The Pulse #161: open source projects overwhelmed by AI-generated security reports
Also: AI agents keep changing engineers’ working styles, layoffs at big and profitable companies, “AI-native” techies increasingly in demand, and more
The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Hit reply and share it with me.
Today, we cover:
New trend: open source projects overwhelmed by AI-generated security reports. Projects like Node.js, Django, and Fastify are restricting or dropping vulnerability reporting platforms like HackerOne.
AI agents keep changing engineers’ working styles. Four cases of tech professionals changing how they work thanks to AI agents – including Uncle Bob Martin (author of “Clean Code”) who might entertain the possibility that code readability matters less with AI.
Layoffs at big, profitable companies. Amazon cuts 16,000 corporate jobs and Pinterest lays off 15% of staff, despite the businesses being profitable. Both sets of job losses seem “quarterly-driven” and timed before earnings announcements.
“AI-native” techies increasingly in-demand: two stories. A product manager who spent 2,500 hours building with AI agents finally landed his dream engineering job specifically because he’s “AI-native.” Meanwhile, a startup failed to hire a junior AI engineer in two months of searching.
Industry Pulse. Claude Code installs exploded in January, OpenAI acqui-hired most of the Cline team, Anthropic forces Clawdbot rebrand, GitHub is finally fixing its slow UI, China’s Kimi K2.5 matches Opus 4.5 for a fraction of the cost, and one AI code review vendor questions whether the space is in a bubble.
Programming note: for the next two weeks, I’ll be travelling in the US, so there will be articles on Tuesdays and new podcast episodes on Wednesdays during that fortnight. The upcoming podcast episode is with the legendary Grady Booch, who offers some much-needed perspective on how the rapid change being wrought by AI agents has actually occurred before, and many software engineers back then were similarly worried that the technological leap would kill the tech industry. Of course, the opposite happened.