The Pragmatic Engineer.

It's rate to see a non-AI frontier lab build an in-house AI coding tool that works better than what frontier labs have to offer. Ramp did this with Inspect: fully integrated with their systems, running on cloud VMs, and a smash hit. Deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-ramp-b...

Meta laid off 10% of devs when the business posted record revenue+profits & reallocated another 20-30% to AI training. Now, their best engineers are leaving to Anthropic, OpenAI & startups, despite large equity retainers offered to departing L6+ engs. blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pulse-me...

What happens inside a company which has no external customers, no deadlines, but a bug could wipe out the full company? Interesting things, like bigger platform teams than usual, and building custom hardware. Our deepdive on the trading industry + Optiver: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/optiver

How is building software changing inside of one of most "AI-pilled" companies, Anthropic? We talked with engineers inside the AI lab to get more details. Spoiler: two-pizza teams have not gone anywhere! Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/inside-ant...

How can you a product that is 10x cheaper or 10x faster than what is already out there? Simon Eskildsen (cofounder and CEO at turbopuffer) used "napkin math" - doing quick calculations to get rough answers - to get here. Full interview from AIE: youtu.be/h8TBLKyo7Rs

What is "loop engineering?" Looking closer at practical examples of workflows devs use, there doesn't seem to be all that much difference between triggers and cron jobs. This is probably b/c harnesses have added one-prompt "loop" capabilities. Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-lo...

"HMs are saying that highly-skilled talent (senior+ devs) is not available to be recruited, at the same time as experienced, proven professionals find their applications ignored by employers. What seems paradoxical here is how both can be true." newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tech-jobs-...

The keynote video from Craft Conference, titled "Slow down to speed up: what changed in the last 6 months for software engineering" is now available to view. Watch it on YouTube: youtu.be/5wks1W-auKY Or read the extended summary in today's issue: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/slow-down-...

Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization? Leadership at the social media giant has been on an AI-fueled rampage through its engineering org. We look into what's happened the last two months, all of it self-inflicted: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-met...

For those who missed: a month ago, Amazon (finally!) allowed using Claude Code and Codex for engineers. This was after many months, where engineers at the company were only allowed to use Kiro, Amazon's answer to AI coding harnesses. From 7 May 2026: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-...

Ever wondered why it's much easier to get a job January to June than July to December? Fresh data from our State of the software engineering job market in 2026 shows why: because historically 90%+ of hiring happens the first part of the year. More: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-t...

Google Cloud blocked cloud infra provider Railway's account, taking it offline. It's not the first time GCP did something unacceptable: in 2024, they deleted the infra of a $124B Australian fund. Not fully trusting GCP saved the fund's data. Full: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/google-cloud...

Anthropic has been upsetting devs: “dumbing down” Claude Code, removing access from some paid accounts and increasing prices. With extra compute from SpaceX, they've increased usage limits. Did Anthropic turn hostile on devs to conceal capacity issues? blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pulse-di...

Anthropic acquired and is shutting down Stainless, a startup also used by OpenAI and Meta to generate their SDKs. So, will OpenAI and Meta rewrite their SDK using AI agents? Unlikely. We covered why, and also Stainless alternatives in our deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-g...

GitHub’s reliability is less than one nine (below 90%), and getting worse. GitHub’s leadership blames a ~3.5x increase in service load over the last two years for the degradation – or it might be self-inflicted. We look closer in this week’s bonus issue: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pulse-ai...

Token spend is out of control inside many (most?) tech companies. We gathered first-hand data from 15 companies on what is happening, and what they are doing about it. The two strategies are either "let it rip" or "curb spending, NOW" newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-...

This week's deepdive hit a nerve. It's true: there are more and more signs that AI agents help increase *output* but they result in worse *quality.* Unless something changes. And something needs to change, clearly! The deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-age...

Steve Yegge on his 8 levels of "AI-proficiency" for software engineers: From level 6, you're working with multiple agents, at level 7 you run agent orchestrators, and at 8, run factories. On YouTube: youtu.be/aFsAOu2bgFk Other platforms: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-ides-...

All main-stage talks from The Pragmatic Summit are out. Check them out: - Data vs hype with AI (with Laura Tacho) - How AI is reshaping software (with OpenAI) - Building world-class engineering orgs (with GitHub's ex CEO and Atlassian's CTO) Watch: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-future...

How do companies decide which AI coding tool and AI code review tool to use across the company? Today's deepdive goes into what 10 different companies - including Wealthsimple and WeTravel - did jus this. This is how WeTravel did it: Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-...

Craft Docs (a 5-year old startup) resisted the urge to jump on the AI bandwagon for the sake of it. They kept experimenting on the side instead. In Jan, they went all in. Built custom tooling (+ open sourced it) and share exactly how they work. Full newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-first-m...

Happy Holidays! In the final issue of the year, we look back on the year, with most-read articles, favorites, interesting podcast episodes, and trends across the tech industry for 2025. Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragma...

Interesting AI coding feature rolled out at Meta called "trajectories." On diffs, devs can see the prompts used to generate it (if it was AI-generated.) Rolled out to everyone. Given more code is generated prompting: interesting experiment! Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-...

Today's deepdive is a rare behind-the-scenes on how AWS handles an outage. Details from October's outage from Senior Principal Engineer, Gavin McCullagh, who was part of the crew resolving this outage. Plus details on how incidents are handled at AWS: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-aws-de...

A new book by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda is out: Frictionless. We asked Nicole how this book relates to DORA and SPACE - frameworks on DevEx that she created. Her response: More on writing the book, and two full chapters from Frictionless: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/frictionle...

It's that time of the year... code freezes / deployment freezes will start at lots of companies. A deepdive on approaches at Big Tech; the upsides; downsides; and companies that don't do this at all: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/code-freezes

The book 'Frictionless' by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda is out - read two full chapters and the story behind (re)writing this book in today"s issue: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/frictionle...

We talked with 40+ devs building MCP servers to figure out the on-the-ground realities of building and using MCP - the good and the bad) Some surprising findings: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/mcp-deepdive

Impact-driven promotions almost always (eventually) lead to promotion-driven development. Little wonder it's so widespread throughout Big Tech and larger companies. Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/preparing-...

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The Pragmatic Engineer Black Friday deal is live! Get a year-long subscription for $120 (instead of $150). A sub gives you access to all deepdives, The Pulse, and resources for software engineers and eng managers. Available till Monday. Get it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/0ea36188

45+ gift ideas and inspiration for the tech workers in your life (and maybe yourself) this holiday season: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/copy-holid...

What caused the AWS outage that felt like it took down half the internet on Monday? It started with a race condition in DynamoDB's DNS propagation, which ended up setting the dynamod.us-east-1.amazonaws.com DNS to empty. A deepdive and more details: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/aws-outage-u...

How does the Claude Code team build Claude code? Today's deepdive covers this. An interesting take from them: "Mockups feel like a thing of the past when you can build 5-10 working prototypes per day." The full article: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude...

How do tech companies measure the impact of AI on software dev? Here's how GitHub, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, Monzo, Atlassian, Adyen, Booking and Grammarly do it: More details on 9 other companies+trends in today's deepdive w @lauratacho.com at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-tech-c...

With the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role trending in discussions, here's our deepdive from a month ago in @pragmaticengineer.com on the origins of the role, how it looks at Palantir, OpenAI and Ramp, and why the role is so hot *now*: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/forward-de...

State of the software engineering job market in 2025: Big Tech has started to hire more software engineers. Also: tenure at Big Tech has dramatically increased since the 2023 layoffs (surprising!) A lot more details in today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-t...

Interesting findings in The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: - JIRA: the single-most mentioned tool.. mentioned more than any language/IDE/other - Even though the survey was taken by developers, Figma is more used than Kubernetes or Cursor (!) Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragma...

How do you build a great SDK? @quentin.pradet.me has been building and maintaining SDKs for a decade. In today's deepdive he walks through the most common approaches in the industry. Surprise: LLMs not a great fit for this kind of work! Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-g...

OpenAI's biggest-ever launch happened on 25 March: releasing ChatGPT Images. 100M new users in the first week 700M images generated in 7 days 1M new users/hour signing up at peek The eng team told us how exactly they pulled it off. All the details: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/chatgpt-im...

What is it like to build humanoid robots, as a software engineer? Today's deepdive goes into the software side of this industry-but before we do, we need to talk about hardware. With Sandor Felber, formerly Humanoid Robot Learning Researcher at MIT: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/humanoid-r...

The Pragmatic Engineer crossed one million subscribers! This is an improbable milestone. Today's deepdive covers the history behind it, who reads the publication, why it might be so popular, and what's next: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/one-million

Tech interviews feel like they are at inflection point: a lot of approaches and interview types that worked fine until now seem to be breaking down. Could we be heading back to pre-pandemic hiring practices? Today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tech-hirin...

What is the MCP Protocol, and why is it spreading so rapidly across IDEs, with all major ones having added support (Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, Zed, Cline and Neovim)? Today's deepdive goes into just this: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/mcp

Today's free deepdive is about the reality of tech interviews (and tech interviewing) in 2025. By Evan King and Stefan Mai (formerly at Meta, currently cofounders at Hello Interview, and getting a good pulse of the current market thanks to this): newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-realit...

Have you been hearing how "AI will replace software engineers"? Is it true? We talked with software engineers who not only are not "replaced" but picked up a new skillset working with LLMs. Building amazing things. A deepdive... into reality: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-enginee...

We want to capture an accurate snapshot of software engineering, today – and need your help! Tell us about your tech stack and get early access to the final report, plus extra analysis Please help out by taking this 5-15 minute survey: forms.gle/hoK7TtaH1hx3...

Imagine interviewing a candidate who looks like a very strong coder. Almost extending an offer. But turns out, the candidate is a deepfake. This actually happened with a startup called Vidoc Security - twice! Deepdive with all the details: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-fakers