Engineering @ Chainguard ⛓️ • Book Author • ex-Elastic ($ESTC) • tweets are my own
US - Boston
Joined March 2009
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I’m based in Boston so that makes me part of the 5%, building github.com/driftlessaf
I wouldn’t be surprised if 95%+ of devs spending $10K+ per month on AI, globally, were based in the Bay Area
Nearly everyone I talk here (devs, founders, CTOs etc) are AI-pilled in ways I rarely see outside. AI-pilled as in obsessed building more with agents, running agents when they sleep, designing loops to auto kick-off, running them during their commute. And talking with each other how and what they do and then taking those ideas and trying it
💯 I’ve not executed any terraform command manually in 2026 to deploy and test changes in my GCP and AWS dev env, my agents figure all it out thanks to IaC foundation put into place years before AI
Maxime Gréau retweeted
@GergelyOrosz is right. From my pov there are two reasons to write your own stuff, even if it's a struggle. First, it's fitness training for your brain. If you struggle to write, your brain is flabby. Having a fit brain will be a key differentiator in the new era. And second, we would all rather read your "bad" writing than polished AI writing. Trust me on this one. We can spot even one sentence of AI writing and it stinks. Your bad writing is fine. Just do more of it, every day, to get in shape and stay in shape.
Made the previously paid article "Becoming a better writer" free.
I see too many devs writing low quality slop with AI. Hopefully this helps those of you who want to share more of your own experiences, using your own words - we need more of these!
newsletter.pragmaticengineer…
💯 A major shift toward proactive, always-on, goal-oriented agents is starting now and will gain momentum over the next few months
Maxime Gréau retweeted
so now that you have entire teams of agents running your company...
♫ what do we do while your agent runs? ♫
Maxime Gréau retweeted
ai has made many new things possible
how should an org deal with it? what should you do?
i got sick of the long slop docs, shared videos and unusable apps
sent this to the teams inside @Snowflake
warning! actual sentences follow.
--------
Always, always look at what you are suggesting from the perspective of the recipient. Empathy is the top AI skill.
Information:
-- Aim to inform; concisely; Nobody likes reading reams of material
-- Always add value: don’t share a video without doing the work to generate a verified summary and / or your perspective.
-- Don’t flood people: a 90m video to watch is 89m too long
Apps:
-- Always start from your end user perspective: what do they want? Think like them.
-- Meet users where they are: show up in email or slack if you can. Cowork / coco are the next options. Unless for a specific high volume task, nobody wants to use another app. They are impossible to find and generally really hard to use.
Don’t confuse “AI native” for “flood of new apps” or “flood of documents”. AI native is about reimagining work to be simpler & easier allowing us humans to focus more on judgement and rumination.
Maxime Gréau retweeted
Dev events went from laptops open and coding to glancing at phones and prompting your agents real quick
Maxime Gréau retweeted
Vulnpocalypse or vulnerability human centipede?
We’re all sewn in somewhere: labs finding, maintainers fixing, vendors packaging, operators deploying. Nobody likes their spot. Last week showed everyone downstream what’s coming.
chainguard.dev/unchained/reb…
Maxime Gréau retweeted
every product i use should just be a headless mcp, that feeds into an agent, where i never have to think about anything underneath.
except for our product, of course.
in our product, customers love the ui and love us very much.
we're special that way.
Maxime Gréau retweeted
Skills are so much more powerful if you start to think of them as memory/brains not static files
Maxime Gréau retweeted
The actual prompt for this was "let's look for pre-auth RCEs in PHP". I'm sharing this so people know this stuff is real and to take agent-assisted scanning seriously.
I kicked if off using Claude Mythos 5.1 (in stock Claude Code) but it uses a skill to drive a harness we built over the last few months.
I don't know if the harness is amazing, but it certainly has a scary track record so far. It's setup to do an agent guided tree search across a codebase, and runs in microvm sandboxes that all have the full source code for the target, as well as the source for any transitive dependencies.
When I built the harness I basically just fed Claude a bunch of Project Zero blog posts describing how they did research and had it build a harness that ran like that, but on our tech stack.
The first phase is just setup and can run with any model, it just does that fetching and assembles the kit environment, and gets a target up and running alongside the source code.
Then we just do some basic suspend/resume stuff over to the hunt phase, where one agent supervises the tree, and the first node kicks off.
Each node is context-aware and aware of the work of all the others. I think I ran this with parallelism 4? So 4 running at any one time. The supervisor can shape the tree and boost nodes or prune. Any node can add more below it with targeted instructions.
A typical run looks like the first node doing a codebase review or building and running a fuzzer or something, all depending on the target. Then based on whatever it finds, it'll queue 4-5 children that go look into those areas. The main system guidance is to validate everything 3 times in clean VMs, and we typically require full exploit chains/POCs.
Here's what this run looked like.
We're doing this with a bunch of other open source projects now and companies. We're doing a lot of this for free, even with private companies, across critical infrastructure. We're directly partnered with Anthropic, and can do this even if you don't have direct access to a frontier model yourself.
Maxime Gréau retweeted
If you wanted to know all the jobs that AI will produce, look no further than cybersecurity. This is going to become one of the biggest investment areas for enterprises going forward.
And even as the work becomes more agentic and autonomous you will need more talent to point the agents at the most critical work, review findings, patch systems, respond to incidents, and more.
Lots of opportunity right now for the systems that protect data and enterprises, as well as the professionals that are deploying them and protecting organizations.
It’s going to only get more wild out there.
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
We at Ramp tried a bunch of agent harnesses and ended up building our own. Cloud-native, model-agnostic, tailored to our infrastructure and product.
And we published how we built it: builders.ramp.com/post/build…
Maxime Gréau retweeted
We at Ramp tried a bunch of agent harnesses and ended up building our own. Cloud-native, model-agnostic, tailored to our infrastructure and product.
And we published how we built it: builders.ramp.com/post/build…
Is PR Zero the new Inbox Zero? 😅
Trying to merge all my open PRs before calling it a day, but my local agents keep opening new ones because I told them to create a PR whenever a feature or fix is ready for review.
💯
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg) says the old work week is officially dead:
“You would think, ‘AI has arrived, & we're all working 2 hours a week.’”
“The opposite is happening. I get text messages at midnight from the CEOs and CTOs of these companies.”
“It’s more like 7/7/7: 7 days a week from 7 AM to 7 PM.”
Maxime Gréau retweeted
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg) says the old work week is officially dead:
“You would think, ‘AI has arrived, & we're all working 2 hours a week.’”
“The opposite is happening. I get text messages at midnight from the CEOs and CTOs of these companies.”
“It’s more like 7/7/7: 7 days a week from 7 AM to 7 PM.”
BREAKING: 60% of Vercel deployments are now driven by AI agents, up from 3% in Jan 2026.
FULL INTERVIEW
Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg), Founder & CEO @Vercel
Stats:
› 80% of AI Gateway token volume comes from open models
› 10 years to reach 1B deployments, then another 1.5B in just 10 months
"The machines have taken over."
I sat down with G at Vercel's SF HQ to discuss how AI is changing software development, infrastructure & the economics of SaaS.
Vercel has reportedly reached $600M in annualized revenue, up 148% YoY, with 485K+ paying teams and a $9.3B valuation. Customers include SpaceX, OpenAI, Meta, Stripe, Brex, Shopify, DoorDash, & Polymarket.
P.S. Guillermo mentions "code" 145 times throughout our conversation. His thesis is that AI agents are making code effectively free, fundamentally changing what companies build versus buy.
"You buy Vercel as the platform, & then you never have to buy software again because you can just generate it to your needs."
We cover:
› The shift from human-facing websites to agent-native interfaces, MCP & agentic commerce with Stripe, Shopify & DoorDash
› Why free code changes SaaS economics for Salesforce & SAP, software development & the role of engineers at Meta, SpaceX & Mercedes F1
› Open vs. closed models, including why ~80% of token volume on Vercel’s AI Gateway now goes to open models like Moonshot’s Kimi & DeepSeek
› Unpacking frontier: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini & xAI
› Agent autonomy, prompt injection, sandboxing & enterprise security after OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach
› Model routing, growing compute demand & the future of serverless infrastructure
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO at Vercel
(03:32) The simplest advice for going viral
(07:24) How Vercel became the index of AI
(11:34) The CEO who still ships code on weekends
(14:34) Robots writing code for robots
(17:57) The web's next users aren't human
(21:15) Is ChatGPT reading your website right now?
(24:21) Minority Report is becoming real software
(29:16) The end of SaaS & the rise of personal software
(34:07) AI agents are soldiers with no frontal lobe
(45:42) AI hackers & the coming cyber war
(47:55) The $1M challenge to hack Vercel's sandbox
(52:10) 80% of tokens now go to open models
(59:00) The biggest risk for frontier labs
(1:04:00) Can AI labs survive the public markets?
(1:06:28) Why AI has Silicon Valley working 7-7-7
(1:07:23) "The thing you fell in love with is gone"
(1:16:56) Your vibe-coded demo won't get you hired
(1:22:22) The hardest part of running a company is keeping it simple
(1:27:01) Why no company can run all its AI apps 24/7