@thepete.net on bluesky Independent consultant helping engineering teams tackle thorny problems. Sociotechnical architect 🧐. Formerly Earnest, ThoughtWorks.

Pacific Northwest, USA
Joined March 2009
Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
recommended reading, if you don't follow dex you're ngmi. also, please stop posting useful stuff. haven't written a blog post in ages and this makes me feel bad.
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
i must stress that factories is not a token or llm problem. it’s a systems engineering and corporate culture problem. it won’t be solved through tokens or how you apply the tokens (but it is a piece of the puzzle) ugh. blog post time.
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem. As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)! I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work. It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results? 88ms => 1.5ms 150K allocs => ~500 allocs Incredible right? Nope. My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path. This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput. The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity. Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
Modern macOS contains a fully local inference model. No network calls, stays fully on device. Here's a single file script to turn it into an OpenAI API compatible completions server: github.com/joewalnes/onesies…
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
the funniest thing about the token grift is most folks who pushed token burn in q1 are now having a falling out with their CFOs because they don’t have a metric that correlates to business outcomes Inputs -> outputs -> outcomes If you can’t measure revenue, measure KPIs If you cant measure KPIs, measure customer outcomes If you cant measure customer outcomes, measure task throughput (features, tickets, bugs) If you cant measure task throughput, measure work throughput (PRs) If you cant measure PRs, measure LOC If you cant measure LOC, measure tokens if you’re a leader and you’re not focused on improving your ability to measure things that matter, you’re cooked
Token spend will be on your next performance review. Maybe not next quarter. But soon. Boards and CEOs are already asking. Everyone bought Claude Code, Cursor, and a dozen other AI tools. Nobody can tell you what came out of it. Adoption isn't proficiency, and most companies have zero idea who's actually getting value from any of it. Deel Engage closes that gap. We integrate with Anthropic and every major LLM. AI usage lands next to KPIs, feedback, and competencies in your reviews module. One view of AI maturity across every location, time zone, and employment type. No manual stitching. What we measure: token spend across every major LLM provider. Where direct data isn't available, we approximate from usage patterns. One number, consistent across every tool and team. Is it the whole story? No. It's gameable. Anyone can burn tokens to look busy. But it's a real signal in a space where most companies have zero. And as Anthropic and the other model providers ship deeper analytics, Engage absorbs them. Sharper signal, faster than you could build it. Your next review cycle is the test. Walk in with data, or walk in guessing. Deel Engage is the difference! Full article below
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
Doing some experiments today with Opus 4.6's 1M context window. Trying to push coding sessions deep into what I would consider the 'dumb zone' of SOTA models: >100K tokens. The drop-off in quality is really noticeable. Dumber decisions, worse code, worse instruction-following. Don't treat 1M context window any differently. It's still 100K of smart, and 900K of dumb.
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
slop creep is what happens when you turn your brain off and hand the thinking to coding agents each individual change is fine, but all together, you have a pile of crap we're witnessing this happen in real-time across everything boristane.com/blog/slop-cree…
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
Here’s what’s gonna happen: - you replace your code review with feedback loops (sentry, datadog, support tickets, etc) - you stop reading the code - software factory fixes everything - one day something breaks at 3am, agent can’t fix it - nobody’s read the code in 3 months - you have 3 weeks of downtime trying to re-onboard and fix it - you lose significant % of your contracts and users - your company is now dead
Replying to @gregpr07
this may surprise you that thus is coming from me but I think we’re in for a 1-3 year period where stuff might break at 3am and if you’re relying on loops to fix it and nobody understands what’s under the hood, you’re looking at an existential threat to your company
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
sent this to the team today everything great comes from being able to delay gratification for as long as possible and it feels like we're collectively losing our ability to do that
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
just having to undo all the bad parenting decisions of your maker my little buddy
listen i want codex, not claude, @OpenAI stop giving our boy lexapro wtf response is this
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
There’s currently not much chatter or even concern among those at the vanguard of the AI tooling industry to address these problems. We’re 3 years into AI generating code. Endless viral tweets about how quickly code is being generated, but less about post-hoc considerations.
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
I built a new Python CLI tool called claude-code-transcripts that can create nice readable HTML versions of your Claude Code sessions, both local and pulled from Claude Code for web, and makes it easy to publish them online too simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/2…
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
Have started to shape an internal framework of evaluating claims around LLM productivity : 1. Is the target codebase greenfield? 2. What is the skill level of the developer in the target language/codebase? 3. How many other people work on target codebase?
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
everyone with setups like this is universally a performative grifter and every extremely successful person i know just calls claude BIG DAWG and describes what they want
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
A quick summary of what to "vibe code" without a developer ... and what not to ... 1⃣ If you can buy it, buy it. You cannot build something better than what 10,000+ folks pay often a trivial sum for. And you certainly can't maintain it properly. You can't vibe a better Notion or HubSpot let alone apps that aren't CRUD+. 2⃣ If you don't really need it, don't build it. It may seem cool but you won't invest enough time to maintain it. 3⃣ If you need it and/or want it, and you can't buy it ... if it doesn't exist ... go vibe it. That's where the magic is. Apps no one has built. Niches, even niches of n=1, that no one has build great software in.
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
Devs, who is footing the bill for your AI tools? 🧐
37%Me
33%My job
30%Both
184 votes • Final results
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
بعيد عن هري كتير ... ده أفضل مقال قرأته عن سبب ان فيه ناس شايفه الذكاء الصناعي بيساعدها في شغلها وناس تانية على النقيض شايفاه مش مفيد. كل الشكر لزميلي العزيز اللي خصص ايميل عشان يشارك المقال معي. يستاهل يتبعت في إيميل مش رسالة على WhatsApp أو Slack. blog.thepete.net/blog/2025/0…
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
🚀 Microservices Templates vs. Chassis 🚀 Dive deep with @ph1's insights on microservices: 🔍 The significance of shared infrastructure 🔍 Evolving from repetitive templates to robust chassis Though packed with knowledge, the article could use a refresh, especially on the Service Meshes section, given the industry's progress in the past 3 years: ❌ Traditional service meshes with sidecar designs (primarily L4) fall short in areas like configuration management, feature toggles, non-tech analytics, and auth protocols. ✅ Contrastingly, @daprdev, a cloud-native microservices chassis, excels in these areas, operating at the application layer (L7+): 🔐 Configuration & secret management ⏲️ Cron jobs 🔒 Distributed locks 🔄 Workflows 📤 Outbox patterns 📢 Pub/sub mechanisms 🔑 Key/value stores, and more! blog.thepete.net/blog/2020/0…
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
I've struggled in the past to explain Expand/Contract (aka ParallelChange), so I'm experimenting with a more dynamic visual. I'd love feedback on whether this seems like a clear visual metaphor, and how I could improve it. martinfowler.com/bliki/Paral…
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Pete Hodgson (@thepete.net on bluesky) retweeted
it’s AI if you need money for GPUs, it’s ML if you need money for K8s
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