Vaughn Dickson
@vaughndickson
CTO at Public Sector Network @ConnectPSN. 23 years building and scaling SaaS startups. Full-stack dev, ML, SOA, Java, Spring, Python, Django, etc.
"I'm going to take it easy today" he lies, as he spins up 4 claude codes and goes full ADHD...
I'm jealous of all the people spinning off dozens of subagents in Claude Code. Here I am waiting on one frozen agent to get going again....
Starting to look like the janky codebases where humans struggle also make AIs struggle. Not sure why people are surprised by this.
This jet2 advert audio being used in every second Instagram is giving me a twitch now. Blocking every bloody account that uses it. I didn’t think ads could get more invasive and annoying, but here we are “innovating” in 2025…
We never used sprints or OKRs at @remote. It's bloating overhead. Talking about work =/= working and all deadlines are arbitrary—tasks always expand to fill the time you allow (Parkinson’s Law). Optimize for intensity, impact, and let results speak for themselves.
I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better
Did MCPs and tool calling kill RAG? No more bottleneck in trying to tune search to get the right documents to fit in the context anymore? Just let the LLM dig around until it gets what it needs instead?
Everyone crying about AI taking their jobs, but here I am chasing up insurance claims and gap claims and plumbers missing in action, etc. If you don't want AI to take your job, then maybe start doing your job?
SV needs to get back to its nerdy roots versus focusing on all these media attention whores. It’s embarrassing.
A lot of the engineers with the deepest experience that I work with also have an absurdly wide span: everything from memory allocators to CSS selectors. They just like to build cool stuff, and that’s why they picked up so many things.
"Hiring pure backend engineer and expecting them to do non backend stuff IMO is wrong" Sigh. Any capable intern/new grad picks up whatever new technology is needed to get the job done. If you, as an *experienced* engineer, refuse to do so: you're less capable than an intern
Everyone in tech tells you to move to SF, meanwhile ~20 SF-based tech companies all just hired the same guy to work remotely out of India.
Why are people confused about AI CLI tools winning over VS code forks? Because Cursor/Windsurf are buggy and unstable, and the CLI tools handle diffing via most IDEs anyway. It’s all text. Integrate the AIs with profilers and debuggers and I’ll be interested. A chat window in…
If you're telling an LLM "fix it" repeatedly, don't expect it to work. Same result if you just yelled "fix it" at a junior developer. You need to put in the effort to say "Fix it by trying X, Y, or Z". Add to the context, don't repeat it.
Soham can now coin it by consulting and handling interviews for the inept YC companies. Bullshitters can spot bullshitters.
So when are AIs going to be able to run debuggers and profilers themselves? One area where they struggle is figuring out performance issues; just staring at the code is as ineffective for an AI as it is for me. I have to watch code in motion to see where it’s going wrong…
A mate shared this piece of wisdom: “Don’t moan, because the people who are prepared to listen to moaning can’t help and the people who can help don’t have time to listen to moaning.”
This aligns with my experience too. Most businesses fail. Keep going.
🍰 Only 4 out of 70+ projects I ever did made money and grew 📉 >95% of everything I ever did failed 📈 My hit rate is only about ~5% 🚀 So...ship more
Developers seem to fall into one of two camps on AI-assisted development. And sometimes they change camps. I know I did. Camp A: "I tried to push the horse and it didn't go and kicked me in the head. Never again!" Camp B: "I figured out how to tame the horse, saddle it up,…
