI agents are _the_ AI engineering trend of 2025. It's understandable: For the first time, it's possible to really start to understand the…
How I Use Claude Code
One month ago, I subscribed to Claude Max. I've been using AI agents including Claude Code for some time prior, but with the flat pricing, my…
Rise of the Product-Focused Engineer
An old colleague reached out this week with a familiar frustration. They're overseeing engineering at a growing company and while they've…
Effective Writing
Clear and comprehensive communication skills are important for [good engineers](https://spiess.dev/note/engineering/great-engineers). Since a…
Great Engineers
A friend asked me a great question this week: “Who are great engineers you know and why are they great?”. And while I immediately had a few…
I’m Joining Tailwind Labs
This is a very special week for me. Not only is the heatwave in Vienna finally cooling off, but more importantly, it’s my first week joining…
Learning is Bidirectional
I remember a situation from early on in my career where I asked my more senior coworker for some help. They came to my desk and showed me how…
The 50-50 Goal
Large companies are inherently number-driven. This is not a bad thing per se: Aligning around measurable objectives has huge benefits and…
Hard Choices
When faced with hard choices, I'm often tempted to search for _the better option_ as if it's hiding just beneath the surface. But most of the…
Reading List
You can find me on [Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/50192165-philipp) for my up-to-date reading list. In the past months, I…
Deploy Workers Programatically
You can deploy Cloudflare Workers via the HTTP API and thus dynamically create Workers. The canonical solution for this is to use [Workers for…
Profiling Extension in Production
The VS Code extension runtime uses Node.js (via Electron) and you can thus use Node.js related debugging tool. Here's a quick guide on how to…
Feature Flags
Feature flags are a powerful technique that every engineer should have in their toolbox. They allow you to ship changes incrementally and…
Demo Culture
Good engineers _ship_. That's no big secret. Shipping is, after all, one of the very core pillars of the engineering culture and celebrated a…
Feelscraft Software
If you've never come across it, I highly recommend you read up on [Theorycraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorycraft). Because *of course*…
The Lifecycle of a Code AI Completion
Generative AI, whether for code, text, images, or other use cases, appears as a magic black box to many users. Users typically navigate to a…
Embeddings
Understanding and processing natural language is a complex task. Embeddings are a powerful tool in todays ML/AI discussions to address this…
Jaccard Similarity
When building an AI code assistant like [Cody](https://about.sourcegraph.com/cody), you often find yourself in need for a quick way to rank the…
Building a Schema Mapper in TypeScript
I've recently been working more with structured logging and as part of this, I wanted to build a TypeScript scheme mapper for creating table…
Niche ClickHouse Features
A lot of companies love ClickHouse for it's great performance as LDAP system, incredible compression, and its ease of deployment. This is a…
Modern Front-End Problems
This is a list of non-trivial problems I have come across in the front-end community over the past few years. It mostly exists as a personal…
New Mac Checklist
- [ ] Input methods - [ ] Set up the [US-German Keyboard…
Test Matrixes
- When working on complex systems, there are often more than one test parameter that changes. For example when working on a component for your…
React’s Escape Hatch
- Being not constraint to a specific domain is one of React's killer features. - In React DOM, you can always fall back to creating custom…
Notes
A collection of my random thoughts. This is a place for me to write down raw ideas, so don’t expect a high bar for quality. Inspired by Josh…
Scheduling in React
In modern applications, user interfaces often have to juggle multiple tasks at the same time. For example, a search component might need to…
Running Native Code in Electron and the Case for WebAssembly
Electron is a powerful open source framework that allows development of cross-platform desktop GUI applications with JavaScript, HTML, and…
A Real-World WebAssembly Benchmark
In late 2016, we released the first version of our Web SDK, which relies on a server component to render documents. Only a few months later…
WebAssembly: A New Hope
In March 2017, the WebAssembly Community Group reached a consensus on the initial (MVP) binary format, JavaScript API, and reference…
An Engineer’s Approach to Marketing
Several years ago, I was working on a platform for photographers to schedule the publication of their best shots on different platforms. You…