CEO & Founder @JoinTerminal | AI Services, AI Hiring, AI Training, powered by our global talent engine.
California, USA
Joined July 2008
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My recent piece explores how our kids are interacting with AI and what will happen when the cost of finding answers approaches zero.
It's an unsurprising wake-up moment when @ChatGPT is down and how much of your work efficiency stalls.
The first issue of my newsletter is here, exploring how artificial intelligence is changing the economics of software.
Still to this day, there is no more dominant shot in tennis than Sampras's flying overhead.
youtube.com/shorts/1xmMzcWgT… via @YouTube
Check out my latest article: The Top 5 Startup Lessons Hidden Inside Roland Garros linkedin.com/pulse/top-5-sta… via @LinkedIn
The AI Hiring Paradox:
More candidates will be available.
Fewer candidates will be highly desirable.
AI is splitting the market into two groups:
People who have rebuilt how they work around AI.
People still operating the way they did a year ago.
The AI-native group brings systems, workflows, and habits that raise the output of everyone around them. They change how teams build, ship, validate, and operate.
That’s the paradox.
Availability will rise.
Desirability will concentrate.
The market will be highly competitive while many candidates are available but are being sidelined.
For those not watching: LA mayor’s race is the blueprint for every campaign that comes next.
This is the first truly AI-native political race.
Fictional ai generated videos that feel real. Supporter-generated narratives that move faster than campaigns can react. Candidates turned into characters.
From 2010 to 2025, the “social media candidates” won.
In 2026 and beyond, the “AI candidates” will win.
The campaigns that understand this first will define reality before their opponents can respond.
LA is the future. Get ready for the midterms 🍿
There is an inherent conflict in OpenAI and Anthropic building their own deployment teams.
Enterprise AI adoption depends heavily on implementation, so the move makes sense.
But model companies are not neutral advisors.
Their incentive is to drive usage of their own models.
The right answer for most enterprises will be multi-model, workflow-specific, and cost-aware:
Claude where Claude is strongest.
OpenAI where OpenAI is strongest.
Open source where cost/control matter.
No LLM where software or rules are enough.
I highly doubt these companies will consistently prioritize what is best for customers when it comes at the expense of their own model adoption.
Dylan Serota retweeted
OpenClaw is the fastest-growing open source project, but there are no stories of running it safely in production at scale. As we started deploying agents internally at @brexHQ, we couldn’t stop thinking about this question.
Agents work, but nobody wants to give them real credentials. Instead of waiting for a solution to emerge, we decided to try a novel approach: using LLMs to judge the network traffic of an AI agent.
Today we’re announcing CrabTrap, an open-source proxy that intercepts every outbound request and blocks risky activity using LLMs, before it ever hits an external API. The results are promising; we believe it’s a meaningful step forward in the security of agent harnesses in production environments.
Try it out today.
(As a side note, it was really fun to work personally on a real systems problem again. And btw, if you want to work at a place where the CEO is building proxies at night, we’re hiring!)
🚀 Launch Day 🚀
Software delivery is now in the AI-native era.
Writing code = commoditized.
The new edge is agentic orchestration.
That changes how you interview and who you hire.
And that's why Terminal just launched the first AI Fluency Standard for hiring.
Watch below 👇
Me: So how’s AI impacting your teams?
CTO 1: It’s helping.
CTO 2: It’s exposing.
CTO 3: It’s like giving a chainsaw to a toddler.
CTO 4: Just pass the wine.
Terminal's CEO hosts a monthly dinner with CTOs. Here's what he's heard about AI's impact on tech jobs. trib.al/QPV47UJ
Dylan Serota retweeted
Terminal's CEO hosts a monthly dinner with CTOs. Here's what he's heard about AI's impact on tech jobs. trib.al/QPV47UJ
Loved sitting down with @JTLonsdale to talk all about what we're building at Terminal, current state of engineering hiring, and the opportunity of global talent.
thanks for having me on!
How is AI augmenting software engineers? Will it replace or commoditize certain roles?
@JTLonsdale sits down with @dserota, co-founder & CEO of @JoinTerminal, to talk tech hiring trends & the global competition for talent.
Dylan Serota retweeted
Got to sit down for Episode 11 of @Shore_Stories with @dserota, CEO and Co-founder of @JoinTerminal - a platform for hiring engineers remotely.
We covered a lot of ground in recruiting trends, and specifically about LatAm.
Here are some interesting takeaways. 👇
take a note on how to handle high horse public criticism with poise 👏
Today I got called out by the legendary @garrytan for some unfortunate bugs he’s been experiencing in Frame. Oof, he was right.
Because of that, I decided it’s time to let you all in on a big secret. If you’ve been observing Frame.io from the outside, you may have noticed our product updates have slowed down and have wondered what’s been going on.
I’ve witnessed this myself with other products I’ve been a customer of. A once innovative company you love seems to quietly fade off. It often means they’ve lost their steam or frankly stopped caring. Is that what’s happening to the Frame product? Hell to the no!
Secretly, internally, we’ve had a roaring engine of innovation and we’re building the BEST stuff in the 8 year history of Frame. If you could walk inside the virtual Frame office, you’d feel the heat immediately because the team has been COOKING.
For the past 3 years we’ve been working on a brand new version of Frame.io, truly redesigned from the ground up. It’s the most important work of my professional life and we plan on sharing it with all of you sometime early next year.
We didn’t think it would take this long but alas, here we are.
We’ve set insane goals for ourselves on not only the product features we’re delivering but also around product craft, quality, and reliability. When it comes to truly delightful products, we’re striving to set a new bar for the industry.
I love how products like @linear and @arcinternet are continuing to drive up our expectations of great software and we fully expect the next version of Frame to to live amongst them.
Because we’ve been dedicating SO much time and energy into the new version of our product, I acknowledge it’s led to an increase in bugs of our existing product.
We have a swat team working to reduce some of those pesky bugs and ultimately I’m confident this will all be worth it. Today, we’re smack in the messy middle.
As I write this message, we have hundreds of designers, engineers, and product people who are tirelessly working to bring this mission to life. Huge shoutout to all the Frame team who are reading this.
I also have to say, our colleagues at Adobe have been SO supportive. What an incredible company to be a part of. There’s a lot of exciting work we’re doing with Frame, across Adobe Creative Cloud.
In many ways, I think Frame was a pioneer in high quality creative software on the web and I have to tell you, the new frame is fucking awesome.
To all the old and new Frame supporters out there, we’ve been building this new version for you. Thank you 🤍🤍
I'm putting together an upcoming webinar for talent execs from mid-late stage tech startups. Here is my outline so far - what else should I add/remove/adjust?
And like if you want to an invite/copy of recording.
Top Global Hiring Trends: Data and Insights from Terminal
1. Snapshot on macro hiring data
- Where are we in the hiring cycle, what type of hiring is heating up, where are the biggest gaps in labor force (tech related)
2. AI's impact on technical hiring
- Does AI really replace the need for as many developers in headcount plans?
- How do technical assessments change in post GPT world?
- Where can AI have the most impact in the hiring processes and what are the best tools out there?
- Where in the world is the best AI talent?
3. Terminal's insight - Contract-to-hire Takeover
- Global paradigm on contract-to-hire models
- Economic risk adjustment / RIF hangover
4. Status of Remote vs. Hybrid vs. Distributed vs. In-person
- What evidence have we seen on impact of different models in the three years since the start of the pandemic
🚀 Terminal is thrilled to roll out our newest offering, giving you direct access to a vast pool of AI and ML engineers across some of the world’s most dynamic tech hubs. Let’s take a deep dive into the richness of talent we're connecting you with for all your Contractor or Full-Time AI & ML hires:
🍁 Canada: Home to a remarkable 35,000 AI and ML professionals. Renowned institutions like the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, University of Montreal, and McGill University, along with pioneering research institutes like the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, solidify Canada's position as a leading innovator in AI and ML.
🇪🇺 Europe: A massive combined talent pool of 21,000 engineers focused on AI/ML:
- Spain: 11,000 engineers, backed by world-class institutions like Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and a bustling startup ecosystem in tech hubs like Barcelona.
- Poland: 6,800 professionals, buoyed by a vibrant IT sector, stellar technical education, and key tech events that fuel innovation.
- Romania: 3,300 talents, with cities like Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca emerging as tech focal points thanks to a robust math and computer science tradition.
🌎 Latam: A burgeoning hub with a collective pool of 6,500 AI specialists:
- Mexico: 3,000 engineers, bolstered by esteemed institutions like Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a thriving tech scene in places like Mexico City.
- Colombia: 2,000 engineers, powered by tech-savvy policies and a rapidly growing digital ecosystem in cities such as Medellin and Bogota.
- Costa Rica: 400 engineers, making its mark through its commitment to sustainable development and digital literacy.
- Chile: Contributing an additional 1,100 AI professionals, further enriching the Latam AI scene.
But don't just take our word for it. Hear from one of our esteemed clients, Doug Aley the CEO of Paravision,
"Terminal helped us ramp up a Machine Learning team that is second to none…They gave us access to talent that quite frankly we wouldn't have had access to before." Watch the full testimonial in our blog post below 👇
Read more on this announcement over on our blog post here: terminal.io/blog/unlocking-g…
Yo @elonmusk - adding payment method to run an ad campaign has had a 401 error page for weeks. No luck with submitting support tickets for help either. Help me give you money, pls??
Unlocking Global AI and ML Talent: Hire AI Developers with Terminal terminal.io/blog/unlocking-g…
