Building React Native Apps, Investor, and Tech Evangelist 🥑 | Ex @penta_medical YC S18 | React.js | Remote at @FullscriptHQ 💻 🇨🇦 | OSS ❤
Toronto, Ontario
Joined March 2010
- Tweets11K
- Following6.1K
- Followers5K
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Pinned Tweet
Just open sourced a React Native library for on device NSFW image detection using CoreML 📱
It runs fully on iOS, classifies images locally, and doesn’t send any data to a server.
Repo: github.com/watadarkstar/reac…
If you’re building React Native apps and need privacy friendly image moderation, check it out and please give the repository a star ⭐️
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Debating just straight-up banning useState in my React apps
Push the agent into the black hole of success
I’d love to buy @spolsky a coffee and ask him whether AI has changed his thinking on rewriting software.
Does he still stand by his 2000 article? And how would he think about moving from React Native to Native today?
For more than a decade, I was firmly against rewriting software from scratch. AI has changed my view of the economics enough to make me reconsider. I still think it’s a high-stakes decision, but some of my old assumptions deserve another look.
It reminds me of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile: seeing someone do what seemed out of reach can change what others believe is possible.
But that’s also where I get cautious.
When we read about companies moving from React Native to Native, we’re seeing a selected set of stories i.e. Shopify, Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. A successful transition makes a compelling engineering blog post. An abandoned rewrite is probably less likely to get one.
We don’t know how many teams tried, failed, and quietly moved on.
AI may be changing the cost of a rewrite. It doesn’t remove the need to understand why you’re doing it, what you could lose, and whether your team can carry it through.
I’m more open to rewrites than I used to be. I’m still wary of treating the stories we hear as evidence of how often they work.
Has AI changed your threshold for considering a rewrite?
joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/0…
Adrian Carolli retweeted
🚨 app store banners can autoplay videos now
new in iOS 27, and almost nobody’s using it yet
super easy to build with claude motion design 👇🏻
preview videos already lift installs up to 30%
add it to your release checklist
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Starting to see more and more of this agentic workflow across our customer base 👇
The mobile factory is humming @expo - everyone is reaching for this type of setup:
1. agents pick up linear tickets
2. spawn simulators to fix them
3. submit PRs
4. 10-20 going at a time
5. Run your test suite
6. Deploy to Production via Update or Build
Adrian Carolli retweeted
The mobile factory is humming @expo - everyone is reaching for this type of setup:
1. agents pick up linear tickets
2. spawn simulators to fix them
3. submit PRs
4. 10-20 going at a time
5. Run your test suite
6. Deploy to Production via Update or Build
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Starting to hear of more teams skipping PRs and doing true trunk-based dev.
The argument: PRs make less sense in the age of agentic coding.
The agent is the author, not me. So I, the prompter, am the first reviewer. One or more AIs operate as second reviewer.
Eliminating PRs unlocks radically more throughput - At Amp they do over 100 releases a day.
21 people, a single meeting a week, no quarterly goals, no pull requests, no mandatory code review, no titles (except one dictator), a hundred releases a day, bugs fixed in minutes, famous for killing features.
@sqs and @thorstenball on how the Amp team works:
Adrian Carolli retweeted
There’ll be times where you over-guide the AI. It knows better than you and is more intelligent than you.
There’ll be times where you under-guide the AI. It can go off-track, have the wrong biases, or miss context.
How well you manage this superpower is the #0 skill I look for.
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Same, wrong level of abstraction for this next phase. They had a good run.
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Why a 3x CTO went back to a 25-person team. From Will Larson @lethain, Imprint CTO and 4x book author.
"It's a hard time in middle management, right? There's a lot more competition for these roles. What I found personally very rewarding is getting back into the details of writing software.
When I left Carta, my team was around 250. When I joined Imprint, the team I was leading was 25.
This a unique moment to actually re-skill. If you're in management, I think right now either you have to get back into the details, or the world is changing so radically that the profession you know will not be valued in three years. You sort of have to decide, am I retiring now or am I re-skilling?
I think there has to be some openness to taking a backward step or a lateral step. What I knew I wanted was getting back into the details and relearning how to do software in the current age. That's what I believe is going to be the unlock to the longevity of my career."
Adrian Carolli retweeted
If your company needs software dev help, I’d love to talk to you! I have some amazing experienced US-based devs on the bench who are very good at using agents and have a high quality bar.
We are best at mobile and web and desktop apps, but can do much more than that.
Average experience level is 15 years. You’ll love working with them. Great people, excellent devs.
Appreciate retweets and any referrals!
Adrian Carolli retweeted
I think many of us working in tech tend to forget that the reason software engineering vs other engineering fields pays (a lot!) more, is a lot more flexible (WFH/remote), and has better perks:
Because this field changes much faster than other engineering fields. The premium is because fewer people are able/willing to pick up new technologies, methodologies so quickly.
But the field had ~10-20 years of stability, and so lots of folks forgot this is why a premium exists. And that AI is just another tech wave: software engineers who pick it up and master it will generally fare better; those not will struggle a lot more.
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Anthropic engineer:
“Anthropic hired me at $350K–$950K because I know how to build harnesses.
99% of people still hand-roll multi-agent systems and wonder why they break.
I build systems that run loops + sandbox tools + turn yesterday’s logs into new skills — same model, 10x more reliable agents that keep improving overnight.”
Opus 5.5 → Agents → Harness → Loops → Graphs
In a short workshop, he shows exactly how to build one from scratch.
step 1 → harness handles loops, context, and sandboxing
step 2 → brain and hands separated — 60% faster to first token
step 3 → runs server-side, resumes from the log after crashes
step 4 → failure is cheap — retry and replay instead of starting over
step 5 → yesterday’s logs become new memory — the system wakes up smarter
Anthropic calls this “dreaming”.
Most people spend weeks building this by hand.
You don’t have to.
Bookmark and watch it.
Then read the full Opus 5.5 harness engineering guide below ↓
Adrian Carolli retweeted
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
Adrian Carolli retweeted
It's fascinating how @alexandr_wang's 200 direct reports or my 120 direct reports (in the Xtreme Labs days) looks so much like the old Pivotal Labs 2-6 ppl pairing pods 🤔
* super small expert generalist teams
* high fidelity IRL collaboration
* prototyping w/ code over specs
* high intensity
* unscheduled 1:1's vs. scheduled
