Gergely Orosz

Writing The Pragmatic Engineer (@pragmaticengineer.com), the #1 technology newsletter on Substack. Author of The Software Engineer's Guidebook (engguidebook.com). Formerly at Uber, Skype, Skyscanner. More at pragmaticengineer.com

Articles & links

Full article: techcrunch.com/2026/06/12/m... Been writing about exactly this this the last several weeks in paid @Pragmatic_Eng issues, in The Pulse, here btw newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/s/the-pulse

Meta's months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it | TechCrunch techcrunch.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Meta reassigned roughly 6,500 engineers via surprise email to generate AI training data, with workers calling the experience 'literally the gulag.'
  • Over 1,600 Meta employees signed a company-wide petition against keystroke and click monitoring for AI training data collection.
  • Zuckerberg acknowledged in a Friday memo that the changes 'caused distress' and admitted the company made mistakes.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 10 ↻ 2 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 25d ago

Recent commentary

What I’m hearing: Instagram’s Trust and Safery org absolutely gutted the last few weeks. ~60% of the org gone - between layoffs and forced reassignments to data labelling. All while “AI maxxing” pushed a bunch of bugs to prod. And hence why today’s massive Instagram account takeover happening.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 453 ↻ 156 ↩ 8 · 37d ago

Well this is massive: - Every non-US company sees how they can be cut off from US vendors with a snap of a finger. Non-US vendors getting free advertisement - What does this mean for US AI labs’ offices and employees outside the US? Reads pretty draconian What a mess

View on Bluesky · ♥ 229 ↻ 49 ↩ 23 · 25d ago

Well, that's a first. An enterpreneur who I met at a cafe a while back and was a nice guy and said we'd follow up perhaps just sent me an AI-genereated pitch. This wiped out the personal connection I had in my mind with this person. How do people not realize AI does this?

View on Bluesky · ♥ 267 ↻ 29 ↩ 14 · 29d ago

So apparently after Meta leadership: - Force reassigned some of the best devs on teams to AI data labelling fulltime - Laid off another 10% - Started to record every dev’s screen in the US 24/7 They now realized that it has indeed started to destroy their eng culture. And now trying to walk back

View on Bluesky · ♥ 262 ↻ 27 ↩ 6 · 22d ago

Let me know if this is just me: Noticed someone I know who is very "AI-pilled" and uses agents 24/7 to... start to talk IRL noticeably more like these LLMs write. Eg more heavily using adjectives like "geniune", frequently terms like "the shape of" and many more examples

View on Bluesky · ♥ 211 ↻ 15 ↩ 40 · 4d ago

Seeing how SOTA models are evolving: becoming more restrictive in usage (decided by the company), less transparent (you cannot tell if the AI lab nerfed your model) + less private (your prompts are stored, no opt out) makes me much more interested in open models + local inference

View on Bluesky · ♥ 192 ↻ 27 ↩ 11 · 28d ago

Things I really dislike about Fable: 1. Anthropic collects my prompt history, stores it, and does whatever they want with it for 30 days. No opt-out 2. They can nerf their most expensive model without telling me, billing me the same amount, wasting my time. Whenever they want

View on Bluesky · ♥ 194 ↻ 19 ↩ 13 · 28d ago

Situation 1: dev A thinks approach X is correct, dev B thinks Y is the right way. They argue and try to convince each other. Situation 2: dev A thinks approach X is correct, tells the LLM to implement it. There is SO MUCH learning in Situation 1, lost when using LLMs....

View on Bluesky · ♥ 162 ↻ 27 ↩ 14 · 50d ago

Meta had a SEV-0 outage today… less than two weeks after Meta’s most embarrassing undetected-for-too-long account takeover (also an outage) It’s impossible to unsee Meta pushing AI for code + reviews and the end result being more massive outages vs before They are connected

View on Bluesky · ♥ 168 ↻ 14 ↩ 8 · 26d ago

Talked with a few folks inside of AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic) about what they think of the future of software engineering. The “closer” to shipping production code engineers are, the less they believe software engineering will be “solved” fully by AI. The opposite true as well

View on Bluesky · ♥ 135 ↻ 12 ↩ 6 · 12d ago

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