Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we

Feedback about the redesigned IDE is overwhelmingly negative due to bugs, poor UX & model support, and eating through Gemini token quotas. Also: a clue that Antigravity’s own devs use other tools for

Massive demand for the role at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The latest version of the FDE role looks like the consultant / solution architect role done by many early-junior engineers.

A $124B fund in Australia would have lost all data stored with Google Cloud, had they not relied on a third-party backup. A rare blunder from GCP, where regional replication did not stop the deletion

For the past few weeks, Anthropic has continually upset devs with its “dumber” model, and by removing Claude Code access from some paid accounts. After securing lots of compute from SpaceX, could the

tl;dr: TechPays is joining Levels.fyi: so the leading tech salary site in Europe gets the love and care it deserves. Thanks to Zsombor for building this project with me for so many years. Pay transpar

GitHub’s leadership blames the 3.5x increase in service load as the cause of degradation – or it might be self-inflicted.

In the past 2-3 months, spending on AI agents has exploded at many tech companies, Details from 15 of them, including the different ways they are coping with this realization.

At Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and other large companies, devs are purposefully burning tokens (and money!) to inflate their AI usage and hit AI usage metrics which they treat as targets.

Availability has dropped to one nine (~90% – !!), partly due to not being able to handle increased traffic from AI coding agents. There’s also no CEO and an apparent lack of direction.

Job postings for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) have surged, but many professionals don’t want the role because it’s more like solutions engineering than software development.

An engineer at Cloudflare rewrote most of Vercel’s Next.js in one week with AI agents. It looks like a sign of how AI will disrupt existing moats and business models. Analysis

I used to pay $120/year for a SaaS that hasn’t added new features in four years, and didn’t fix its broken billing system for three years. Using an LLM, I managed to rewrite all the functionality I us

AI writing most code brings grief to developers as they grapple with what happens to software engineering when their primary skill becomes automated.

Cloudflare suffered another major outage from a global config change, just two weeks after a similar incident, highlighting risks of instant worldwide deployments.

Meta joins Amazon in requiring 5-day office returns for employees, starting February. Other tech giants may follow this stricter RTO trend.

Downdetector went down during Cloudflare's outage due to a hard dependency that can't be easily removed, highlighting the risks of relying on upstream services.

A Mongolian startup translated "The Software Engineer's Guidebook" to benefit their team and local tech community.