Rob Bowley

Claude Code telling you you've nearly reached your session limit is a good reminder it's time to log off for a Friday

How I Dropped Our Production Database and Now Pay 10% More for AWS I’m working on expanding the AI Shipping Labs website and wanted to migrate its current version from static GitHub Pages to AWS.

Eek

A Terraform command executed by an AI agent (Claude Code) wiped the production infrastructure behind the DataTalks.Club course platform.

A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines A prompt injection in a GitHub issue triggered a chain reaction that ended with 4,000 developers getting OpenClaw installed without consent. The attack composes well-understood vulnerabilities into something new: one AI tool bootstrapping another.

A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4k Developer Machines
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Summary of HN discussion 🧵👇

This has been inevitable since Oracle signed the deal with OpenAI for $300B of AI services over 5 years.

Oracle needs to build out data centers to handle the capacity but banks don’t think OpenAI will follow through so getting loans has been hard.

Massive cost cutting being the inevitable plan B.

How Many People Does It Take to Kill a ChatGPT? Let's run the numbers on the QuitGPT phenomenon

I don't know how OpenAI come back from this. In part, because (at least in my experience) Claude is just currently way better than ChatGPT, which ppl will find out when they switched

the useful architecture is structured financial analysis with traditional techniques, with the LLM acting more as the interface and coordinator (see e.g. Amplitude's GenAI agent as an example)

What's interesting is the conversational layer - helping a citizen explain their situation, asking clarifying questions, but handing off to e.g. an api to make the structured queries

Those parts are typically done with rules and pattern detection over transactions, and tend to be very reliable. So I’m not sure the financial analysis step is really where GenAI adds the most value here.

once you’re using Open Banking APIs the data is already structured. A lot of what the agent is doing - detecting income, recurring payments, benefits etc - is something fintech systems have handled for years.

Amplifying — AI Benchmark Research Systematic analysis of how AI systems make decisions — from product recommendations to developer tool choices.

"The biggest finding: agents build, not buy. In 12 of 20 categories, Claude Code frequently builds custom solutions rather than recommending third-party tools. Custom/DIY implementations account for 12% of all primary picks (252 out of 2,073), making it the single most common “recommendation.”"

Github Downfall Track Github's incidents and downtime

Related and interesting = GitHub has been getting less stable over the last 12 months.

Could be for many reasons of course, not just GenAI assisted dev (have been going through lots of org change could be one reason)

githubdownfall.com

Anthropic do appear to be corroborating the studies showing you can ship faster with GenAI coding, but at the cost of reliability.

Error message on ChatGPT: "Gateway time-out The web server reported a gateway time-out error. Ray ID: 9d6045cffa57054f Your IP address: 188.127.83.3 Error reference number: 504 Cloudflare Location: London"

ChatGPT down as well??

Claude Status page showing things are currently broken

Claude is down is the new GitHub is down

If the news wasn't already depressing enough, one of my cats got run over this weekend.

RIP Gengis Bowley 💔🐈

Ouch. Harsh, but...

Case in point.

Good software engineers and good SWE teams understand and care about user needs ffs.

What do you think we all did before product mgmt as a discipline came along?

Prob need to upgrade

I've heard a few people say this. I need to give it a go

What happened in late 2021?

Couch Investor🛋️ on X: "Jack, you ran Twitter into the ground, and Elon's FIRST move was to cut ~80% of the employees. In 2021, you spent $300M on Tidal. The company owned by your friend Jay Z. In 2023, you put an absolute cap of 12,000 employees at $XYZ. In 2025, you spent ~$68M on an employee https://t.co/P8B7pbbPPp" / X Jack, you ran Twitter into the ground, and Elon's FIRST move was to cut ~80% of the employees. In 2021, you spent $300M on Tidal. The company owned by your friend Jay Z. In 2023, you put an absolute cap of 12,000 employees at $XYZ. In 2025, you spent ~$68M on an employee https://t.co/P8B7pbbPPp

I'm very much enjoying Jack Dorsey getting absolutely rinsed on X today. Exemplo:

x.com/Couch_Invest...

One thing bugging me on our new found TDD evangelists - multiple calling it "Red/green TDD".

Where is the refactor step? It's not TDD without the refactor step. It's ceremony without the substance.

@emollick post on X Two things: 1) Given that effective AI tools are very new, and we have little sense of how to organize work around them, it is hard to imagine a firm-wide sudden 50% efficiency gain 2) CEOs with vision who hired well should also use AI for expansion & augmentation, not decimation

Even the usual AI Optimists are skeptical

Post from @BullTheoryio on X This is CRAZY. It turns out Jack Dorsey's Block $XYZ spent $68 million on a single party in September 2025, roughly the annual payroll for 200 employees at $340,000 each. Then 5 months later, he laid off 4,000 people (40% of the company's workforce), citing AI and "intelligence tools" as a reason. Many people are speculating the real reason is poor planning and overspending, not AI.

Claude Code you are so buggy. Crashing constantly at the moment for me...

Block Layoffs Ignite Online Firestorm: AI Disruption Or Just Plain Bad Management? While Jack Dorsey defends the move to lay off people as a necessity of the current times, users on Stocktwits and X are raising concerns about the job cuts.

Re the Block layoffs, and being careful not just to accept the narrative being fed to investors and media

It's like we're going to speed run re-learning the last ~25 years of software development best practices.

As I keep saying, we're going to learn the hard way...

Also looking forward to everyone learning abiut Behaviour-Driven Development next 🤯

Which has also been around for ~20 years. I remember Gojko Adzic introducing us to Specification by Example at Skillsmatter events in London