Ben Vinegar
@bentlegen
Starting a software co in Toronto. Former VPE at @getsentry. Co-wrote Third-party JavaScript. Hacking on http://counterscale.dev. 🇨🇦
👋 Some news! I've started a software company. Headquartered in Toronto. We're building a product to augment devs for the new era. We have S-tier backers and we're aiming high. If you're a strong engineer or designer who wants to try something ambitious – we should talk.

The amount of learning I've had to do to become effective working/coding with LLMs is staggering. Everyday employees aren't gonna figure this out in their spare time. You've got to intentionally carve out time for them to level up – or your team is gonna be left behind.
Aside – building a startup right now is incredible because you get to completely rethink your development workflow for the AI era. I don't just mean code. I mean how you go from feedback → insight → plan → shipped feature. Feels like a whole new ballgame.
👋 Some news! I've started a software company. Headquartered in Toronto. We're building a product to augment devs for the new era. We have S-tier backers and we're aiming high. If you're a strong engineer or designer who wants to try something ambitious – we should talk.
The vast majority of “product development” for a mature product is simply updating old neglected flows that no one ever benchmarked against peer apps. It’s surprising how easy it is to overlook the primary entrypoints into an app—because “that’s the way they’ve always been.”…
You should also nameYourFunctionsExactlyWhatTheyDo, because that way the agents don't have to parse through import after import to figure it out. (Turns out the Java nerds were right all along.)
Everything we _should_ have done (albeit low ROI) to make it easier to maintain software is about to have a lot more reason to invest into it. Docs, testing, isolation, etc. will finally become common place simply because it will enable us to achieve more via agents.
Here's a common one I see: Claude can't debug why some data has a form it doesn't expect (e.g. string vs Date), so quietly modifies the entire codebase to handle both possible types – this is bad
One thing I find with agentic coding is you have to be 10x more diligent in identifying/fixing bad patterns early because the agents will just replicate them everywhere.
One thing I find with agentic coding is you have to be 10x more diligent in identifying/fixing bad patterns early because the agents will just replicate them everywhere.
Claude Code tip from Anthropic: Spend more time on the task but do it smarter 1. Put this file in ~/.claude/commands/ In claude code 2. type "/explore-plan-code-test <Whatever task you want>" 3. Enjoy
Using this as my terminal theme now
Using this as my terminal theme now
In 4 months, we’ve 3x’d our ARR from $1M to $3M. And here at @useblacksmith - we're hiring on all cylinders. There's never been a better time to join.
IMO the best PM:Engineer ratio for software teams is 0:1 (your builders are your PMs) ⚡️ Lossless, lower latency signal interpretation → better performing products, built faster
Product management is becoming the new bottleneck according to @AndrewYNg "I don't see product management work becoming faster at the same speed as engineering. I'm seeing this ratio shift. Just yesterday, one of my teams came to me, and for the first time, when we're planning…
holy shit groq + k2 is fast af - video not sped up stuff is changing real fast
All these 💯 reactions to Seer remind me of Sentry's early days, when just getting a stack trace in your email delighted people
seer by sentry is absolutely amazing. even the code fixing part. these 4 commits may not be a lot of lines of code but they were extremely urgent fixes and seer almost always killed it in one shot
📈 React package downloads/day are up almost 70% (!) since the start of 2025

if you work at Sentry there are two truths: 1. you wont see a 300x valuation on zero revenue ever 2. i wont quit to join some random boring company leaving everyone else hanging what a fucked up time we live in
the dumbest person you know is being told "You're absolutely right!" by ChatGPT
There has never been a higher signal year to go to a tech conference. *Any* tech conference. Get a ticket, get a flight – just go somewhere and see in person how people are building right now.
If you want to talk about agentic coding, AI or anything really, in person, a good opportunity is EuroPython in Prague in a few days. I will also be there on a panel for the new Python documentary by @CultRepo.