May 13, 2026
Every dev tool looks the same (a sidebar with a list of chats) and every tool is turning into a dev tool (Linear, Notion, Figma, even Posthog lol). What's going on?
The uniformity is crazy because every conversation with an engineer about AI feels like a weather report from a different planet. One person just watched an agent dissolve a week's worth of glue work. Another tried the same tools and got a confident mess. Someone is terrified, someone is bored, and someone is quietly rebuilding their entire workflow while pretending it's normal.
I keep seeking these conversations out. At dinners, meetups, etc., I'm looking for the little opening where I can let the freak out.
What I WANT to do is ask a bunch of probing questions about their perspective and then share my own and we can try to triangulate on the truth together. Getting closer to the truth is the fun part.
Neither of us sees the truth of the situation, we all just see from our own vantage point. The challenge is we rarely even know where our own vantage point is. But once we start to have multiple perspectives on an object we can compare what we see and our individual histories and surroundings to start triangulating reality.
However, as it turns out, this is hard.
It takes a lot of steadiness to hear another person's perspective and have our own different perspective and not try to assert control of that situation. Especially when the thing in question is our careers and the entire fate of our field.
We want to regain control because it's disorienting to step into someone else's world and see through their eyes. Changing perspectives can be as subtle as moving to the other side of the couch when watching a movie or as jarring as suddenly flipping upside down on the monkey bars. Either way, there's a period of discomfort and adjustment to our new viewpoint.
There are two ways people try to gain control in this situation:
Everyone tends toward one or the other. I tend towards #2.
Sometimes these are the correct reactions. Maybe the other person is missing a key fact and they're way off base. Or (more rarely) acting in bad faith to deceive us. In those cases, yes we need to assert our own understanding of reality. Likewise, sometimes we're the one missing something important and we need to recognize that too.
But more often than not both people are acting in good faith and have meaningful, different insights. This is a great gift because it gives us one more little depth map we can use to piece together the truth.
The challenge is that we have to navigate this together with another person.
The other party is in the same situation where they feel disoriented by a fresh and different perspective being thrust upon them and need to gain some measure of control. Somehow we need to collectively align on how we're going to resolve the conflict and learn from it.
I've been thinking about this a lot as I'm starting to hire a team to build Ref. AI and software engineering are changing so fast that it's impossible to be fully aligned with anyone. Every engineer is being drenched with a torrent of content and new experiences. Everyone is at a different point on the adoption curve.
It's as though every engineer is climbing stairs and at each step there is a completely new view. You start mind blown by Copilot autocomplete, then you get tab-tab-tab then you start running an agent in your terminal. Then you realize you could run multiple and what if you never look at the code again? You encounter a whole new suite of problems and the future starts to unfold in front of you.
If you're building tools for software engineers right now, your job is to help people up the stairs.
Those of us choosing to participate in the galactic warfare that is building a business in the dev tools space right now do so because there's nothing else in the universe as cool and we love being at the ragged edge of possibility.
Most other people are not living at the ragged edge and the view from there is very different. They're working in the tech org of a primarily non-tech business or maybe they're a new grad trying to understand what life looks like outside the university bubble or they might even be a Silicon Valley startup veteran trying to balance family life and an unexpected career transition.
As builders, we can't assert our perspective to drag these people up the stairs, nor can we give up on the possibilities we've seen with our own eyes. We need to meet people where they are, learn from what they see and help them navigate the steps in front of them.
