StaffEng I Haven't Opened an IDE Since November — Will Maier
17 snips
Mar 11, 2026 
Will Maier, who leads growth engineering at Stripe with a non-CS background, reflects on a late-November AI inflection and why he stopped opening an IDE. He recounts holiday hacking—building a Lua distribution from his phone—and explains skills-as-markdown, token-measurement surprises, and the psychology and organizational dynamics shaping AI adoption in large engineering teams.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
November 2025 Marked A Qualitative Inflection
- Will identifies late November 2025 as a qualitative inflection when model quality and tooling (skills, harnesses) made new workflows feasible.
- The jump in model capability plus humans learning better workflows produced a rapid, compounding change in what's possible.
Holiday Prototype Built With Claude And Cosmopolitan
- Will spent the December holiday building a Lua distribution and agent harness using Claude to automate much of the work.
- He patched Cosmopolitan libc, exposed C standard lib to Lua, and iterated from his phone while doing laundry, showing rapid personal prototyping.
Build Small Skills That Critique Not Replace Work
- Do extract simple improvised skills (markdown files) to support humans rather than replace them, like an incident report critic that improves reports without writing them.
- Small 100-line skills shared internally scale quickly and raise report quality while preserving learning-by-doing.