engineer & founder / obsessed about user experience & performance
Brussels, Belgium
Joined January 2026
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- Following3.2K
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Pinned Tweet
yesterday i crossed 3k followers 🎉
for everyone new here, a bit about me:
i'm Matt, 30, from Belgium 🇧🇪
software engineer for 8 years, now trying to build SaaS and sharing the journey
you'll also see some gym, BJJ and random life stuff in between
thank you all, and say hi if we never talked :)
trying to relax a bit this Sunday, playing some Switch games and not thinking about building, but i still feel guilty about not having agents running and not maxing out my Claude/Codex subscriptions
how is everyone dealing with this?
when i see how stores have to barricade themselves because of looters in Brussels, i feel privileged to make my money on the Internet
adapt or get left behind :)
I think many of us working in tech tend to forget that the reason software engineering vs other engineering fields pays (a lot!) more, is a lot more flexible (WFH/remote), and has better perks:
Because this field changes much faster than other engineering fields. The premium is because fewer people are able/willing to pick up new technologies, methodologies so quickly.
But the field had ~10-20 years of stability, and so lots of folks forgot this is why a premium exists. And that AI is just another tech wave: software engineers who pick it up and master it will generally fare better; those not will struggle a lot more.
yesterday evening i noticed some strange Google Cloud bills coming in, i asked Claude to investigate whether someone was abusing my backend but we couldn't find anything
this morning i woke up with a nice email from @Railway telling me that all my API keys were compromised
what a nice start of the day :)
two weeks ago i answered to that tweet without really expecting anything
this morning i got a nice surprise when checking my mailbox
thank you @zenithquinn, you really made my day 🙌
my question is: does this ever stop?
i think the brain is very adaptable and can get better at handling certain things the more you practice them
but it’s been months now since my days shifted from coding to managing agents, and i still feel tired from all the context switching
AI was supposed to make us work less
I've never been this tired in my life
most days I have up to 10 agents running at the same time. one fixing a bug, one writing pages, one refactoring something I already forgot I asked for, 3 other I have no idea what they are doing but i suppose i ask it?
and I jump from conversation to conversation all day
compared to 5 years ago, I probably context switch 100x more
by the end of the day my brain is fried. completely toasted. nothing left, not even for the people I love
I call it the fried brain effect
thought it was just me but almost every founder I talk to lately says the exact same thing
we got superpowers, and somehow the pressure only went up. if you can ship 10x more, you feel like you have to ship 10x more. every single day
I don't have a solution
honestly I have no idea where this goes from here
anyone else feeling this?
8 years ago, when i started working as a software engineer, the book on my desk was Clean Code
back then the implementation was the job. naming, small functions, clean abstractions. that's what made you good
today AI writes and reviews 90% of my code, so that part matters a lot less than it used to
AI can suggest an architecture too, but i'm the one who has to understand the tradeoffs. where the data lives, what happens when something fails, what i give up with each option
so this is the book on my table now
i think designing systems is becoming the most important skill for engineers. the job looks a lot more like software architecture than coding
i replaced doomscrolling with replying to 862 strangers on X for 7 days, here are the results:
i've always heard replying was the best way to grow on X, so i tested it.
every time i reached for my phone to doomscroll, i wrote thoughtful replies instead, checking each person's profile so the reply was actually relevant.
the numbers:
- starting point: 1,716 followers
- 862 replies (~123/day)
- ~3h per day, 21h total
- 564 new followers (+33% in a week)
was it worth it? it's the same 3 hours i was already burning on the feed, except now they compound :)
