Beyond Coding

Meta Staff Engineer: What the Best Engineers Do Differently

8.1K views · 2d ago · 33:26

Guest: Meta Staff Engineer

Meta Staff Engineer Sajal Rustagi reveals what Staff Engineers do that most don't and what the best engineers do differently to reach the top. While foundational behaviors like proactivity and ownership still separate growing engineers from stuck ones, leveling up today requires a completely new set of staff skills built around agents.

Topics: The New Staff Engineer Skills · 2 Behaviors That Separate Mediocre and Staff Engineers · How the Best Engineers Build an Ownership Mindset · What Staff Engineers Do Differently During On-Call · Senior vs. Staff Engineer: Expanding Your Sphere of Influence · Why Switching Between Manager and Staff IC Builds Better Engineers

How Senior Engineers Use Coding Agents On Prod Infrastructure

44K views · 1w ago · 42:20

How do senior engineers use coding agents on prod infrastructure when “make no mistakes” is just a polite request? Kerim Satirli (HashiCorp, an IBM company) explains why prompt rules don’t hold in production, and what he runs instead.

Topics: Why “Make No Mistakes” Is a Polite Request · How Open Source Terraform Changed Provisioning · Why API-First Services Matter Beyond AWS and Azure · How AI Agents Changed Terraform Provider Updates · Why “Make No Mistakes” Won’t Stop Your Agent · Bringing Determinism Back to Agentic Workflows

Lead Architect Reveals His Rules for Coding Agents

241K views · 2w ago · 1:15:24

Lead Architect Carlos Kelkboom shares his rules for coding agents and how great engineers architect software with AI. One of the great ones is: he throws away generated code the moment he doesn't understand it. He breaks down why coding agents fail at iterative changes, why his main agent never touches files, and how he scaffolds projects for one-shot execution.

Topics: Why Carlos Throws Away Working AI Code · Why Pull Requests and Team Collaboration Are Dying · The Trap of Starting Projects You Never Finish · Escaping the Solo AI Developer Bubble · How to Scaffold Code Before Using AI Agents · Learning New Programming Languages With AI Agents

What the Best Engineers Built for Their Coding Agents

20K views · 3w ago · 1:14:38

What happens when coding agents see your entire system: code, services, infrastructure and live traffic, all connected? Most agents are blind to everything outside the repo. Adyen Staff Engineer Mat Jones explains what changed once theirs weren't, and why he calls it somewhat scary.

Topics: Running Five Coding Agents in Parallel · Atrium: How Agents Avoid Stepping on Each Other · Why Graphs Save Coding Agents Tokens · What Is Architect? Nine Graphs in One Database · What Broke at 7 Million Spans a Second · The Timeline From Proof of Concept to Production

Why Coding Agents Keep Making Your Codebase Worse

141K views · 1mo ago · 45:16

HumanLayer CEO Dexter Horthy, who coined "context engineering", on why coding agents degrade codebases over time. He breaks down a benchmark that measures AI code quality across features, and how his team ships with agents without drowning in slop.

Topics: The Man Who Coined the Term: Context Engineering · SlopCodeBench: Proof AI Makes Codebases Worse Over Time · Background Agents and the Enterprise Friction Problem · Why You'll Never One-Shot a Big Feature · Scaling Agentic Engineering to 1,000 Engineers · Dark Factories, Fake Hype and Token Maxing

How These Engineers Ship 50 Times a Day With Coding Agents

27K views · 1mo ago · 43:25

Amp ships to production around 50 times a day with AI agents, but the change that makes their team ship faster isn't AI at all. Dario Hamidi, AI engineer at Amp, makes the case that pull requests are holding your team back, and explains what replaces them.

Topics: Is It Time to Kill the Pull Request? · What Happens If Every PR Gets Auto-Closed Tomorrow · Pull Requests Were Built for Strangers, Not Teammates · Does Dropping PRs Hurt Quality at Scale? · Agent Permissions: Why No Default Makes Everyone Happy · Don't Juggle Knives: Building Environments You Can Trust

How Top Software Engineers Still Get Hired When Most Get Ghosted

34K views · 1mo ago · 33:35

How do top engineers still get hired in 2026 when most applicants get ghosted, 120,000 people have been laid off this year, and hiring managers say they can't find talent? A recruiter, a hiring lead, a career coach and an open source engineer explain why your resume is dead on arrival when every CV looks the same, and what actually gets you in the room instead.

Topics: How Bad Is the Tech Job Market in 2026? · Why 120K Layoffs and 60K Open Jobs Don't Add Up · Why AI Tools Are Banned From Interviews · Hard Skills Get You In, Soft Skills Keep You There · "I'm a University Dropout": How GitHub Got Me Hired · CVs Are Too Good Now: Why Referrals Win

How an Ex-Googler Accidentally Founded a Database Company

16K views · 1mo ago · 40:12

Jordan Tigani helped create Google BigQuery, then got fired as Chief Product Officer on a Friday morning. He planned to hack on DuckDB to learn Rust. Investors offered to fund it before he'd decided to start a company. That company became MotherDuck

Topics: Fired on a Friday: how MotherDuck accidentally started · Giving DuckDB Labs a co-founder share of the company · Why most open-source SaaS products are just "managed" · Why VCs said yes: Snowflake, DuckDB, and BigQuery credibility · The 11-person founding team that skipped the wrong designs · Alpha in 4 months, beta in a year, paid in two

Why machines need a different map (veteran CTO)

15K views · 1mo ago · 37:30

Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon on how the best engineers solve problems most give up on — from a 4D model of the world to shipping research in months. He built Google Earth and ran Google Maps for over a decade, and he's been there, done that. What he's building now is harder, and it's already live for customers. Along the way: who makes it on his team and who doesn't, and the one piece of advice he'd give every engineer using AI.

Topics: Google Earth? Been There, Done That · Turning a Research Idea Into Production in 6 Months · How Any Photo Gets Located Within Half a Meter · The Long-Term Goal: A 4D Model of the World · Treating a Pile of Photos Like a Database · What Google Maps Taught Him About Training Robots