I live in two places: a terminal running Claude Code and Neovim. For months I bounced between them. Edit in Neovim, alt-tab to the terminal, paste a file path, ask Claude something, alt-tab back, apply the change by hand. The friction was small but constant, and constant friction is the kind that wears a groove in your day.

I have been using DeepSeek 4.1 Flash for about a month, heavily, across a dozen projects. It is super capable, and orders of magnitude cheaper than the "frontier" models. When I'm mid-session, if I don't look at the model name, I honestly could not tell you if I'm using DeepSeek or Opus. Whether it's our conversations, the work, or the speed, I don't notice a difference. I don't care that there is no 4.1 "Pro". I treat this like a frontier model because it behaves like one. I'm coming at this from my subjective usage experience, but you can see more complete benchmarks here if that floats your boat.

When we made our strategic bet on Rust back in 2022, we focused on Rust for backends and cloud systems. At the time, that was not an obvious choice. Rust was mostly seen as a systems language only, a safer replacement for C and C++ in operating systems, embedded devices, or browser engines. Suggesting to use it also for the kind of web backends that teams would typically build with Rails, Django, or Node.js required some explaining.

My first session with Claude Code was practically magical. I was speaking to my computer, telling it with natural language what I wanted it to do, and it was able to just do it. It did ( and still does ) feel like a completely new form of input, a new way to control my machine. I have misgivings about using AI in this way, but I still think this is a great tool for sufficiently low-level tasks. I’m waiting eagerly for the day that I can spin up a local LLM that can perform this function as well as Claude Code does.

The role of the IC (Individual Contributor) is evolving fast—and AI is accelerating the shift. As AI tools become deeply integrated into development workflows, many engineers find themselves stepping into responsibilities once reserved for engineering managers. This isn’t a hypothetical trend—it’s already happening in high-performing teams.