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. …
17 Jul 2026 · Lalit Maganti
Writing for the world is something which has ebbed and flowed for me over time. I’ve always liked sharing my thoughts, starting with websites all the way back when I was a kid. In times when I sustained it, I had various “blog”-like things for technical projects which would often veer into sharing personal beliefs as well. It’s been a year since my latest attempt at what I expect to be a lifelong endeavor. So I’ve been reflecting on how it’s gone, and that’s led me to make some dec…
13 Jul 2026 · Lalit Maganti
Working with lots of changes in parallel on git can be painful. You end up juggling branches and commits, and running scary rebase -i commands that can leave your tree in a half-broken state if you so much as sneeze. jj, an alternative to git, gets discussed a lot these days (1, 2, 3, 4) and is often pitched as a solution. While I’m very sold on the problems jj is trying to solve, the way it solves them hasn’t quite hit home with me. Every 3 months, for the last 1.5 years, I try it out for a…
2 Jul 2026 · Lalit Maganti
We just released Perfetto v57 and I wanted to share the new things I’m most excited about. This is something I wanted to do for past releases but I just never quite got round to it. It’s also something I plan on doing more of going forward: there might even be dedicated pieces if I think the feature deserves it! PyTorch traces reliably work!# What I’m most excited about in this release isn’t a feature but a bugfix. If you used the PyTorch profiler and opened the resulting trace in Perfet…
30 Jun 2026 · Lalit Maganti
When impressive performance gains do not matter is a very nice article covering some ways in which going after performance alone is not sufficient without considering the wider picture. It resonated a lot with how I think about performance. If there are multiple bottlenecks in the pipeline—and with these systems, this is common—the overall throughput will not improve until every last bottleneck is removed. His focus is on distributed systems bottlenecks, but I’ve hit the same “do-nothing…
17 Jun 2026 · Lalit Maganti
Since my original launch post for syntaqlite, I’ve been quietly working away on it in the background. A lot of the work has been fixing correctness bugs which I discovered as I integrated it into production as the parser for PerfettoSQL in the Perfetto trace processor: as I wrote previously, this has been my dream for over 8 years so it’s amazing to see it finally realized. Just today, I released syntaqlite 0.6, the most interesting release since the original launch, so I wanted to talk abou…
16 Jun 2026 · Lalit Maganti
I came across Iroh (via, via) today as it hit 1.0 and found it a really interesting solution to a problem I knew existed but had not thought a lot about. Judging from the comment sections, it seems pretty clear that lots of people are confused as to exactly what Iroh is. I don’t think their launch post does their product justice at all, and their tagline is “IP addresses break, dial keys instead” which sounds cool, but if you think about it for just a second, you’ll end up with lots of q…