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Rob Sutter

@robsutter.dev
651 followers 333 following 114 posts

Building software engineering teams and coaching them to peak performance.

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Rob Sutter @robsutter.dev · 7h
> MongoDB is hiring a Senior Software Engineer on Benchmarking in Mexico. And I guess probably a CEO?
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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 25/09/2026
I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility
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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
AP Stylebook warns against anthropomorphizing AI systems: “Avoid language that gives them human characteristics… Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.”
APStylebook @APStylebook
X.com
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
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Rob Sutter @robsutter.dev · 22/09/2026
Influencers stop using "Pareto" challenge (difficulty: impossible)
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Adam Becker @adambecker.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
@aoc.bsky.social just put out a great statement on AI. Refreshing to see a major politician on the left nail this. "Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity. But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves." 🎯
Charles,

Last weekend, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the largest Al companies in the world, publicly asked his industry to slow down Al development.

Shortly after, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAl, followed suit. Then Elon Musk.

This all came days after an Anthropic researcher quit, citing his belief that this technology could wipe out humanity and that Al companies are "gambling with our lives."

For years, people have warned that generative Al could slip out of our direct control.

Those safety concerns must be taken seriously.

And this is why I have advocated for strict safety standards on how Al is built and deployed, public oversight over this technology, and using existing laws to hold these companies accountable when they cause harm.

But I want to draw your attention to another reality: Right now, the U.S. economy and our financial futures are riding on Silicon Valley's bet that Al will soon be immensely profitable and pay off. And that bet isn't looking good.

The formula for a profitable business isn't complicated: make more money than you spend. But the biggest Al companies aren't doing that. They are spending hundreds of billions per year on data centers, chips, and other costs while their ability to make revenues that exceed their already-immense sunk costs are unclear. Experts estimate that these Al companies will require another $600 billion of debt just to financethemselves in 2026 alone. That is more than the entire budgets of the U.S. Departments of Justice, Transportation, & Education combined.
Meanwhile, despite almost every single one of these companies not turning a profit & having sunk billions of investor dollars in development of data centers & other infrastructure, Al companies are also on a spending spree of hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying & dark money in our elections.
It would be one thing if we were discussing a few private companies with a poor business model. But last year, virtually all stock market gains - 80% - rested entirely on just a handful of Al companies.
That tells us two things:
1. Nearly the entire U.S. economy outside the Al industry is relatively stagnating and faring poorly & the gains from these few companies are disguising it; &
2. Millions of people's retirements - including their pensions, 401ks, & investments - are potentially exposed to this risk.
That's why these Al companies' dubious financial positions matter to working people.
These companies argue that debt is necessary. They'll tell you that building transformative technologies requires upfront capital, & that massive borrowing today will pay off in generating unprecedented prosperity tomorrow.
But this is not the typical debt that startups take on while they build out a company. We are talking about billions going on trillions of dollars leveraged with no indication that these companies will be able to recoup these funds profitably. And they are increasingly looking to the government as their source of cash.
In an effort to hide their debt, tech companies have been relying on "circular financing" where tech giants like Google, Amazon, & Microsoft give billions to Al startups like OpenAl & Anthropic, only for those startups to hand that money right back to buy Al processing power.
In other words, these Al companies are luring in new investors by making it look like their financials are healthier than they really are.What's even worse is that retirement & pension funds are key to supporting this illusion.
When the Al companies issue bonds to raise more money, your pension funds & retirement accounts are some of the biggest buyers. When Musk's Al business went public, it became part of index funds where millions of Americans invest our savings. Many Americans don't even know that their retirement investments are tied up in these companies at all.
From Big Tech's perspective, that's a feature, not a bug. By tying our futures to their reckless gambling, Al billionaires are trying to make themselves too big to fail. They think they can take such dangerous risks because we will bail them out if things go wrong.
Sound familiar? This scene is dangerously reminiscent of the rampant speculation, corruption, & broken incentives leading up to the 2008 financial crisis that plunged millions of working class Americans into financial chaos that we never fully recovered from.
It is no accident that these warnings from Altman & Amodei come months-if not weeks-before these companies were meant to go public.
When companies go public, they have to be more transparent about how they are doing financially. And after a waiting period, they typically have to let private investors-like their own employees-sell their shares.
The New York Times recently confirmed that OpenAl has postponed going public for this very reason. They are in no rush for the truth about their finances to come out.
But the moment these oligarchs began to seek our public tax dollars & public contracts while exposing their companies to public pension funds & investments, they opened themselves to public accountability & scrutiny.
Silicon Valley billionaires have rigged the game & are attempting to shift their financial risk to working people: If they're right about Al's potential, they reap the profits. If they're wrong & the bubble bursts, they are setting up the American people to pick up the tab.
Heads, they win; tails, we lose.We can stop this, and we shouldn't play their game. Together we can address both the economic and safety threats of unrestricted Al development and prevent financial chaos and stabilize market risk.

We must make it clear now that should the Al bubble pop, Congress should not bail out Big Tech.

And across our federal agencies, we have the authorities and tools to hold Al companies and their leaders accountable for releasing dangerous, unvetted, and defective products. We must not wait.

Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity.

But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves.

It's time we hold them accountable.

Thank you for reading.

In solidarity,

Alexandria
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
There have always been humans who thought: 1) The world will end soon 2) It will happen in a cool, exciting way 3) It’ll happen to me personally 4) I’ll be a martyred prophet, or a warlord, or otherwise special 5) People who don’t see this are lesser “Sexy apocalypse” is a great phrase for that
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Killed by Google @killedbygoogle.com · 16/09/2026
For my next trick, I’d like to be employed again. :) 📍 Located in SF. 💼 I lead technical customer-facing teams inside GTM and/or Support in the dev tools space. 📋 prev: Clerk, Vercel bs: @codyogden.com
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Cloudflare @cloudflare.social · 15/09/2026
You can now scope access to individual Workers and assign narrower Developer Platform roles, so teammates, CI tokens, and agents get only the access they need to debug, deploy, or monitor safely. cfl.re/4xNVOqO
blog.cloudflare.com
Give every teammate and agent the right level of access to your Workers
Now, you can give a teammate or agent access to a specific Worker, so that they can only make changes to that application and no other resources in your account.
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rob pike @robpike.io · 21/08/2026
A lovely analysis of what makes human-made things last. www.experimental-history.com/p/i-like-em-...
experimental-history.com
I like 'em thick
OR: an apology to my English teachers
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jj skolnik @supremenothing.myatproto.social · 11/08/2026
what if i do not want to be optimized. what if i want to make mistakes because that’s how you learn; what if i want to do nothing sometimes, what if i want a world that is weird and challenging and has mysteries left to reveal. what if i like taking the long way
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Rob Sutter @robsutter.dev · 03/08/2026
Can’t believe Natalie Merchant was a prophet all along.
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Rob Sutter @robsutter.dev · 29/07/2026
A/B testing considered harmful.
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JP @jpbrammer.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
I wrote about "performative reading," resentment, and how tech CEOs managed to make us so incurious, to their great benefit johnpaulbrammer.substack.com/p/on-perform...
johnpaulbrammer.substack.com
On Performative Reading
Language, resentment, magic, and morals.
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Jon of The North @krauza.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
You're going to get left behind if you don't use Al." Leave me then. Leave me with my critical thinking skills, my ability to read and write long- form, and books without needing Al summaries.
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Cloudflare @cloudflare.social · 06/07/2026
We are launching Workers Cache, a regionally tiered cache that sits directly in front of your Worker entrypoints. Infinitely composable, configured via standard HTTP headers. cfl.re/4bo49YW
blog.cloudflare.com
Your Worker can now have its own cache in front of it
Today we are launching Workers Cache: a tiered cache that sits in front of your Worker, configured by a single line of Wrangler config and the same Cache-Control headers you already know.
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Tits McGee @scientits.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
‘Say yes and never do it’ Mel Brooks knew how to deal with the studios
You have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.

I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot. After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out.”That’s probably the most famous scene in the movie, the campfire scene.

I know. He said, “You can’t punch a horse.” I said, “You’ll never see it again.” I kept saying, “You’re absolutely right. It’s out!” Then, when he left, I crumpled up all his notes, and I tossed it in the wastepaper basket. And John Calley, who was running [production at] Warner Bros. at the time, said, “Good filing.” That was the end of it. You say yes, and you never do it.

That’s great advice for life.

It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.
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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Ford has rehired hundreds of senior engineers after replacing them with AI backfired and has cost the company billions of dollars. AI adoption is blamed for Ford being the most recalled automaker in the U.S. with 51 recalls covering over 11 million vehicles in the first half of 2026 alone.
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John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
"Broom the soup." A lot of centrists are freaking out right now, and people are both reading too much and too little into the DSA victories, but a metaphor from my career may be helpful here. 1/?
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Grady Booch @booch.com · 24/06/2026
The world of computing is and will remain far larger, more impactful, and far more vibrant than the narrow subdomain of genAI.
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Dr Urmila Chadayammuri @uchadaya.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
More than once I have heard techies in the EU lament that we are going to "lose the AI race". When I ask how that's measured, they say "Isn't it obvious?" No, it's not. Forcing the tech dev to slow down to consider the human and societal implications is a win. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good
Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers, studies show.
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DuckDuckGo @duckduckgo.com · 29/05/2026
Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our "No AI" search page have tripled…and they’re still rising! Want to make it your default on Chrome or Firefox? Grab our No-AI extensions and banish AI-assisted answers, chat, and AI images. (1/3)
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Patrick Stuart Sutcliffe @peaceandliberation.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
I can only speak as a trans ally, but what Steyer has done will (hopefully) change the dialogue on trans people (especially athletes). He’s addressing them as human beings, not as a problem to be solved. That’s amazing, but it’s depressing that it has taken this long.
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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
I think this is a key insight about the AI psychosis we are seeing exhibited by big tech CEOs. The further you are away from the work, the more you assume it’s trivial for Claude or ChatGPT to replace the worker.
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David Belson @dbelson.com · 08/05/2026
I was one of the 1100 impacted by yesterday's layoff at Cloudflare. Thankful that I had the opportunity to work on @radar.cloudflare.com over the past 4+ years, evolving it into a trusted industry resource. Would love to continue working with #Internet data in my next role...
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Richard Waite @waiterich.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
I used to be good at Computer. Now Computer thinks it is good at me. But it actually isn’t??????
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Rob Sutter @robsutter.dev · 28/04/2026
Anybody else heading to Girona this week?
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Rob Sutter @robsutter.dev · 17/04/2026
Announcing the private beta of Agent Memory, a managed service that extracts information from agent conversations and makes it available when it’s needed. Agent Memory allows agents to recall what matters, forget what doesn't, and get smarter over time. blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-...
blog.cloudflare.com
Agents that remember: introducing Agent Memory
Cloudflare Agent Memory is a managed service that gives AI agents persistent memory, allowing them to recall what matters, forget what doesn't, and get smarter over time.
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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 31/03/2026
Today is Trans Day of Visibility.
Trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people have always been here — from the hijra of India to the Diné nádleehi to the leaders who built the modern LGBTQIA+ movement here in New York.
Your existence is not up for debate. Your lives are not a political issue.
We're fighting for a city where every trans New Yorker can live openly, safely, and with joy.
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Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com · 13/02/2026
In incredible news, the European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly for "The Full Recognition Of Trans Women As Women." Even the center-right European People's Party voted for the declaration. It will form a foundation for their position at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Our latest.
erininthemorning.com
European Parliament Votes Overwhelmingly For "The Full Recognition Of Trans Women As Women"
The resolution, though nonbinding, is a significant shot at those who seek to erode transgender rights on the continent.
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Celso Martinho @celso.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Big developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/20...
developers.cloudflare.com
Workers are no longer limited to 1000 subrequests
Workers no longer have an explicit limit on subrequests per invocation, allowing for more fetch and service calls.
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Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
If you've run seaweedfs, versity, juicefs, beegfs, or rustfs—permissively-licensed s3-compatible storage systems— and are open to chatting about your experience, I'd like to chat with you for The Consensus.
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Cloudflare @cloudflare.social · 03/02/2026
Local Uploads on R2 reduces request duration for uploads by up to 75%. It writes object data to a nearby location and asynchronously copies it to your bucket, all while data is available immediately. cfl.re/3NQ4R8I
blog.cloudflare.com
Improve global upload performance with R2 Local Uploads
Today, we are launching Local Uploads for R2 in open beta. With Local Uploads enabled, object data is automatically written to a storage location close to the client first, then asynchronously copied to where the bucket lives.
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Jeffrey Lewis @armscontrolwonk.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
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Astro @astro.build · 16/01/2026
We are joining Cloudflare! astro.build/blog/joining...
astro.build
The Astro Technology Company joins Cloudflare | Astro
The Astro Technology Company is joining Cloudflare! Astro remains open-source, MIT-licensed, and platform-agnostic. With Cloudflare's support, we're focusing 100% on building the best framework for…
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Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 18/12/2025
Hey losers leave trans folks alone
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rmoff 🏃‍♂️🫖🥓 @rmoff.net · 16/12/2025
Ouch. people-work.io/blog/junior-...
When we neglect teaching hands-on work, we forfeit building expertise.

When we avoid pair-programming, we miss out on transmitting tacit knowledge.

When we don’t teach the art of a code review, we miss the opportunity to teach software architectural design.

When AI replaces junior engineering work and seniors have been excused from people development responsibilities, you get a missing generation.
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It's more of a bouncy palace. @mrmunchertoyou.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.
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Mitch Dyer @mitchyd.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
If only everyone could have predicted this www.thegamer.com/ea-generativ...
thegamer.com
EA's AI Game Development Tools Are Apparently So Bad That It's Costing More Money To Fix Their Mistakes
A new report suggests that EA's pivot to AI is just causing costly mistakes, and the developers hate it.
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Epi_lady (Amy) @epilady.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
For Gen X part of why watching the unapproved & unpermitted destruction of the #WhiteHouse is so hard is the symbolism. We watched the Berlin wall fall, & remember elation and excitement that democracy and freedom were winning. This demonstration symbolizes the fall of our democracy and freedoms.
Bulldozer tearing down the white house
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Jon Bois @jonbois.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
i see you're doing something online that you have effortlessly done 100,000 times. would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? would you like to use this ai tool? w
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 17/10/2025
Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!
anildash.com
The Majority AI View - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 17/10/2025
More than *anything* the people who actually know how technology works, who actually build things, wish that people would treat LLMs like every other technology, and be normal about them. Don't build a religion about them, don't force them on people, don't ignore the problems. Just be normal.
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Jenniferplusplus @jenniferplusplus.com · 11/10/2025
The appropriate historical analogy is radium, not the web. In this TED talk, I will
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The Oatmeal @theoatmeal.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Let’s talk about AI art. theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art
theoatmeal.com
A cartoonist's review of AI art - The Oatmeal
This is a comic about AI art.
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Oliver Gould @olix0r.net · 03/10/2025
nytimes.com
Opinion | What I Learned From My Days in Russia: Silicon Valley Needs to Start Speaking Out About Trump
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Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 01/10/2025
We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.
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Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 01/10/2025
Oh this is good
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Robin Berjon @robin.berjon.com · 01/10/2025
If you think this is US-only, it's not. If you think the GDPR protects you, it's doesn't. If you hadn't realised privacy is a national security and corporate espionage issue, it is. If you think politicians can't tackle this, they can. If you believe that tech or business need this, they don't.
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 08/09/2025
The idea that we have to "encourage responsible AI usage" is a core part of the inevitability narrative driving the institutional adoption that makes people think it's worth trying out. it contributes to the very problem it supposedly tries to solve. we can't let it go unchallenged.
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