It kind of feels to me like there is more to this than what’s being reported here.
Story time: One time Marc Benioff DMed me on Twitter to ask me a question about all of the Clubhouse stuff that was going on (and that I was inadvertently swept up in the middle of)
We ended up going back and forth on DM a bit and then he gave me his number and we had a conversation about my business and how I should be thinking about some parts of it I was struggling with.
It’s fair to say that he spent over an hour texting back and forth with me about what was going on and how I should approach it.
I have a hard time squaring this up with him paying $28B for a business and then totally ignoring the people behind it.
Wow, Stewart Butterfield had just ONE HOUR of total face time with Marc Benioff before Salesforce announced its $27.7B acquisition of Slack, the second-largest software acquisition in history at the time.
“My last meeting with him was cut short because McConaughey arrived.”
Stewart left the company after 18 months; he says the tipping point came when he was invited to Davos to represent Slack and Salesforce. Thinking he would be there to talk to customers, he instead found himself scheduled on a panel about innovation with will.i.am, another of Salesforce’s celebrity spokespeople.
“It was so fucked up.”
Fun read into the culture clash between Slack and Salesforce.
If you’re building a company it’s worth reading this entire series. Very good stuff.
Latest (and probably penultimate) Building Slack post is up: buildingslack.com/salesforce…
What it's like being eaten by the whale
Urgently redirecting all remaining token spend towards security and hardening for the rest of the month.
This is just going to be our lives now, isn’t it?
Not just PHP. Node.js has also announced security releases for October 21, with HIGH-severity vulnerabilities affecting its 26.x, 24.x and 22.x release lines.
If you run either stack in production, keep an eye on official advisories and apply patches promptly.
Security maintenance doesn't stop at your application code. Your runtime matters too.
Node.js advisory: nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerabi…
"At least we're not using PHP" he says as he goes around updating every server because of the number "4"
Heard today that another great engineer I’ve worked with is leaving the industry. They’re tired of constantly relearning how to do their job because of AI. Have been hearing this more and more.
We went from 90,000 builds in January to 443,000 builds in September. Fun to live in times where everything is breaking all at once.
Excited to watch everyone here speedrun their learnings about the differences between a $60K/year NYC “preschool” and a normal preschool almost anywhere else.
You should be spending at least half of your tokens improving the software that you’ve already built.
Piling on new features without thinking seems to be the scourge of everything I try these days.
The other day I had someone on street ask me how to get to the F train station. After I told them they said "but Claude said it's the other way."
Ok. 🤷♂️
theverge.com/report/1002963/…
Sonnet 5.5 is the first non-frontier model we've seen that can score 100% on our project management benchmark Koreybench (and it finishes it 3 times faster than the Sonnet 4.6 did)
Just a really great model.
Me: "Remove these models as options in the list"
Claude: "I'll write some test cases to show that they've been removed"
🤦♂️
I'm seeing some non-devs start to use sandboxes/Devin/etc to push PRs for smaller production things around the edges.
Fixing smaller "this has always bothered me" sort of problems.
Bury your head in the ground at your own risk. I aim to not jump on any hype trains, but since Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.2 + the harnesses it was clear that these things can write code nearly as good as I can in my best language; better in other languages.
But we won't see non-devs push production code for a long time; possibly forever, if you ask me. Software still needs to be built in robust ways, and it's our profession to do this well, and use the new tools we have, which create new and interesting (+tough!) challenges
