Dev Interrupted

In this Friday Deploy, Andrew and Ben dive into the viral Moltbot (now OpenClaw) phenomenon and Steve Yegge's Software Survival 3.0 essay, debating how SaaS companies can build moats in an era of token-constrained engineering. They also explore the concept of "Dark Flow" - a deceptive state where vibe coding feels productive but hides accumulated tech debt - and break down Anthropic's newly released constitution for Claude. Finally, the team discusses a Reddit user’s claim to have ported CUDA to AMD in 30 minutes and shares a fascinating breakdown of podcast listening data.
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OpenClaw
Software Survival 3.0
Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding
Claude's new constitution
Claude Code Has Managed to Port NVIDIA’s CUDA Backend to ROCm
My Top 25 Podcast Episodes & Interviews from 2025 by IPM (Insights Per Minute)
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MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

If you rely on complex scaffolding to build AI agents you aren't scaling you are coping. Thibault Sottiaux from OpenAI’s Codex team joins us to explain why they are ruthlessly removing the harness to solve for true agentic autonomy. We discuss the bitter lesson of vertical integration, why scalable primitives beat clever tricks, and how the rise of the super bus factor is reshaping engineering careers.
LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor
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OpenAI Codex: Learn more about the models powering tools like GitHub Copilot.
Codex Open Source Repo: The lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal (check out the Rust migration mentioned in the episode).
Agent Skills Open Standard: The open standard and catalog for giving agents new capabilities.
The Bitter Lesson: Richard Sutton’s essay on why compute-centric methods win in AI.
Follow Tibo on X @thsottiaux | GitHub
OFFERS
Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.
LEARN ABOUT LINEARB
AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

With the Ralph loop going mainstream, how are engineering organizations utilizing it at scale? Andrew and Ben sit down with Angie Jones, VP of Engineering AI Tools and Enablement at Block, to pick her brain on how they are using the Ralph Wiggum technique to automate updates across 25,000 repos and how she is strategically preparing for Gas Town. The team also breaks down the launch of OpenAI's new GPT-5.2 Codex model before closing out the week with a look at the weirdest tech from CES, from hypersonic knives to music-playing lollipops.
LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor
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Angie Jones: angiejones.tech | LinkedIn | X (Twitter)
Goose (Block’s AI Agent): github.com/block/goose
Steve Yegge’s "Welcome to Gas Town": Read on Medium
Geoffrey Huntley’s Ralph Loop: ghuntley.com/ralph
Ryan Dahl on the End of Coding: @rough__sea
The Weirdest Tech of CES: Read the Article
OFFERS
Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.
LEARN ABOUT LINEARB
AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Before Backstage became the industry standard for developer portals, Spotify’s engineers relied on spreadsheets to navigate their massive microservices ecosystem.
Tyson Singer, Spotify’s Head of Technology and Platforms, joins us to trace the evolution of their internal developer experience from a necessity for order into the open-source giant Backstage and its new SaaS evolution, Portal. We dig into how they use golden paths to align autonomous squads and how their new AI Knowledge Assistant (AiKA) reduced internal support tickets by nearly 50% while protecting developer flow. Finally, Tyson shares his philosophy on sustainable innovation, explaining how to train an engineering organization to run a marathon at a sprinter's pace.
LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor
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Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.spotify.com
Spotify Portal: backstage.spotify.com
Confidence: confidence.spotify.com
Connect with Tyson: LinkedIn
OFFERS
Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.
LEARN ABOUT LINEARB
AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

In our first-ever Friday edition, Andrew and Ben dive into the viral "Ralph Loop" phenomenon and discuss how simple bash loops and deterministic context allocation are changing the unit economics of code. They also explore Steve Yegge's chaotic "Gas Town" concept for orchestrating AI agents, debate whether AI is killing the individual contributor role, and share a laugh over a creepy link generator that challenges our trust in URLs. 
LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor
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Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
Gas Town Emergency User Manual
Loom by Geoffrey Huntley
AI Killed the Individual Contributor
CreepyLink
OFFERS
Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.
LEARN ABOUT LINEARB
AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.