Full-Breadth Developers for the Win  ## Metadata - Author: [[Changelog Master Feed]] - Full Title: Full-Breadth Developers for the Win - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/17861aa3-b759-4cb0-8fc0-f780054d503f ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Justin Searls' Full-Breadth Developer** - Justin Searls completed two months' worth of work in two days using generative coding tools. - He combines both product vision and programming skill, coining "full-breadth developer." Transcript: Jerod Santo Full breadth developers for the win. Much like myself, Justin Searles turned the corner on generative coding tools. Quote, it may not map to any particular splashy innovation or announcement, but everyone agrees generative coding tools crossed a significant capability threshold recently. It's what led me to write this. In just two days, I've completed two months worth of work on Posse Party. End quote. Justin explains how he did it, but the key insight is this. He embodies the entirety of the problem-solution space. He is both product Justin and programmer Justin. If you were to split him in two, it would have taken weeks, not days. In this post, Justin coins the term full-breadth developer and describes why he thinks full-breadth devs will be the big winners of the AI upheaval. He also disambiguates my frequent call to move up the value chain. Quote, a lot of developers are feeling scared and hopeless about the changes being wrought by all of this. Yes, AI is being used as an excuse by executives to lay people off and pad their margins. Yes, how foundation models were trained was unethical and probably also illegal. Yes, hustle bros are running around making BS claims. Yes, almost every party involved has a reason to make exaggerated claims about AI. All of that can be true and it still doesn't matter. Your job as you knew it is gone. If you want to keep getting paid, you may have been told to move up the value chain. If that sounds ambiguous and unclear, I'll put it more plainly. Figure out how your employer makes money and position your ass somewhere directly in between the corporate bank account and your customer's credit card information. ([Time 0:00:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b4271c08-509f-494f-9ae3-dc21a6cb1dc2)) - **Cloudflare's Pay-Per-Crawl Idea** - Cloudflare proposes a new option beyond just blocking or allowing web crawlers. - They use HTTP 402 payment code to enable pay-per-crawl monetization for publishers. Transcript: Jerod Santo Content. Up until now, the options have been limited to a binary, let them do it, or don't let them do it. Enter Cloudflare. Quote, we believe your choice need not be binary. There should be a third, more nuanced option. You can charge for access. Instead of a blanket block or uncompensated open access, we want to empower content owners to monetize their content at internet scale. We are excited to help dust off a mostly forgotten piece of the web, HTTP response code 402, end quote. By leveraging the 402 payment required status code, Cloudflare has devised an experimental pay per crawl system where publishers control their monetization strategy, crawlers Authenticate via the web bot auth protocol and indicate their payment agreement via headers, and Cloudflare acts as the settlement layer. ([Time 0:02:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/27ea4a2c-446a-428c-aca8-a9227aabd0cc)) - **Avoid Complex AI Agents** - Avoid building complicated AI agents involving multiple tools and memory systems. - Use Hugo's flowchart to determine if an agent is truly necessary to avoid brittleness. Transcript: Jerod Santo Hugo Bone Anderson is frustrated by seeing the same pattern after advising dozens of teams building LLM-powered systems. Quote, everyone reaches for agents first. They set up memory systems. They add routing logic. They create tool definitions and character backstories. It feels powerful and it feels like progress until everything breaks. And when things go wrong, which they always do, nobody can figure out why. Was it the agent forgetting its task? Is the wrong tool getting selected? Too many moving parts to debug? Is the whole system fundamentally brittle? End quote. Hugo learned this the hard way by building a research crew of three agents, five tools, and perfect coordination on paper. The system, like others he'd built, failed spectacularly, leading Hugo to create this flow chart about should I use an agent, where the hint is probably not. ([Time 0:04:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5db32136-6b18-49d6-980c-87345b2419c6)) - **Job Worth Calculator Insight** - A job value calculator measures actual worth using salary, commute, environment, and personal factors. - It includes international salary comparisons adjusted for cost of living, helping evaluate job grind worth. Transcript: Jerod Santo Is your job worth the grind? This job worth calculator calculates a job value rating based on your salary, work hours, commute time, environment, and more. It does international salary comparison with purchase price parity conversion across 190 plus countries. It lets you customize it with personal factors like education level and work experience. And then it generates a shareable, downloadable job analysis report for you. ([Time 0:06:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/eb3be33e-f45f-4bd6-8783-cb36dd17ce08)) - **PlanetScale Embraces Postgres** - PlanetScale is adding Postgres support inspired by customer demand, not just MySQL. - They plan to bring Vitesse-like sharding to Postgres, paralleling Supabase's Multigress project. Transcript: Jerod Santo Announcing PlanetScale for Postgres. Here's Sam Lambert, PlanetScale CEO, announcing that the Vitesse cloud provider is adding Postgres to its shortlist of supported databases. Quote, PlanetScale has been successful hosting some of the world's largest relational databases, so why are we building for Postgres? The reason is simple. Customer demand. End quote. This is fascinating in the wake of Subabase recently hiring Vitesse co-creator Sugu Sugimarane, which I still don't know how to pronounce, but we'll have him on the show soon, so I'll Find out for sure, to help them build Multigress, which is Vitesse for Postgres. On that topic, Sam says, quote, Vitesse is one of PlanetScale's greatest strengths and has become synonymous with database scaling. Contemporary Vitesse is the product of PlanetScale's experience running at extreme scale. We have made explicit sharding accessible to hundreds End quote. So PlanetScale, which is historically all about Vitesse and MySQL, plans on bringing Vitesse-like sharding to Postgres, but not with Vitesse itself. Meanwhile, Supabase is working on pretty much the same thing with some of the team that built Vitesse in the first place. Imagine what they could create if they teamed up on this initiative, but something tells me that's never going to happen. ([Time 0:06:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/be74b3d9-7303-47d0-95fc-77ab7110a0eb))