David Crawshaw. Co-founder and CEO of exe.dev, a developer tools company. Previously co-founded Tailscale, where he served as CTO. Writes about software engineering and AI-era development at crawshaw.io and blog.exe.dev.
Operating themes
- Open source as the AI extension model Source code replaces extension APIs in an agent-driven world; any devtool that restricts access to its code limits how much an agent can personalize and maintain it.
- Agent-driven maintenance loops Nightly cron jobs running AI prompts can automate the fetch-rebase-verify cycle for open-source dependencies, reducing human overhead to an initial customization prompt.
- Personalization as a first-class product property Software with a fixed feature set is weaker in an agent era than software that can be shaped to a user's needs without programming.