Slow down to speed up: so much has changed in 6 months’ time

Scheduling note: there will be no edition of The Pulse on Thursday as I’m in San Francisco for the next week and a half, visiting AI labs and startups, and attending the AI Engineer World Fair from next Monday. For the podcast and Tuesday articles, it’s business as usual.

Three weeks ago, at Craft Conference, in Budapest, Hungary, I opened the event with a keynote titled ‘Slow Down to Speed Up’.

As with most of my talks, it came together in stages, including with some input from full subscribers to the Pragmatic Engineer, with whom I shared my thinking in advance, in ‘Ideas: slow down to speed up when working with AI agents’. Thank you for all the comments!

As fate would have it, just two days beforehand, social media giant Meta appositely provided a real-world case study for my talk, with its most embarrassing outage of all time: users could simply ask the Meta AI to change the email of any account, and the bot happily complied – even if the account belonged to someone else entirely – including a former US president. It was a timely example to kick off the talk with. Check out the full keynote that’s available to view on YouTube:

Watch the keynote video

In this article, I summarize the key parts of my Craft Conference keynote in detail, and some responses received at the event. Full subscribers also have access to the slides, here, and at the foot of this article.

We cover:

1. Meta: “AI psychosis” in effect? Meta has been destroying its engineering org, and an obsessive focus on AI seems to be one reason for it. For more on this question, check out this deep dive.

2. Everything’s changed in six months. From around November last year, things changed with a more capable generation of AI agents like Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.4.

3. How are tech companies changing how they work? Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Uber, startups, and traditional companies.

4. Trends. Individual productivity is up, but team productivity’s flat, tokenmaxxing and tooling adoption, vanishing middle management, CEOs and CTOs back to coding, and more.

5. Trends across software. Falling software quality, GitHub’s constant reliability woes, AI slop overwhelming devs who care about quality, and more.

6. Advice for software engineers and engineering leaders. Suggestions to help future-proof a career.

7. Feedback. “It’s happening here too!” is a common theme, and relief for some that it’s not unique to their own workplace.

1. Meta: “AI psychosis” in effect?

I thought it was a made-up story when I read that Meta had enabled account takeovers via a “zero auth” policy; i.e., simply asking the Meta AI bot was sufficient to change any account’s email address. After all, shipping such a regression would fly in the face of security measures, code reviews, automated testing, and metrics. Plus, the company has dedicated Integrity teams whose mission statement is to ensure something like this never happens… And yet, this bug shipped.

It went undetected by anyone at Meta, and high-profile accounts like that of former US president, Barack Obama, were taken over as a result. Instagram’s dedicated Integrity team seems to have discovered the embarrassing issue via the news.

As mentioned, it was two days before the Craft keynote, so there was enough time to ask around at Instagram and Meta. Engineers at the company there told me this disaster was caused by AI-generated, AI-reviewed code, along with layoffs, and by forced reassignments from Integrity teams and elsewhere onto AI labeling and related duties.

The problem at Meta seems to be that leadership is aggressively pushing AI, while withdrawing resources and headcount from areas responsible for security, quality, and reliability. Since last week’s deepdive into what’s been happening behind the scenes was published, I’ve learned further details:

• Integrity teams at WhatsApp have been hit hard by layoffs and enforced data-labeling reassignments

• Instagram’s design team suffered a 44% cut in headcount during layoffs