Kai Duan

Really cool role that's going to grow rapidly in the coming AI era. Come shape how the biggest companies on earth manage their money!

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As we enter the agentic era of software development, I am now tracking the ratio of PMs to traditional SWEs and to Forward Deployed Engineers. SWE roles seem to be the most impacted with some teams considering 1-1 PM/SWE ratio in the next 12 months. FDE seems to be trending up. What trends do you see?

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🎉 Major MapLibre success - Rivian integrates a commercial map data source (Google) with the Open Source map visualization stack (MapLibre), offering flexibility and styling consistency across multiple platforms, while avoiding vendor lock-in.

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With everyone headed back to school, feels timely to call out how Samsara is helping keep the kiddos safe too! First Student is partnering up with Samsara to raise the bar for school transportation safety—with Samsara powering AI-driven alerts, predictive insights, and real-time visibility across ~46K vehicles.

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Waymo is steadily capturing market share from ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft. According to a recent Sensor Tower report, the rise of self-driving technology is no longer a distant future—it’s reshaping the mobility landscape right now. What does this mean for the traditional ride-hailing business model? As autonomous vehicles become more reliable and accessible, companies like Uber and Lyft face a fundamental challenge: adapt or risk losing relevance. The convenience and potential cost savings of self-driving fleets could quickly shift consumer preferences. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end for human-driven ride-hailing, or will established players find new ways to compete? The next few years will be critical for the entire industry.

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To all the engineers in my network who might or might not know what test-driven development is: The California government’s approach to innovation is like test-driven development. In some cases it actually *IS* test-driven development. I just found out that California’s failed SB 1047 would have “required developers to perform risk assessments of models prior to release, with guidance from the Government Operations Agency.” (wikipedia) There’s one place where the analogy to test-driven development falls short, though. Whereas in TDD you know what you’re testing for, SB 1047 doesn’t even know what it’s trying to regulate, as its goal is to “mitigate the risk of catastrophic harms from AI models so advanced that they are not yet known to exist.” Unfortunately, the state senator who introduced SB 1047 is back at it and still doesn’t realize he is trying to put the cart before the horse. Source: Politico

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Scaling managers is harder than scaling engineers. Engineers scale through complexity. Managers scale through ambiguity. The shift happens when a manager stops focusing only on their team’s output and starts thinking about adjacent teams, shared dependencies, and organizational load. The managers who grow fastest in my org are the ones who proactively reduce cross-team friction. They don’t wait to be told there’s tension. They surface it and resolve it early. At that point, they’re not just running a team. They’re shaping the system.

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The Qualified Hackathon exemplifies leading with learning. Product engineering leaders and their staff participated. I expect leaders to walk the walk. Jason Mattiace, Bing Yang, and Gopal Patel are running. Qualified’s Agentic Marketing platform triggered Salesforce’s acquisition. Engineers couldn’t move this fast without machine learning. The platform and acquisition prove the game has changed. Yes, software development cycles tend to lag behind technological trends. Writing software with meticulously crafted stories and relying solely on traditional development puts your project at a disadvantage from the very beginning. If you can explain a process, there’s likely an existing tool that can automate the task. Focus on ensuring functionality rather than building line by line. Tools improve, but don’t get caught waiting for the perfect one. The winning strategy is speed with quality.

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San Francisco’s problems aren’t monocausal, but housing scarcity makes almost every problem harder. I wrote a short explainer on the city’s zero-sum politics and anti-growth nostalgia. Link in the comments.

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SWE Tooling Review: Lazygit (https://lnkd.in/gc2Nurt9) Git as a VCS has become the de-facto standard for engineers in 2025, and there is nothing "lazy" about it. Rebases, merging, and conflict resolution can be challenging for engineers not familiar with the intricacies of git. In response, several third-party UIs are available that flatten the learning curve for juniors by abstracting the git complexity away from users. I feel that Lazygit is a great balance between pure command line interface (how git was created and intended to be used by its creator) and some of the more "aesthetic" UIs available. Lazygit meets engineers where they are at daily: the terminal. Its TUI (Terminal User Interface) is minimal, with keyboard shortcuts for everything. It shows you the actual git commands it is running, to show how you COULD execute the commands via CLI. Where I've been using Lazygit most, is during agentic coding sessions with Opencode. Lazygit on one side, Opencode on the other. I can closely monitor what files and changes the LLM agent is making, even committing and locking in changes as it progresses.

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