Most of the variance in developer output, even with AI augmentation, is not about the developer, it’s about friction. It’s about how many times a day someone gets interrupted, how long the builds or tests take, how quickly a review is turned around, how confident they feel deploying on a Friday afternoon, whether the test suite is trustworthy, and whether they spend their week on work they consider meaningful.

100% this! If you want to improve developer output, then protect them from unnecessary meetings and distractions.

If you’re using quotes around your own terms and preemptively closing any discussion about it, then you’ve already lost.

This is exactly what the article is trying to argue, in the authors own words, he wants a “meaningful conversation”. As for the quotes, it’s challenging the claim that “coding is largely solved”, as made by Boris Cherny at Anthropic, by dissecting what is meant by both “coding” and “solved”.

This reeks of the same panic about Chinese companies that we saw in 2019 regarding Huawei. Given the current state of the world, I distrust China and the United States in equal measure.

Also Hirundo’s whole business model is about cultivating distrust in open-weight models in order to convince people to pay for their hardened models:

Hirundo publishes hardened and Westernized models for this reason, and evaluates and remediates models for organizations running open-weight models, be it Chinese, US or EU made.