The Pulse #157: Internal dev tooling at Meta & the “trajectories” feature
Also: GitHub upsets devs by charging for self-hosted CI/CD, Warsaw could become the EU’s new “tech capital”, hiring juniors is profitable now, and more
Before we start, two things:
Check out our new MCP report! Elin and I have done something experimental: create a more detailed report than even our MCP deepdive was. If you’d like to get deeper into the MCP ecosystem, check out the report. Feel free to give feedback, as we’d like to do more of these if there’s enough interest to justify the intensive research involved. This is the most detailed report on this topic that we know about.
The Pragmatic Summit speaker list is nearly finalized. Speakers confirmed in the past few weeks include some names you may know as guests on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast: Chip Huyen, Martin Fowler, Nicole Forsgren, and Kent Beck. I’ll share the detailed agenda in early January. The event takes place on 11 February, in San Francisco. Apply here to secure a spot.
The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups.
Today, we cover:
Internal dev tooling at Meta & “trajectories.” An overview of three different internal AI-coding tools which devs at Meta use. Also, the company has started sharing the prompts which devs make when generating code – and it’s pretty controversial.
GitHub upsets devs by charging for self-hosted CI/CD. GitHub Actions is notoriously slow and unreliable. But instead of improving the service, GitHub sought to charge by the minute for using third-party CI/CD solutions. That didn’t go down well with devs.
Industry Pulse. Warsaw on track to become the “tech capital of the EU,” hiring juniors could actually be “profitable” thanks to AI tools, GitHub is working on stacked diffs, non-devs use LLMs for more coding tasks, Cursor migrates CMS to Markdown, OpenAI gets rid of 6-month vesting cliff, and more.
“Apple Tax” alive in Japan. A US court rejected Apple’s appeal, and the iPhone maker can no longer ban alternative in-app payments or impose junk fees on third-party payments… in the US. Meanwhile in Japan, Apple is pulling the same trick that got it in trouble in the US.
1. Internal dev tooling at Meta & “trajectories”
An interesting detail about Meta that I learnt from chatting with two current software engineers there: last week, the social media giant rolled out a feature allowing devs to see the AI prompt history on diffs (internal lingo for pull requests) in review. And this new feature launch is causing some controversy in the workplace!