My Best Losing Bet

Nothing focused him more than a bet. A friend who interviewed with him shortly before Halloween had made a giant squid costume. “Dude, …

AI and Individual Contributors

How is the day-to-day experience of the individual contributor changing with the adoption of AI tooling? The tool capabilities remain …

A Bike Shifting Heuristic

My bicycle is a 24-speed model, with three front sprockets and eight rear sprockets. What’s a good shifting pattern to apply when …

In Search of Ignorance

Build to Buy

In our May 2025 meeting the Austin CTO Club took on the theme of “Build versus Buy”. Much of the discussion centered around the …

A Pianist's Scales

Tyler Cowen will never have the opportunity to ask me his question “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist …

Aider First Impressions

One trend among AI-enabled development tools is tight integration with an IDE. A popular example is Cursor. If you already use a similar IDE …

Training Data Shortages

A common view holds that the human-generated data set for training LLM models has been exhausted. All of the accessible digital data have …

Austin CTO Club

In June of 2025 the Austin CTO Club celebrates its one-year anniversary! That means it’s time to share how we got here and what …

Necessity and Luxury

Someone once asked me “What used to be a necessity that is now a luxury?” Some variations of this question make the rounds, such …