Karthik Hariharan
@hkarthik
Engineering manager working in tech. Tweets about tech, politics, business, and the occasional shitpost.
We are starting to see more evidence that AI coding tools have diminishing returns and aren’t a panacea, especially on large, mature code bases like the ones found in Big Tech. My take is most new AI tools are optimized for new code construction. Not refactoring, debugging, or…
I was one of the 16 devs in this study. I wanted to speak on my opinions about the causes and mitigation strategies for dev slowdown. I'll say as a "why listen to you?" hook that I experienced a -38% AI-speedup on my assigned issues. I think transparency helps the community.
This was definitely true 20 years ago. I remember at a former workplace, there were few annual raises or bonuses given for over 3 years. One coworker got a promotion and received a 3% raise. He took his new senior eng title and immediately got a 20% pay increase at his next…
There were may years when job hopping every few years was glamorised (“if you stay at the same company for more than 2 years you get underpaid” - there was truth to this in a hot market.) But feels like we also forgot to appreciate the learning tenure can offer. Like this:
India would have been a stronger country today if Ashoka had unified the language, writing system, currency, and created more culturally binding ties between the Indian kingdoms. A big missed opportunity compared to what Qin did for China and Nobunaga did for Japan. This left…
Which opinion about history will get you like this?
I am seeing history repeat itself. In 2015, when I worked at Uber, we knew the unit economics were unsustainable but there was an optimistic assumption that technical innovation would magically enable profitability. In the end, it was a monopolistic moat and higher pricing…
Premium newsletter: Based on user data and their gross profit margins, I believe that Anthropic's most popular product, Claude Code, is haemorraging money on every user, with some costing the company hundreds - even thousands - of dollars in a few days. wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-b…
Next gen browser wars are coming as as AI gets more tightly integrated and browsers become self-driving. I started using Dia from @browsercompany and I'm now checking out Comet from @perplexity_ai. I think it's inevitable for OpenAI and Anthropic to launch browsers as well.…
I actually went to a Coldplay concert with my wife in Palo Alto last month and we enjoyed it. Little did I know that half the audience was tech CEOs with their mistresses.
There’s definitely been a Cambrian Explosion of AI dev tooling over the last 18 months. However, I think a wave of consolidation is just around the corner. The Google/Windsurf deal is just the beginning.
insane turn of events
How I feel when a random engineer at work recognizes me for my tweets.
I predict Microsoft will acquire a company in the AI vibe coding space within the next 6-12 months. Just like their acquisition of GitHub in 2018. Vercel, Lovable, Replit, etc will all be acquisition targets.
Excited to team up with Microsoft to bring Vibe Coding to the enterprise. Now every team member—not just engineers—can turn ideas into software with Replit Agent, no code required. We’re aligned with Microsoft on a shared mission: empowering every person and organization to…
The tech industry is in a phase of role compression. 1. Every engineer needs to be full stack. 2. Every manager needs to be more technically hands on. 3. Every product manager needs to be data fluent and AI savvy.
At some point in their career, devs forget they're "engineers" and start role-playing "Frontend Engineer", "Backend Engineer", etc. This is all programming. You can do this all. Doesn't mean you have to master it all. Be good at many things. Be an expert in a few.
When one of my engineers says something will take take two weeks, I'll tell them Soham could do it in 2 hours, while working at 4 startups simultaneously.
Lots of dialogue recently about the AI Researchers being poached for potentially $100M+ packages to jump from OpenAI to Meta. And questions about what price people are willing to pay and whether anyone is ever really mission oriented. One thing that gets missed is that many…
Job placement in the US for international Computer Science graduates has fallen to almost zero. Many of the universities involved should probably forgive tuition and student loan debt for these graduates. Many are likely to default on the loans and go back home anyway.
“Oh, your favorite programming language is Python?” “Name all the different ways to define a list in Python.”
Definitely a hot take. But there is something to be said, even in first world countries, around encouraging kids to contribute back to the family with some income. My teens babysit, run errands for friends/neighbors, sell stuff, get jobs, etc for spending cash. Alternatively, I…
The simple solution to fix the declining birth rate in rich countries is to re-legalise child labor but most people aren’t ready to hear it
How everyone who was an adult during the Iraq war and WMD era feels right now.
This issue is pervasive in California, and probably in many older cities and towns. Older businesses are grandfathered in to lower rents, lower taxes, and lower regulations that allow them to stay consumer friendly and maintain low pricing. Nearby where I live, there's an ice…
Gut-wrenching story from Seattle about how a city and state can destroy a small business—one rule, one tax, one bureaucratic hoop at a time. For decades, there's been a 24/7 breakfast spot in downtown Seattle. A beloved place that I'd been going to since the 1990s. I came here…
The GenX/Millenial version of this nostalgia is $5 UberPOOL rides in SF.
In the 1970s, Air Canada installed a dance floor on the upper deck of its 747s—letting passengers groove at 35,000 feet on transatlantic flights.
One of the biggest problems in Big Tech: PMs and Eng are simply not embarrassed enough about the shitty products they ship. Within tech orgs, there's a lot of high-fiving and patting each other on the back for finally getting through all the consensus building activities and…
Apple transcription is still so, so bad compared to what’s available on market, they should be embarrassed