Software/Performance Engineering & Security. Mechanical Sympathy Enthusiast.

Germany
Joined February 2010
Sven Taute retweeted
very important in companies. Keep the ones willing to "truth nuke" close. They are load bearing.
The reason it’s incredibly hard to break out of a “kind lie” doom loop is because the longer it’s gone on, the more unkindness is needed to get back on track. And the fact that you’re in this situation to begin with probably means your culture will hate that.
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A great example of what’s possible with modern hardware if you focus on solutions for your users instead of excuses. I still remember when Microsoft proudly improved the loading time for their glorified chat client from 22s to 9s…
We've improved our iOS loading time by 99.8% That’s 904 ms → 2 ms (p75)
The `try` tool from @tobi has been the biggest positive change to my local workflow in the past year. Nothing comes close. The day I installed and started using it was the last day I lost any of my experiments/plans/repos/docs. Highly recommended! github.com/tobi/try
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Sven Taute retweeted
Want to understand B-trees better? Try btree.app and bplustree.app. These are standalone sandboxes of the visuals I built for my "B-trees and database indexes" article. Helpful for learning B-tree insertion, search, and node splits.
Sven Taute retweeted
Lazygit is exceptionally good software. It's like software's greatest hits. Clear, quick, easy to command, drive-by-keyboard if you want, contrasty, glanceable, peacefully powerful, the list goes on. So impressed. github.com/jesseduffield/laz…
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There is a reason why most large companies are doomed. They value complexity more than anything else. People fabricate complexity to get recognized.
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Sven Taute retweeted
Geoffrey drops a new analogy for working with AI that I really like; you're the surgeon, the AI tools are your team of surgical assistants
A lot of people say AI will make us all "managers" or "editors"...but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view! Personally, I'm trying to code like a surgeon. A surgeon isn't a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at. My current goal with AI coding tools is to spend ~100% of my time doing stuff that matters. (As a UI prototyper, that mostly means tinkering with design concepts.) It turns out there are a LOT of secondary tasks which AI agents are now good enough to help out with. Some things I'm finding useful to hand off these days: - Before attempting a big task, write a guide to relevant areas of the codebase - Spike out an attempt at a big change. Often I won't use the result but I'll review it as a sketch of where to go - Fix typescript errors or bugs which have a clear specification - Write documentation about what I'm building I often find it useful to run these secondary tasks async in the background -- while I'm eating lunch, or even literally overnight! When I sit down for a work session, I want to feel like a surgeon walking into a prepped operating room. Everything is ready for me to do what I'm good at. --- Notably, there is a HUGE difference between how I use AI for secondary vs primary tasks. For the core design prototyping work, I still do a lot of coding by hand, and when I do use AI, I'm more careful and in the details. I need fast feedback loops and good visibility. (eg, I like Cursor tab-complete here) Whereas for secondary tasks, I'm much much looser with it, happy to let an agent churn for hours in the background. The ability to get the job done eventually is the most important thing; speed and visibility matter less. Claude Code has been my go-to for long unsupervised sessions but Codex CLI is becoming a strong contender there too, possibly my new favorite. These are *very* different work patterns! Reminds me of @karpathy's "autonomy slider" concept. It's dangerous to conflate different parts of the autonomy spectrum -- the tools and mindset that are needed vary quite a lot. --- The "software surgeon" concept is a very old idea -- Fred Brooks attributes it to Harlan Mills in his 1975 classic "The Mythical Man-Month". He talks about a "chief programmer" who is supported by various staff including a "copilot" and various administrators. OK, so there is a super obvious angle here, that "AI has now made this approach economically viable where it wasn't before", yes yes... But I am also noticing a more subtle thing at play, something to do with status hierarchies. A lot of the "secondary" tasks are "grunt work", not the most intellectually fulfilling or creative part of the work. I have a strong preference for teams where everyone shares the grunt work; I hate the idea of giving all the grunt work to some lower-status members of the team. Yes, junior members will often have more grunt work, but they should also be given many interesting tasks to help them grow. With AI this concern completely disappears! Now I can happily delegate pure grunt work. And the 24/7 availability is a big deal. I would never call a human intern at 11pm and tell them to have a research report on some code ready by 7am... but here I am, commanding my agent to do just that! --- Finally I'll mention a couple thoughts on how this approach to work intersects with my employer, @NotionHQ First, as an employee, I find it incredibly valuable right now to work at a place that is bullish on AI coding tools. Having support for heavy use of AI coding tools, and a codebase that's well setup for it, is enabling serious productivity gains for me -- *especially* as a newcomer to a big codebase. Secondly, as a product -- in a sense I would say we are trying to bring this way of working to a broader group of knowledge workers beyond programmers. When I think about how that will play out, I like the mental model of enabling everyone to "work like a surgeon". The goal isn't to delegate your core work, it's to identify and delegate the secondary grunt work tasks, so you can focus on the main thing that matters.
Sven Taute retweeted
dbpill (the Postgres proxy that automates index optimization) is now open source: github.com/mayfer/dbpill enjoy
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Sven Taute retweeted
The externalization of Google's engineering culture has led to incredible amounts of complexity spread across the industry.
Sven Taute retweeted
Replying to @TanelPoder
Neat work, as far as explains go I love DuckDB's explains - both the console graph, as well as the web tool (db.cs.uni-tuebingen.de) - esp. the visual cues for slow operations or these with large resultsets.
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SierraDB: A Distributed Event Store Built in Rust tqwewe.com/blog/building-sie…
Sven Taute retweeted
Whoa, zero-click remote exploit in WhatsApp being demonstrated at Pwn2Own!
OMG.. whatsapp 0c in pwn2own
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Sven Taute retweeted
Until ~2015, GitHub Pages hosted over 2 million websites on 2 servers with a multi-million-line nginx.conf, edited and reloaded per deploy. This worked incredibly well, with github.io ranking as the 140th most visited domain on the web at the time.
Sven Taute retweeted
Some reactions to my post are "wow, I'll never use Ghostty since you use AI." That's fine, I really don't care. But my friends, if you plan on avoiding all software that had any AI assistance in its dev, I have really bad news for you about the general software ecosystem.
Sven Taute retweeted
After being kind to your database, please also be kind to your users and don't vomit ugly uuids all over them unkey.com/blog/uuid-ux
Thinking about using UUIDs as primary keys? Read this first. In short, random UUIDs can negatively impact database performance with page splits, 4-9x storage overhead, and slower inserts. Use v7 or consider alternatives like BIGINT or NanoIDs. planetscale.com/blog/the-pro…
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Sven Taute retweeted
So much corporate red tape can be traced to a single anecdote where someone fucked up and their manager didn't have the balls to tell them directly. So they made a policy instead. Don't be that coward. Just tell Ben.
Sven Taute retweeted
💥 Wiz Research has uncovered a critical Redis vulnerability that's been hiding for 13 years We found RediShell (CVE-2025-49844): an RCE bug in Redis that affects every version of Redis out there. It's rated CVSS 10 - the highest severity possible. The vulnerability lets attackers send a malicious Lua script, escape the sandbox, and execute code on the host. About 330,000 Redis instances are exposed to the internet right now. 60,000 have no authentication. Over 75% of cloud environments are running Redis. Redis released a patch this weekend and we responsibly disclosed everything upon discovery. Huge thanks to the Redis team for their fast response and collaboration ❤️ If you're running Redis: update immediately. Our blog has the full technical breakdown and security recommendations >> wiz.io/blog/wiz-research-red…