18 Aug 2026 · Lalit Maganti
I’ve been using Opus 5 as my main coding for the last few days 1, and I noticed something odd: the code comments stopped using em-dashes; everything is double hyphens (--) now. Instead of going off a gut feeling, I decided to actually run some checks. agentsview indexes all my conversations into a SQLite database, so this kind of question is just a query away. Here’s the chart: Seems pretty clear to me! But you might say “maybe it’s not the model, maybe it’s something else”. Well act…
17 Aug 2026 · Lalit Maganti
PyTorch profiles are going to look much better in the next release of Perfetto. Last time, I explained how PyTorch’s profiler emits events that overlap in ways that are technically forbidden by the Chrome JSON Trace Event spec. As a result, Perfetto used to drop these events on the floor. In the last release we stopped doing that, keeping all the events and merging the overlapping ones back together for display. Unfortunately, this fix is more of a workaround: in practice, the trace simply doe…
15 Aug 2026 · Lalit Maganti
To get promoted as a software engineer in Big Tech, you generally need to show “ownership” of a product or area. This means being responsible for it and deciding what should happen over time. I often hear more junior engineers ask: “How can I demonstrate ownership when my manager hasn’t given me anything to own?” This way of thinking is a trap: an easy one to fall into, but a trap nonetheless. The problem is that they are treating responsibility as a complete, self-contained opportunit…
9 Aug 2026 · Lalit Maganti
In Devtools must be open source1 (via), David Crawshaw makes the case that, because of coding agents, we’re now in an era where devtools will be personalized by individual users. Specifically, agents’ ability to jump into new codebases and build whatever we want means we’ll be hacking on the source of the devtools we use day to day (even those without extension APIs) adding features and automatically rebasing our patches across releases. The argument is seductive, especially to a reader wh…
1 Aug 2026 · Lalit Maganti
Codeberg, a Git code hosting platform, recently took a decision to prohibit projects that mostly consist of generative-AI-written code which has prompted concern and extensive discussion elsewhere. The decision does not surprise me, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. Codeberg has always presented itself as a mission-driven alternative to GitHub, not neutral infrastructure.1 What interests me is the disappointment in the response. Many people reacted as though one of the few plausible GitHub…
27 Jul 2026 · Lalit Maganti
Antirez, the creator of Redis, recently argued that expert programmers using AI should think of themselves as being Linus Torvalds. The key part of his analogy is this: Automatic programming, instead, in the hands of people that are expert technicians, or expert programmers, expert designers, expert software architects, is to assume the role of Linus, with the agents and the LLMs assuming the role of the different maintainers of the different subsystems. This analogy does not work for me. As the…
25 Jul 2026 · Lalit Maganti
Note: this post was revised after publishing for increased clarity, based on reader feedback. “How do you find problems worth working on?” a senior engineer I mentor asked me recently. He’s trying to make the jump to staff engineer and realized that the role isn’t just about doing the work he’s assigned. He also needs to get involved in figuring out what his team and org should be building. Someone else had suggested blocking out time in his calendar to think about the bigger picture. …