Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Since A.I. coding tools from Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor and other companies took off last year, one result has now become apparent: code overload . - NYT * GitHub platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear — Kyle Daigle, COO, GitHub * At tech companies like Meta and Shopify, managers have started to factor A.I. use into performance reviews, rewarding workers who make heavy use of A.I. tools and chastening those who don’t. It has created an expensive new status game, known as “tokenmaxxing,” among A.I.-obsessed workers who are desperate to prove how productive they are. - NYT * OpenAI's agentic coding tool, Codex, had tripled its weekly active users since the start of the year. Overall Codex use, measured in tokens, has increased fivefold. Google's A.I. models processed more than 1.3 quadrillion tokens a month in 2025. * AI companies char...

Gergely Orosz chats with Jean Lee, who joined WhatsApp as its 19th engineer when it was still a small company with barely any formal processes. She played a key role in scaling it to hundreds of millions of users, experienced the $19B acquisition by Facebook, and later continued her career at Meta. Here are the standout sound bytes and interesting facts from the talk : Why Jean got into tech: "After talking to a lot of adults, I realized people who are in tech were the only ones who were really excited about their jobs. So in Silicon Valley, when you ask people like tell me about your work, people are often very hopeful for the future and very proud of what they're building. Compared to many other adults that I spoke with, they were not so encouraging. They're like, "Oh, don't become an architect. Don't become a designer."" On process: " We didn't have code reviews... The only time I got my code reviewed was the first time I made a commit....

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations