Product/Design/Code
Washington State
Joined May 2007
- Tweets97
- Following57
- Followers507
- Likes2K
Bryan Powell retweeted
Beware people obsessed with outcomes instead of building outcome machines. Its worse than ever with AI, but these people existed before. Short term results above all else, etc. Don't fall into the trap. Invest in building strong fundamentals, invisible supports, and outcomes flow like water. An outcome machine.
zed is the the most disappointing missed opportunity of the agentic era (so far). I went from using it all day to using it never. the entire time it's had such a clear path to becoming *the* tool for this moment but they are chasing rather than leading :(
Bryan Powell retweeted
Worries that software developer jobs are going away are backwards. There is SO MUCH software to build right now, that previously wasn't possible (uses AI directly) or wasn't cost-effective (too niche). We're going to have more developers, and orders of magnitude more software.
Can someone @CloudflareDev vibe code a solution to this bug in container state management? I’ve been trying to get it solved for two months 😅 github.com/bryanp/cloudflare…
Bryan Powell retweeted
Fan of the “SaaS is dead” takes.
Please keep posting these and hammering my public competitors & making the category uninvestable.
(While we keep building capabilities and signing customers)
Bryan Powell retweeted
Taste has always mattered.
It's comical that all the sudden it matters.
ALWAYS.
Bryan Powell retweeted
everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code
here's what things actually look like
- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping
- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life
- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend
- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon
- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real
- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills
"haven't written a single line of code" is a poor proxy for improved outcomes. speed to code is the bottleneck 15% of the time. outsized returns come from applying ai to the other 85% of the problem
Love seeing how Spotify is shipping with Claude Code.
Their best developers haven't written a single line of code since December, they fix bugs from their phones, and they shipped 50+ features from Slack during morning commutes
techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/sp…
Bryan Powell retweeted
What I like about the @FastCompany piece featuring @karrisaarinen is that it's a reminder that you can choose your own constraints and rhythm. And if you’re right, the results compound. You just need people who care about the work, the space to do it well, and the courage not to copy everyone else. fastcompany.com/91445544/the…
Bryan Powell retweeted
A lot of people build startups to win the lottery instead of building the thing they'd build if they’d already won.
The companies I'm most drawn to are ones that founders build as machines to do the stuff they want to do with other people who do, too.
notboring.co/p/the-company-a…
Bryan Powell retweeted
The idea that we will automate work by building artificial versions of ourselves to do exactly the things we were previously doing, rather than redesigning our old workflows to make the most out of existing automation technology, has a distinct “mechanical horse” flavor
Bryan Powell retweeted
Look, say what you will about it, but right click editing a PHP file in an FTP client with upload-on-save is still the tightest and fastest feedback loop I've ever had in my life. We actually don't know how to do this anymore as an industry.
Bryan Powell retweeted
Why Experienced Founders Need Slow Conviction Over Fast Momentum...
Too many great founders ask ‘can I start this?’ when the important question is ‘should i?’.
Incorporating and raising capital is at least a 3 year commitment, even if you realize you are wrong fast.
When you think about the salary and options you’re walking from, you are making a SERIOUS investment. The difference between ‘can i’ and ‘should i’ is the whole ballgame.
Bryan Powell retweeted
you're laughing at zuck's demo but he innovated more than tim cook in the last 5 years
Folks are quick to say you probably don’t need a vector db because {insert-current-db} has rudimentary vector support, but honestly just use a vector db. Bolted on support in postgres or whatever else will fall over at any scale. Completely different workloads.
zed.dev is so, so good. I've used bbedit, coda, vim, textmate, sublime text, and probably a half dozen others I'm forgetting. Zed is the first that consistently works exactly how I think without tons of tweaking.
