Pinned Tweet
This is genius. Pure fucking genius.
Imagine what this can unlock. Imagine that you can have a Harvard Biz School case study of every single important event in a company's evolution as if you were a fly on the wall. The way one learns and interacts with voice is fundamentally different from text. Every great leader / manager I respected in my life has used their voice!
On 11/25/25, Opus 4.5 dropped. @rsnodgrass and I started recording every bloody conversation that we were having since then even before we started a company. @MilkanaBrace joined, we incorporated, and every member of @SageOx has recorded every conversation: hundreds of hours so far.
We wanted to have everyone to have the git "pick axe" 'git log -S' for the company brain.
Inspired by Steve Jobs (in 1983!) youtube.com/watch?v=t9HmOz8H… asking 'What would Aristotle have said?' But do that for every one of our decisions, because we knew that this was going to come and it was going to land in 2026.
@jack and his team already built Buzz and we were waiting for it: sageox.ai/blog/welcome-buzz
I will write a blog post soon, but take a bow Team @dessa. Audio is the second piece of the puzzle after the agentic software factory. Sight is going to be next. I cannot wait.
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
facebook.com/share/r/1FLf7D1…
My fav anecdote of my mother is her riding with her beloved IAF pilots in the supersonic jets.
And every time coming back and saying that even though she had read all the books of aviation medicine and high altitude physiology, it always inspired her to see the world class judgment and decision making of those fighter pilots.
Book knowledge is never the same as the real thing!
Preach the retire-or-retrain mantra!
Too many leaders are just waiting out this year of change instead of embracing it.
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.
Middle managers need to retire-or-reskill, too many folks learned the wrong lessons through the 2010s, great nuggets from @Lethian
What’s changed in “the unwritten rules” of engineering management since the 2010s, why are hands-on managers “back”, and what has it done to the engineer-to-CTO career path? With Will Larson (@Lethain). Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
08:20 Stories from Yahoo!
12:47 Digg’s v4 rewrite: the insider story
26:02 Will’s path to eng leadership
30:03 Uber, Stripe, Carta, and Calm
35:11 What does a CTO do?
38:09 Will’s role at Imprint
42:48 How engineering management has evolved
51:08 ZIRP’s impact on tech
57:21 Career ladders
1:01:03 Eng 1 vs Eng 2
1:06:58 How software engineering roles are changing
1:16:25 Revised rules of engineering leadership
1:21:57 The risks of becoming a bureaucrat as an EM
1:25:57 How to become a CTO?
1:31:33 Middle management vs. line management
1:41:36 Will’s writing
1:52:13 Book recommendations
Brought to you by:
• @turbopuffer – vector and full-text search built on object storage: fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. turbopuffer.com/v3
• @EntireHQ – Git hosting, rebuilt for the agentic era. Entire hosts your code in-region, and is up to 89x faster than any other competitor. entire.io/pragmatic
• What if you only needed a single test to harden your system? Get a free introduction to property-based testing: through a live, online webinar hosted by Hillel Wayne, author of Logic for Programmers and Developer Educator at @AntithesisHQ. RSVP here: pages.antithesis.com/webinar…
Two sage observations from Will on how engineering management changed:
1. ZIRP shaped engineering management practices in the 2010s, Will believes. As he put it:
“Back then, your ability to hire and close and retain became the differentiator between successful companies. The less successful ones simply couldn’t retain great people.
[This dynamic on hiring and retaining] pulled leverage back into the engineer’s hands and created a very different environment. So, companies were pitching themselves as a more relaxed environment, more focused on you, and offering more career development. And I think in ways that I think were often kind of self-defeating.”
2. Blunt message for middle managers: retire or re-skill.
Will left a team of 250 at Carta to head up 25 tech people at Imprint. He purposely took a “step back” in his leadership career because he believes things are changing so radically that the engineering leadership profession that we know will not exist in three years.
Amid all this, Will says that line management can be a lot more engaging for executives these days because the tools for line management and the tools for writing software are really good. Plus, the tech industry has always been volatile: during the 2010s most of us simply forgot about this!
@SageOx makes invisible intelligence tangible.
I moved to the US from India in 1996. The first thing I did was take a photo of the highway signage. They were HUGE!
We didn't have those speeds in India then. But I immediately realized what the designers were doing. They were designing for the speeding drivers attention budget.
All of software engineering did that 40x speedup transition this year. But our information radiators are still written in the tiny fonts of the earlier era.
Which is why I had to tweet when I found the phrase "make invisible intelligence tangible".
Tsunami Surfers Welcome!
What we do at @SageOx every day to maintain our AI euphoria:
* Don't compete on intelligence. Neither with each other nor with the models.
* Make being wrong cheap and public. Do not worry about being right, as long as you get it right.
* Tell stories, not status. Build AI-based tools like Murals to see the godlike creativity that is being unleashed.
* Let the knowledge gossip. SageOx tells your colleagues everything that you've learned.
Trust is what makes it work.None of these habits survive without trust. You don't admit a mistake to people you think will use it against you. You don't kill your own belief in front of a room that keeps score.
When things calm down, go to Lyon.
Find a bouchon. Order the thing you can't pronounce. Thank me later.
#Lyon
Hanging out with the @huggingface infra crew at en.visiterlyon.com/out-and-a… to celebrate the XetHub integration
This is the second priceless drop this week, the first one was
felixrieseberg.com/how-to-be…
We need more intuition pumps like these to become world class thinkers in 2026. Love it!
"how to avoid brain rot" was a great watch. some of my favorites points:
- using ai to ask yourself socratic questions instead of giving you the answer makes you feel like you're learning less but research shows you're actually learning more
- ai tooling is moving so fast that it's better to know 50% of a new tool than to master 90% of an older tool
Micro co-located teams are the @SageOx way
To get a 40x team
sageox.ai/blog/the-40x-team
face-to-face engagement is 100% required in the A.D era of 2026.
"Every open role is worked in person. We don't hire for remote or hybrid positions."
David Vélez on why AI makes remote work less valuable:
"AI also in a perhaps counterintuitive way, increases the argument to spend time in person more.
Because increasingly the work that AI can do is more or less the work that people at home individually could do.
And so the individual at home will be competing with AIs, and we'll lose that battle.
But the work around collaboration and coordination in presence physically is something that needs to be happening inside the office."
Teams are the original super intelligence.
That was and will remain @SageOx foundational thesis.
I was in AWS when I saw the S3 team catch fire. This is an anecdote from my mentor Peter Vosshall
--
Years ago JJ (who you may remember as a leader in the website platform organization) began a project to interview principal SDEs and write up their stories in a blog or book. I don’t know whatever came of that, it may never have reached fruition. But if it did, the best would be to read the chapter/blog entry on alv@ and S3. It’s a remarkable story. 8 engineers, some seasoned, some green, all remarkable, with a clear vision and a set of simple but powerful design tenets building one of the most successful cloud offerings ever.
--
In the A.D era, with @SageOx I am looking forward to hundreds of teams created with this kind of impact.
This Margaret Mead quote never gets old
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Watch out, more and more folks are going to dtmfa GH!
"In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, #Anthropic merged over 30,000 per day."
Awesome! We are investigating replacing GH too, for availability/further speed. Can't wait for the additional curve upwards compounded with #SageOx context.
@SageOx vs @AnthropicAI data estimating PRs per day/engineer. This is what bleeding edge AI era engineering looks like.
anthropic.com/engineering/re…
"Don't be a loser" says @dhh in his keynote at Rails World 2026. He talks abt his great-great-grandfather who was a 19th century master painter who pivoted when the camera came along.
(full video on YouTube)
This made me want to highlight living champions of change and pivots.
My Ma (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padma_…) has seen her share:
📈➡️📉 My grandmother gets TB in 1947
📉➡️📈 Penicillin affordable India early 1950s, grandmother recovers. Ma vows to become a doctor.
📈➡️📉 Breaks out of traditional Tamil Brahmin family, gets her MBBS, has a love marriage with a Bengali, ostracized by both families. (1960s)
📉➡️📈 Both my parents get the VSM for operations in the 1971 war, everybody loves and welcomes them.
📈➡️📉 My dad is diagnosed as Bipolar (1970s)
📉➡️📈 Keep on keeping on. 2 MDs. PhD. Research on cold in the Soviet Union (Murmansk). Older kid in AIIMS. Younger one (me!) in IITK.
📉➡️📈 IAF's first woman Air Marshal. Padma Shri.
I asked her this morning:
Ma, you have seen plenty in your 82+ years. My industry is going through a tectonic shift, and the vibes are pretty frenetic. There is a lot of bad juju. What would you tell my friends and colleagues caught up in this tsunami of change?
Watch the video below for her pragmatic advice!
‘I Thought I Would Fly a Plane’: How a Doctor Became the IAF's First Woman Air Marshal thebetterindia.com/governanc…
@thebetterindia
I decided that I needed to upgrade our MoQ version from draft-4 to draft-21 and it was done over the weekend. 2700+ PRs caught up.
In the process, I learned some TLA+, some Kani, shipped a few PRs into Charon and moq-dev.
Our antidote @SageOx to AI burn out is social learning and tinkering.
Ajit Banerjee retweeted
So the device I got at @WorkOS’s init conference is the different one that we have in our product . Both are esp32-s3 but
@SageOx - it’s by Waveshare
WorkOS - it’s M5Stack Stopwatch
So there’s a good amount of difference on how chips are assembled and what sort of helper chips are used.
But I got it working on that chip quickly by just asking Claude.
So the point? We have so much to do even in this LLM era. We just have to become more ambitious.
So now our firmware supports multiple boards.
If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump.
Amazing moment.
Navi Pillay has received the Nobel Peace Prize ! bbc.co.uk/news/live/ck5yng9z…
We are at the Nuremberg Court; I cannot think of a stronger symbol for her Nobel prize.
We are all so thrilled!
This is her first reactions upon hearing the news: