engineer and explorer - starting something new
Los Gatos, CA
Joined September 2009
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Accidentally spun up 12000 agents for a customer - had a mild freak out before realizing they were haiku agents. Amazing price performance!
Got the @AskRobinhood Gold Card and Banking accounts finally a few weeks ago. Great perks but a lot of broken windows:
- debit card didn’t work despite activation. Support had to manually turn on
- gold card doesn’t work with 3DS, visa doesn’t have my phone or email on file
These new Amazon email changes are so customer hostile. Why bother sending a receipt if everything is an ‘essential item’
Startup stack sales motions this week:
Corgi: 10/10. Outbound hit within 5 minutes.
Mercury: 9/10. Inbound form to video call - a few hrs
Ramp for Treasury: 1/10. “Schedule a call” -> no availability for 7 days. Extra surprising because they can see my connected balance.
One of the biggest unfair advantages for startups right now imo - they get an absurd amount of subsidy on Claude Code (probably Codex too). Big companies are paying per token because managing 100s of Claude Max subs isn’t a thing.
Crazy to hear so many public companies claim they're ahead on AI. Paraphrasing earnings from earlier today - "we're the defacto choice for legal services w/ ChatGPT"
reality....
Jonah Back retweeted
Lots of engineers think AI codegen is only good enough to do little bug fixes here and there
If you tell them you can ship 15k LOC of ai gen code to prod they think you have lost your mind.
It’s so so early. And also those engineers are living in 2025.
Jonah Back retweeted
I’m not exaggerating, I hear from so many big software cos which don’t use Claude Code/Codex.
CTOs are asleep at the wheel. Engineers are typing code by hand. Fixing a bug a day. Like it’s 2024.
If youre at these cos, demand change or leave. Now. You’re in for a rude awakening.
Jonah Back retweeted
It’s time to build in San Francisco again
WSJ today on the San Francisco real estate market
Pretty good summary what’s going on, and it’s not overly complicated:
“An uptick in demand coupled with the city’s notorious lack of housing supply means that fierce bidding wars are breaking out again for single-family homes and condominiums in desirable neighborhoods”
Excited to be a part of this journey with the Deeptrace team - killer team and killer product
Excited to share that @deeptraceai has raised $5M to identify and fix every alert in production.
This round is co-led by @felicis and @matrix, with participation from @ycombinator.
As AI generates more of the world’s code, the real leverage shifts to systems that help engineers understand and run it in production. Deeptrace is that reliability layer.
Today, teams like @opendoor, @mintlify, and @phantom use Deeptrace to automatically investigate every alert in production and proactively catch issues before they turn into incidents.
If you’re looking to automate on-call and use agents to monitor prod, please reach out!
Jonah Back retweeted
The cruelest thing you can do to an engineer is require them to use AI to code and at the same time restrict them to using crappy models and tools.
I understand why it happens but would be so frustrating.
Amazon had four Sev-1 outages (their highest severity level) in a single week. Internal memos say AI-assisted code changes were a contributing factor.
The timeline here is wild. In October 2025, Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate employees. In January 2026, another 16,000. That’s about 30,000 people in five months, roughly 10% of the corporate workforce. CEO Andy Jassy said the cuts were about culture, not AI.
During those same months, Amazon set a target: 80% of developers using AI coding tools at least once a week. They tracked adoption closely and blocked rival tools like OpenAI’s Codex. Even so, 30% of developers still hadn’t touched Amazon’s in-house tool Kiro by January.
In December 2025, Kiro caused a 13-hour AWS outage. The AI tool had production-level permissions and decided the best fix for a bug was to delete and recreate an entire live environment. A second incident involved Amazon Q Developer, another AI tool. Amazon blamed both on “user error, not AI.” But quietly added mandatory peer review for all production access afterward.
Then March 5: Amazon’s retail site went down for about six hours. Over 22,000 users reported checkout failures, missing prices, and app crashes. Amazon called it a “software code deployment” error.
Five days later, SVP Dave Treadwell made the normally optional weekly engineering meeting mandatory. His memo acknowledged “GenAI tools supplementing or accelerating production change instructions, leading to unsafe practices.” These problems trace back to Q3 2025. Amazon’s own assessment: their GenAI safeguards “are not yet fully established.”
The new rule: junior and mid-level engineers now need senior sign-off on any AI-assisted production changes. Treadwell also announced “controlled friction” for the most critical parts of the retail experience.
For context, Google’s 2025 DORA report found 90% of developers use AI for coding but only 24% trust it “a lot.” An Uplevel study of 800 developers found Copilot users introduced 41% more bugs with no improvement in output. Amazon is finding out what those numbers look like at the scale of a $500 Billion revenue company, with 30,000 fewer people on staff to catch the mistakes.
Sort of telling with buyback authorizations re: how companies think of their future.
In a world where every pure SaaS company is at an all time high disruption risk, you’d think that money might be better spent on creating AI native experiences
#AtomsNotBits
Jonah Back retweeted
Most data teams are still building dashboards nobody looks at.
We killed 1,400 of ours.
Replaced them with a semantic layer you can talk to. Built custom AI tooling that replaced SaaS we were paying six figures a year for. Every person on this @Opendoor data team has unlimited tokens and AI agents running alongside them daily.
Real estate is the largest asset class on earth and the transaction still feels like 1997. That's the data problem we wake up to. Pricing millions of homes. Optimizing tens of millions in ad spend. Building models that move real dollars, not slide decks.
Our CEO's (@nejatian) mandate is "default to AI." Not a slogan. How we actually operate. Opendoor might be the most AI-native public company you haven't been paying attention to.
Small team. Absurd talent density. Embedded across the entire C-suite. You touch pricing, marketing, product, sales, operations — all of it!
We're hiring across Agentic Analytics Engineering and Data Science. Seattle or Toronto.
If this is the kind of data team you've been looking for, stop scrolling and apply:
Agentic Analytics Engineering: grnh.se/mqzo4ab46us
Data Science: grnh.se/awisi8t36us
Jonah Back retweeted
Last shirt said "Faster." Sneak peek at what this one says. Limited drop at openarmy.com now powered by @shop.
Don't miss Q4 Financial Open House tomorrow 2/19 at 2pm PT on X, Robinhood, and YouTube. investor.opendoor.com
One of the most underrated things about AI driven automation. Mistakes are easy to fix. We had a bug in our assessment process yesterday. 3 months ago, that would’ve meant 2am pages, lot of overtime and delayed offers. Today we basically just hit ‘retry’ after a fix.
Jonah Back retweeted
For anyone in a software engineering leadership/management position, this is the time to see if you can figure out how to shelve that responsibility for a while and return to being a full time IC.
Software engineering has changed more in the last few months than it has in the previous decade. The skills, experience, and perspective that you built to get you to the leadership/management position you're in now are becoming irrelevant extremely rapidly. If you are not able to adapt right now, you are going to start becoming bad at your job very soon, if you have not already.
You're trusted to lead because you built the skills and judgement over time direct the boat confidently. But the boat that you were driving has suddenly been replaced by a completely different boat which you have never worked on before, so it's time to shift down and re-build your expertise before taking the helm again.
🫡
We’re doing a fun thing @Opendoor a lot more recently. Instead of beleaguering folks - esp founders - with typical tech interview loops, we’re just building in person together. 2 weeks of side by side crafting, focusing on delivering customer value.