# Pau Friedman

> Essays\, notes\, and useful links by Pau Friedman\.

This index links to plain Markdown versions of every blog post. Canonical HTML is available at [pau.fm](https://pau.fm/blog).

## Blog

- [I wonder how the Kafka microservices for that low\-volume CRUD app are going\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/15/kafka-microservices.md>): I wonder how the Kafka microservices for that low\-volume CRUD app are going\.
- [Inspired by Claude Fable 5\.1 solving the 370\-year\-old Cyphral Distich\, I asked…](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/14/a-message-from-my-good-friend-ted-cruz.md>): Inspired by Claude Fable 5\.1 solving the 370\-year\-old Cyphral Distich\, I asked it to decrypt a message from my good friend Ted Cruz\.
- [Commodities want to be cheap](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/14/commodities-want-to-be-cheap.md>): Frontier models are expensive to create and cheap to reproduce\, so tokens are becoming a commodity\. Commodities want to be cheap\, and the labs know it\.
- [Constraint over convention](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/10/engineering-discipline-in-the-slop-era.md>): Coding agents produce more code than your team can safely absorb\. The answer is not more careful engineers\: it is engineering discipline made executable\, for humans and machines\.
- [Paying for Spotify subsidizes Europe for being awful at technology\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/09/subsidizing-europe.md>): Paying for Spotify subsidizes Europe for being awful at technology\.
- [Correctness is not intelligence](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/08/correctness-is-not-intelligence.md>): AI excels where answers can be verified\, but real intellectual progress depends on abstractions that make the world easier to understand\.
- [I don’t have code access yet\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/03/ruby-1-9-3.md>): I don’t have code access yet\. But I have reason to believe they’re on Ruby 1\.9\.3 and Rails 2\.3\.
- [I asked Claude to do something and it produced a twelve\-week plan\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/08/28/claude-estimates.md>): I asked Claude to do something and it produced a twelve\-week plan\. I asked again later\. Two and a half to three and a half hours\.
- [Our new quality person believes quality is everyone’s responsibility\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/08/21/quality-is-everyones-responsibility.md>): Our new quality person believes quality is everyone’s responsibility\. I\, too\, believe that my job is everyone else’s responsibility\.
- [Engineers at Percy got a rubber stamp for their one\-year anniversary gift\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/08/15/engineer-anniversary-gift.md>): Engineers at Percy got a rubber stamp for their one\-year anniversary gift\. Perfect\.
- [If you ever used DSA interviews\, your fraud is now exposed](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/08/14/if-you-ever-used-dsa-interviews-your-fraud-is-now-exposed.md>): DSA interviews replaced judgment with ritual\. Now that machines have solved the ritual\, companies still using it are exposing that they never knew how to hire engineers\.
- [Two tech workers live together long enough and their sprints start to…](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/08/08/sprints-synchronize.md>): Two tech workers live together long enough and their sprints start to synchronize\.
- [I like to imagine these huts are New York’s solution to the housing crisis\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/08/02/new-york-housing-solution.md>): I like to imagine these huts are New York’s solution to the housing crisis\.
- [At some point\, “tech podcast” came to mean “Android phone show\.” Specifically…](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/07/26/tech-podcasts.md>): At some point\, “tech podcast” came to mean “Android phone show\.” Specifically\, shitty Android phones you’ll never buy\.
- [Imagine if engineers pretended to be salespeople\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/07/20/mandatory-sales-hackathon.md>): Imagine if engineers pretended to be salespeople\. They would write random sales pitches they stole from SEO blogspam\, insist they be emailed to customers\, then hold a mandatory sales hackathon twice a year\.
- [Python has load\-bearing whitespace\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/07/13/load-bearing-whitespace.md>): Python has load\-bearing whitespace\.
- [Love hack weeks\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/07/07/hack-weeks.md>): Love hack weeks\. Very inspiring to half\-ass something you know will get thrown away\.
- [Lines of code means something now](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/07/06/lines-of-code-means-something-now.md>): When coding agents make typing cheap\, code volume becomes a rough measure of how much implementation work an engineer can successfully orchestrate\.
- [Claude gave me a four\-week implementation plan\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/06/30/four-week-implementation-plan.md>): Claude gave me a four\-week implementation plan\. I knocked it out in two days\.
- [I found a venture capitalist with his SAT score on his LinkedIn profile\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/06/24/sat-score-on-linkedin.md>): I found a venture capitalist with his SAT score on his LinkedIn profile\.
- [I asked Google to set a two\-minute\, thirty\-second timer\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/06/17/google-timer.md>): I asked Google to set a two\-minute\, thirty\-second timer\. “Okay\, I’ve started a two\-minute timer called ‘30 second\.’”
- [The owner of my neighborhood teriyaki restaurant is wearing a GitLab T\-shirt\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/06/11/gitlab-teriyaki.md>): The owner of my neighborhood teriyaki restaurant is wearing a GitLab T\-shirt\. Invest\.
- [The Clay Theorem](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/06/10/the-clay-theorem.md>): The interesting transition in AI software is not database to chatbot\. It is database to engine\: software that stores the method of human judgment and performs it continuously\.
- [I would describe Rippling’s aesthetic as “boomer chain letter\.”](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/06/04/boomer-chain-letter.md>): I would describe Rippling’s aesthetic as “boomer chain letter\.”
- [Crypto is the Agile of real life\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/28/crypto-is-the-agile-of-real-life.md>): Crypto is the Agile of real life\. Fake work invented to enrich a sleazy grifter class\.
- [I love the term “pre\-owned\.” Like somebody already did the work for you\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/22/pre-owned.md>): I love the term “pre\-owned\.” Like somebody already did the work for you\. What a relief\! It’s pre\-owned\, so I don’t have to worry about it\.
- [On a long enough timeline\, all internet banter is meta\-banter\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/15/internet-meta-banter.md>): On a long enough timeline\, all internet banter is meta\-banter\.
- [MacRumors is stepping in to help people who don’t know when fall is\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/09/macrumors-explains-fall.md>): MacRumors is stepping in to help people who don’t know when fall is\.
- [I install really basic shit through Homebrew\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/05/02/homebrew-dependencies.md>): I install really basic shit through Homebrew\. Then one day I discover I have 248 packages\. Love to upgrade aws\-sdk\-cpp\.
- [Losing three percent every day has an upside\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/04/26/the-good-news-about-a-three-percent-drop.md>): Losing three percent every day has an upside\. The absolute value keeps getting smaller\.
- [Whenever literally anything happens in the world\, I wait for Slack\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/04/19/take-time-for-yourself.md>): Whenever literally anything happens in the world\, I wait for Slack\. I’m not okay until I see some VP post “it’s okay to take time for yourself\.”
- [Hate your career long enough and AI displacement starts to sound pleasant\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/04/13/quietly-hated-your-career.md>): Hate your career long enough and AI displacement starts to sound pleasant\.
- [Tradeoffs are real](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/04/11/tradeoffs-are-real.md>): Political rhetoric promises abundance by hiding the bill\. A serious policy argument names the benefits\, the costs\, and who gets each\.
- [Americans for Common Cents was funded by the zinc lobby\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/04/06/common-cents.md>): Americans for Common Cents was funded by the zinc lobby\. Of course it was\.
- [WeWork replaced its in\-app snack\-buying software with a generic Square terminal\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/03/30/wework-snack-terminal.md>): WeWork replaced its in\-app snack\-buying software with a generic Square terminal\. It was a hundred times better\. This is why you let technology companies make the software\.
- [It’s funny when DJs turn every knob while the music is clearly unaffected\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/03/24/dj-knobs.md>): It’s funny when DJs turn every knob while the music is clearly unaffected\.
- [I’m so market\-pilled I don’t think it’s possible to be overpaid\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/03/17/marketpilled.md>): I’m so market\-pilled I don’t think it’s possible to be overpaid\. You both agreed to the salary\.
- [Locality of context over separation of concerns](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/03/16/locality-of-context-over-separation-of-concerns.md>): Coding agents strengthen the case for locality\: organize code so the context needed to change it is nearby\, rather than scattered across architectural layers\.
- [Hello\.](<https://pau.fm/blog/2026/03/15/hello.md>): Notes on how AI is changing software development\, plus the occasional dog photo\.