Slack Insights

A tech leader shares their successful implementation of a multi-agent AI system that produces enterprise-grade code through specialized Claude instances working as a coordinated engineering team with rigorous review processes.

Discussion comparing custom OpenAI-based code review solutions with specialized services like CodeRabbit, highlighting cost differences, performance variations between models (GPT-5, Codex, Claude), and practical implementation through GitHub Actions.

Announcement of the upcoming CTO Summit 2025 featuring high-profile speakers like Bjarne Stroustrup and Charity Majors, with program highlights and connection to code.talks event.

Announcement of an upcoming CTO Summit on November 5th featuring speakers, networking opportunities, and food, with a calendar link and invitation for suggestions.

A tech leader seeks CTO-level insights on building custom Operations Research solutions for airline scheduling (aircraft, crews, maintenance) to replace third-party systems, receiving an offer for knowledge sharing from someone with direct experience at a major Dutch airline.

A resource-sharing thread featuring detailed summaries of 50+ AI companies and their products, providing a valuable overview of the current AI application landscape based on an a16z report.

A tech leader considering migrating from Slack to Microsoft Teams due to price increases receives strong cautionary feedback from peers who experienced significant collaboration and productivity losses after making similar transitions.

Announcement of a Masterclass by Vercel's Mark Knichel on strategies to improve developer velocity in large organizations, covering incremental builds, microfrontends, and practical approaches to common development bottlenecks.

Announcement of a focused 60-minute online session for tech leaders to exchange current practices, failures, and working patterns around applied AI in engineering and product teams, with strong community interest shown through 65 positive reactions.

A SaaS startup leader seeks advice on implementing structured compensation with salary bands before Series A funding, receiving recommendations for comprehensive resources including a masterclass recording, slides, and a public template.

Tech leaders discuss the release of Claude Sonnet 4.5 with 1M token context window and Claude Code 2.0, comparing its performance against other coding assistants and sharing their experiences with different interfaces.

A community member shared a summary of a research paper showing significant productivity gains from an AI coding assistant called DeputyDev, which reduced PR review cycle time by 31.8% and increased code output for high-adoption users.

A user shared an arXiv paper about a real-world study showing significant productivity gains from an AI coding assistant called DeputyDev, with another member requesting and receiving a comprehensive summary of the research findings.

Discussion on security approaches for Machine Callable Packages (MCPs) when making them accessible organization-wide, covering RBAC, JWT authentication, centralized gateways, and comprehensive security considerations.

A technical discussion comparing Claude Code SDK and OpenAI's Codex, with one participant sharing extensive experience using Claude Code SDK for automated code review, refactoring, and documentation.

Discussion about implementing an internal open-source concept where a small team maintains core software components while enabling other teams to contribute directly to reduce bottlenecks.

A tech leader seeks advice on AWS architecture decisions for launching a standalone SaaS product alongside their existing platform, focusing on account strategy, data segregation, shared services, and compliance requirements for German enterprise customers.

A tech leader shares frustrations with German cloud provider Stackit's technical limitations and documentation issues, prompting others to suggest alternatives while one participant expresses optimism about Stackit's future potential.

A community member seeks leadership coach recommendations for a CTO colleague preparing for a difficult conversation with their CEO, receiving three specific suggestions including Laura Tacho and ForChiefs.

Matthias Laug announces his new venture Terraspark, co-founded with Jasper and Sanjay, focusing on space-based solar power with the goal of becoming Europe's first global energy provider.

Discussion of Wiz's approach to maintaining agility at scale by shifting from incubating teams to incubating POCs, enabling rapid innovation while avoiding common pitfalls between CTO and product teams.

The discussion explores whether to embed a lightweight BI tool in a B2B SaaS platform to allow customers to create their own charts, with participants sharing experiences, technical considerations, and strategic advice about different approaches based on customer data maturity.

Microsoft France's director publicly acknowledged during a French government hearing that they cannot guarantee French citizens' data won't be shared with US authorities when legally required, despite claims about EU data sovereignty.

A tech leader shares their positive experience with NVIDIA's small Parakeet speech-to-text model, highlighting its ability to be fine-tuned for domain-specific terminology in just two hours while running efficiently on modest hardware.

A developer shares JMux, a Python package for streaming structured JSON from LLMs that improved their app's response time from 20s to 4s, with community members discussing similar tools like BAML and Instructor.

A tech leader seeks frameworks to present AI adoption/maturity across their organization to board members, covering various use cases, industry benchmarking, and business impact, with community members offering survey tools and discussing the challenge of realistic AI representation amid hype.

Discussion on approaches to implementing LLMs with highly sensitive health data while maintaining strict data protection standards, weighing options between self-hosting and using certified providers like Stackit.

Tech leaders discuss their experiences using AI tools like Claude, Phoebe, and custom solutions to automate DevOps and on-call tasks across multiple tech stacks.

A tech leader seeks insights on migrating from Asana to Linear, receiving positive feedback from someone who successfully transitioned from Jira to Linear with excellent adoption and minimal customization needs.

A tech leader seeks recommendations for agentic workflow solutions that automate E2E test creation from PRDs or Gherkin stories, receiving suggestions ranging from AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code to specialized testing platforms like Checksum.ai and Stagehand.

The community reached and celebrated the significant milestone of 1000 members, generating enthusiastic reactions from numerous participants.

A CPTO shares their frustration with being pulled away from technical work into business operations for over a year, until meeting two inspiring new leaders who want to help them return to tech-focused responsibilities.

A tech leader shares Google's new computer use model for browser automation, noting they're already achieving good results with local Phi-4 models and Stagehand, while another member recommends Director.ai for natural language web automations.

A humorous late-night coding project proposing to 'solve' microservices by letting LLMs handle everything sparked amusement and playful discussion about the absurdity of modern tech stacks.

Community members share and discuss news about OpenAI's forthcoming agent builder platform that appears to offer integrated workflow capabilities similar to n8n/make.

Users share experiences and solutions for preventing Cursor AI agent from accidentally deleting databases during development, particularly when using Docker containers and Laravel migrations.

A developer shares that GPT-5 Codex outperforms Claude Code/Sonnet4 for React Native and Python development despite UI limitations, while another user acknowledges its quality but prefers Claude's UX.

Discussion comparing Claude's team collaboration features to other AI providers like ChatGPT, Gemini, and NotebookLM, with a focus on project sharing capabilities that make Claude potentially superior for team use.

The thread discusses options for implementing a customer support voice bot for German-speaking customers with strict EU data residency requirements, with participants suggesting specific providers like lautmaler.de and yoummday.

Discussion questioning Germany's digital sovereignty tech stack that paradoxically includes US-based technologies like GitHub Actions, Angular, and React despite requirements for replaceability with manageable effort.

Discussion about the feasibility of building reusable plugins across different e-commerce platforms, with insights on implementation differences and existing connector solutions.

Discussion on what profile to hire for automating processes and improving interfaces between internal systems for non-engineering teams, with suggestions ranging from specialized titles to creating dedicated automation teams.

A member urgently sought recommendations for a tax advisor who can handle German freelancers working in other EU countries, received several suggestions, and ultimately chose Guhr Steuerberatung for their responsiveness and digital-first approach.

A member shared GitHub's resource about implementing AI coding assistants in engineering organizations, highlighting that even GitHub struggled with adoption due to change management challenges rather than technical issues.

A startup handling sensitive health data seeks recommendations for German managed service providers who can handle device management, security policies, and provide GDPR-compliant documentation for their small team of about 20 employees.

Discussion about structuring contracts and navigating regulatory requirements when providing fractional work or consulting services to the German public healthcare sector, particularly regarding compliance with 'Entgeltverordnung' salary regulations.

A community member sought recommendations for C++ and desktop app development specialists, receiving a specific agency referral that was positively acknowledged.

Tech leaders discuss experiences and cost savings when migrating from DataDog to Grafana solutions for observability platforms, with multiple participants confirming significant cost reductions.

A request for recommendations on German agencies with Magnolia CMS expertise received two specific suggestions: Neoskop and IBM iX Berlin (formerly Aperto).

A discussion about migrating data between Slack workspaces, including private channels and DMs, with specific focus on Grid-to-regular Slack migrations and recommendations for the Backupery tool.

A discussion about n8n Enterprise pricing that evolved into sharing information about their Business Plan costs and Node-Red as a potential open-source alternative for workflow automation.

A tech leader is looking for advice and experiences regarding cybersecurity insurance for their German company, with another member offering to share their recent experience.

A community member is promoting a free workshop on Kubernetes and GitOps using OpenTelekomCloud as a sovereign alternative to US hyperscaler clouds, with other members expressing surprise at finding fellow OTC users.

A discussion about aicx, a German enterprise AI platform with security-first approach, sparking a broader conversation about implementing AI solutions with proper data privacy considerations, especially for German companies.

A tech leader seeks recommendations for AI generation tools beyond Gemini Pro and Sora for creating YouTube ads, receiving suggestions for Heygen and Synthesia along with advice on proper prompt structuring.

Community members share their experiences with Cursor 2.0's new agent-first UX and proprietary Composer 1 model, highlighting its impressive speed while noting areas for improvement in code quality and browser integration.

A user shares the Verbalized Sampling technique that improves AI model diversity by adding '... and corresponding probabilities' to prompts, with research showing 1.6-2.1x better diversity over direct prompting.

Community members share a resource about DGX Spark setup issues and discuss alternative hardware choices like the Blackwell RTX6000, with one member beginning their DGX journey and promising to report findings.

A tech leader explores implementing Google Gemini Enterprise as the company-wide AI chat solution for non-technical staff, with community members confirming SSO integration capabilities, data protection agreements, and offering implementation support.

A tech leader shares their experience using GitHub Spec Kit with Claude for spec-driven development, highlighting improved output quality and documentation but noting challenges with output volume and token costs.

Tech leaders discuss security concerns around 1Password's new 'agentic autofill' feature that allows AI agents to use credentials in virtual browser sessions, with participants expressing skepticism about credential security and control.

Discussion exploring the technical feasibility and business implications of using real-time bank transfers instead of traditional payment providers to avoid the typical ~3% transaction fees.

A tech leader seeks to compare notes on GitLab pricing for 100-200 users (Premium vs Ultimate tiers), receiving feedback from peers about their experiences with GitLab pricing, alternatives, and considerations between self-managed and cloud options.

A community member is announcing that two fellow members are presenting at code.talks at 3PM on Stage 3 and is asking who else will attend the session.

A discussion sparked by an article questioning cloud cost-effectiveness, with a response highlighting the importance of implementing guardrails and cost monitoring to prevent runaway cloud expenses.

A discussion seeking privacy-focused alternatives to Crashlytics/Firebase for a secure recorder app, with community members recommending self-hosted Sentry and PostHog as viable options.

A tech leader seeks external review of their Data Mesh implementation plan for a platform with 25 engineers and 10 data team members managing multiple web applications on AWS.

A tech leader seeks recommendations for tools that consolidate infrastructure costs from multiple providers (AWS, Azure, etc.) into a single dashboard, receiving suggestions for Vantage.sh and DataDog's cost integration features.

Jakob requests brief interviews with community members to gather insights for his go-to-market strategy for a new Fractional CTO and tech assessment business.

A member requests restricting @channel mentions as they find all such notifications unnecessary, particularly in what they describe as a marketing channel, with an admin promising to review the situation.

A request for recommendations on outsourced development partners in Eastern Europe to build GoodNotes for Android and Windows tablets using React, receiving three vendor suggestions from community members.

A brief exchange noting that Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry) is experiencing a global outage, with additional insight that the underlying S3 centralization is causing pipeline failures.

Brief announcement of an AWS outage in the us-east-1 region occurring on a Monday, garnering acknowledgment from community members through reactions.

A community member successfully rallies participants to complete the alphalist x Albany Partners CTPO Debate Survey, offering an iPad as a prize incentive and ultimately exceeding their goal with 111 responses.

A tech leader shares their new open-source ERP project built with TypeScript and AI assistance (Codex), highlighting its modular architecture, multi-tenant capabilities, and modern tech stack while seeking feedback and contributors.

A free, ready-to-use AI in Engineering Survey was shared to help engineering leaders identify barriers to AI adoption, successful use cases, untapped opportunities, and changing roles within their teams.

A solo founder announces the public launch of DoneThat.ai, an AI-powered time tracking tool that automates activity monitoring after a quick 2-minute setup, on Product Hunt after six months of iteration with early users.

A community member shared a link to Gumloop's AI Champions showcase session featuring Anthropic, Cursor, Gumloop, and Vercel, noting it contained marketing content but also valuable ideas.

A community member shared Google's announcement of their Agents to Payments (AP2) protocol, which enables AI agents to make payments, prompting skeptical reactions about potential risks.

Request for a local CTO mentor/coach to help a friend's small boutique firm (15-20 FTE) in Graz, Austria implement better structure and processes.

A channel announcement inviting members to participate in a 3-minute anonymous survey about whether companies should have separate CTO and CPO roles or a unified CTPO position, with participants eligible to win an iPad.

A community member is seeking a cybersecurity expert to join a podcast discussion with a privacy expert about whether organizations can build a unified model that satisfies both privacy and security requirements.

A tech leader inquires about which AI tools, libraries, or platforms have made the biggest impact on other teams, receiving mentions of Claude Code, Playwright MCP, and CodeRabbit/Qodo.

A member is seeking insights about the Cosmic subsidy program for AI energy solutions and requesting brief calls with others who have experience with this funding opportunity.

A tech leader shares Gemini's comically literal interpretation of a request to summarize weekly status updates from a Confluence page, generating amusement among peers.

A developer inquires about using GenAI tools like Cursor to improve ABAP development efficiency, receiving feedback that current AI models aren't well-tuned for ABAP, though Google and SAP are working on specialized solutions.

A community member shared information about Claude AI's deprecated output styles, advising users to review options in `/output-style` and use CLAUDE.md or plugins instead, with reference to version 2.0.30.

A tech leader is seeking community feedback on Codeligence, a German company that builds AI agents for non-coding development tasks like story refinement and QA testing improvement.

Announcement of an AI Roundtable event with clarification that October 30th is the correct date after a member noted receiving invites for two different dates.

A brief discussion about OpenAI's new product announcement where participants express underwhelming reactions and compare it to alternatives like Comet, Dia, and Arc.

A brief exchange about an upcoming AI roundtable event, with confirmation that invitations will be sent out the following day and indication of interest from community members.

A brief discussion about the Uncloud deployment tool, where participants share their experiences and compare it to alternatives like Kamal and Docker Swarm for simple deployment needs.

A tech leader is seeking senior full-stack mobile freelancers with React Native and TypeScript experience for a short-term project, which sparked a brief side discussion about mobile app build and deployment tools like Bitrise and Expo.

A tech leader is seeking recommendations for quality freelancers for PowerPoint slide deck creation and website development after having poor experiences with Fiverr contractors.

Users report experiencing slow GitHub operations and connection failures despite GitHub's status page showing all systems operational, raising questions about service reliability monitoring.

A tech leader seeks negotiation insights on Stripe's 1% invoicing fee while considering alternatives to Invoiced.com, receiving a recommendation for Chargebee as a multi-gateway solution.

A community member is seeking recent information on enterprise pricing (500+ engineers) for Engineering Intelligence Platforms like Swarmia, LinearB, or Haystack, with another member suggesting additional platforms and a potential contact for pricing information.

A request for affordable videographer recommendations for product videos (without live action filming) received a specific referral that was appreciated by the original poster.

A humorous post jokingly claiming to have obtained AWS's internal deployment strategy, which received numerous laughing reactions from the community.

A brief message expressing empathy for those affected by a technical incident in Seattle while noting the value of post-incident analyses that typically follow such events.

The thread humorously points out that downtime monitoring services like downdetector.com and isdown.app were themselves experiencing outages, with members appreciating the irony.

A tech leader is seeking help with Amazon Seller API migration to the new Solution Provider Portal, expressing frustration over threatening emails despite completing all required steps and receiving no clear confirmation from Amazon support.

A tech leader seeks advice on scalable methods for sourcing Elixir Phoenix talent beyond Stack Overflow and meetups, receiving an offer for direct engineer referrals.

A community member inquired about the code.talks 2025 conference schedule for travel planning purposes, and organizers responded that the schedule is being finalized and provided general timing information.

A tech leader is experiencing persistent race conditions with Telnyx's telephony service affecting call forwarding functionality and seeks community input on whether to migrate to Twilio based on others' experiences with both providers.

A tech leader is seeking practical experiences from anyone involved in follow-on damages claims related to the 2018 European Commission's €4.34 billion fine against Google in the Android antitrust case, particularly regarding Google Adwords costs.

A tech leader is seeking more comprehensive frameworks and resources for legacy modernization that go beyond Gartner's 8Rs, including methods for goal definition, system assessment, effort estimation, and progress tracking.

A tech leader seeks recommendations for tools beyond Miro to document team topologies with better metadata capabilities for personnel planning and team health tracking.

A brief exchange sharing concerns about humanoid robots alongside an impressive demonstration video, highlighting the tension between technological advancement and potential risks.

A community member shared information about upcoming Cursor office hours in Berlin, but another member noted it was too short notice for them to attend.

A brief exchange noting that DynamoDB is experiencing an outage attributed to DNS issues, with community members acknowledging the common occurrence of DNS-related problems.

A brief statement about AI's undeniable logic generated engagement from community members who responded with positive emoji reactions, suggesting agreement or amusement.

Brief comment appreciating Claude's ability to 'un-deprecate output styles' in code, noting it as a learning opportunity for new terminology.