Cindy Sridharan

AI agent demos would be better if they did tasks like contest an insurance claim (tedious work) than make a reservation at a restaurant. When I go out to eat, I want to personally explore menus, check out photos etc. It’s part of the fun, and I don’t want AI automating fun.

But, plot twist: The much-discussed contraction in entry-level tech hiring appears to have *reversed* in recent months. In fact, relative to the pre-generative AI era, recent grads have secured coding jobs at the same rate as they’ve found any job, if not slightly higher.

One thing AI models are *really* a godsend for is … scripting with bash. Bash is so terrible in so many ways, yet it’s ubiquitous and often the best tool for many tasks. Having AI models write most of my bash with me just having to do minor edits is such a luxury.

As code *generation* becomes solely the purview of AI, code *review*, qualification etc becomes all the more important. I expect people who review code to have *more* subject matter expertise, not less, especially for critical production code involving money or confidentiality.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to join in with everyone saying how tacky Bezos’s wedding was. If you’re vaguely familiar with Indian oligarch weddings, Bezos’s wedding feels like a quiet affair in comparison. 😅 A price tag of “only” 66m is like Walmart wedding territory.

As widespread use of AI for “homework” becomes the norm, I wonder if Western countries will adopt the Asian approach of … having your grades entirely be determined by closed book, hand-written tests and exams, where you’re not allowed your phone, or calculators, or computers.

This might be one anecdote, but what a soul-crushing environment to work in, with no leadership, no engineering mission, no camaraderie between coworkers, no clear ownership … just isolation and disorientation. And to think of all the VCs who said go work for Twitter 2.0 …

The #1 rule of scalable systems is to avoid congestion collapse. This is when a system slows down, starts timing out, then gets hammered by retries that also time out, in an infinite loop. I’ve accidentally broken Dropbox and Convex this way. Here's 7 tips how not to:

2021 was 4 years ago, which is quite a long period of time, but it just doesn’t *feel* that long ago to me. I vividly remember 2017, 2018, 2019, and even 2020. But 2021 - 2025 has become something of a blur that I can’t really tell apart. 🙁

For the first time ever, our wait at @plow_sf was just 10mins (as opposed to ~1h) The trick, I guess, is to stop by on a weekday (which I’ve never done before). This place def ties for my top breakfast spot, the other being Lou’s Cafe, which makes the best breakfast sandwiches.

Recently, I've been discussing throttling with one of our teams. It's a super deep topic, probably deeper than it gets credit in modern systems, so I decided to write some thoughts on the matter: blog.joemag.dev/2025/06/the-nu…

Massive, massive, absolutely massive #nokings protest on Market Street in SF happening right now. 🇺🇸❤️

The only info we have so far about the GCP outage is that an “underlying shared dependency” required recovery in multiple regions. It’s been years since I’ve closely followed outages, but I’d wager it was a config change to a shared, global service, most likely a control plane.