Typical text exchange with my AI founder friends

I've managed fully remote engineering teams for ~7 years, from small teams to rapidly growing orgs spanning 10+ countries. I've developed some pretty strong opinions about what makes remote work actually work: 1. YOU MUST GET "THE TEAM" TOGETHER ONCE A QUARTER, NO EXCEPTIONS. The faster the team/company is growing, the more critical this is. If you follow no other piece of advice follow this one. Remote work is built on a foundation of trust which for most humans can only be built in person. Think about a person you know well who has extremely dry humor. Would you be able to detect that characteristic if you met them for the first time over SMS or slack? Bonds are built over dinner, a beer, an in person hackathon. And those bonds carry forward to the rest of the time spent remote. **for some definition of "the team" - can be a mix of immediate team, org, company-wide, all are useful at different cadences. 2. Managers must be pros and must be highly technical. Many non-technical managers rely on lazy half-ass signals like "who left the office last". As a remote manager you literally have no option other than to inspect the concrete outputs to understand what is going on. This tip is also very useful to non-remote teams 🙂 3. No juniors except for exception cases. Exceptional cases are obviously exceptional. Gotta build the muscle before you play on hard mode - for mere mortals at least. Don't expect someone to learn "how to remote" and "how to engineer" simultaneously. It is too much. 4. Establish a physical center of gravity, ideally 20-30% of staff. Company can still be fully remote and have "an office" where company events are held, some fraction of local employees cowork once a week even if on different teams. 5. Regardless of critical mass, all meetings must be remote first. None of this conference room with 10 people dialing into a zoom meeting with 3 other people nonsense. 100ms latency of conversation is real and you are at a disadvantage if you are trying to interject remotely into a room of in person attendees. 6. Hire managers into the critical mass (or who are willing to travel a lot). There will be lots of good reasons for the manager to make their way in on occasion (once a week, twice a month) to the home of critical mass for one reason or another 7. Onboard senior hires and leaders in person. I have seen new leaders, ICs, managers, design/pm/marketing leaders crash and burn over lack of building good relationships in the first 3 months. If you're bringing on a new leader for god's sake make sure they spend a few days in person with the other leaders they have to collaborate with. 8. Hire within a deliberate, manageable timezone range!!! This becomes more important the more varied the experience level is within your team. Is it possible with absolute engineering pros and remote veterans? Yes! But you need to ask yourself if your team is ready to coordinate work across Australia, UK, NYC, SF, Japan, and India timezones. Think hard about this one. My team is US west coast through Czech Republic. Teammates spanning every part of the US, Brazil, UK, Portugal, Denmark, and more. 8.a. Have a clearly established schedule for "time the whole team must be online". For us this is 8:30 - 10:00am Pacific, but many Europeans choose to work shifted schedules to have more overlap with their peers. I advertise this upfront in every hiring manager screen. Make expectations clear and let people decide. We're all adults and we're more likely to commit and make things work when we make a decision with complete information. 9. Onsite time is precious. Don't waste it on ordinary meetings. Use it for strategic conversations, solving hard problems together, hackathons, and high-bandwidth planning. This is where you build the relationships that make the next three months of remote work successful. For fuck's sake please do not fill a week making people stare at a projector while you read powerpoints!!! Take the advice or don't.

And he’s off

If I don’t make it back in one piece, @devm33 is in charge.

Crazy when you find a part of the planet where 24 inch rainbows are considered average

This week: swinging for giant bows in Igiugig AK. Brought my starlink so agents continue to work z24/7. Let’s just say I am very close to “bootstrapping the compiler”.

Used this workflow to rebuild a substantial GitHub product from scratch in 5 days. 800 commits, ~$15k in tokens. Nested orchestrator/worker pools. Strong models coordinate, cheap models implement, hard decisions escalate. Runs autonomously for days. gist.github.com/EvanBoyle/8c…

Me one calendar year into working on coding agents pondering the ratio of human : dog : agent years. IYKYK

Even AI pilled people forget to do this: once a month try to build something that you believe the model can't accomplish. You'll be surprised by how often you were wrong. Even the smartest people I know are struggling to invalidate their priors frequently enough.

Hydrafusion is more than an auto model router. It actually exceeds single model baseline for task completion and token efficiency on everything from simple to the most complex requests.

I haven’t filed an expense report by hand in months.

Back to the coding agent wars 🫡