Alt F4
Software that outlasts the hype.
Alt F4 is a software company in Munich. This site is where we follow the world of software development and its changes. There have been 2,052 posts since 2010, and now and then you'll find an essay. The rest of the time we build procurement software, and occasionally something else.
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- Source control and turnaround time is becoming a bottleneck in the era of agentic coding. Anthropic thinks they solved it.
Ask an investor what a moat is and you get the catechism: network effects, switching costs, brand, scale. Ask an engineer and you get something closer to the truth. Rebuilding this thing would have cost someone five years and twelve people, and nobody wanted to pay for it.
That someone now has an agent. Feature parity is within reach in less time than ever, and the agent reads a competitor’s API just as fast as yours. Effort is no longer a defence.
But not everything's lost. You still need to know the domain, and you still need to talk to people — the customer who tells you over lunch which feature she actually uses, and that the one you’re proudest of isn’t it. You need taste. You need someone who can look at a screen and say it’s wrong before they can say why. And that little bit of human creativity, knowing when and where to bend the rules.
Unfortunately, none of that was ever on the salary bill.
- State of the art full text and vector search for Postgres, is now GA.
- Single shot, on Opus 5.5: Invisible Cities. Background.
- Speed isn't the only metric for delegating to AI. Dishwasher mode puts it well: that dishwasher might be slower than you, but it works while you do something else, and clean beats fast (at least for dishes). The ideal tasks are narrow, annoying, and off the critical path.
Let's talk.
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