Building React Native Apps, Investor, and Tech Evangelist š„ | Ex @penta_medical YC S18 | React.js | Remote at @FullscriptHQ š» šØš¦ | OSS ā¤
Toronto, Ontario
Joined March 2010
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- Following6.1K
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Just open sourced a React Native library for on device NSFW image detection using CoreML š±
It runs fully on iOS, classifies images locally, and doesnāt send any data to a server.
Repo: github.com/watadarkstar/reacā¦
If youāre building React Native apps and need privacy friendly image moderation, check it out and please give the repository a star āļø
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse.
We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.
It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent.
Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it.
[Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]
Adrian Carolli retweeted
At Callstack, most of our time goes to building applications for many platforms. We're building Sentinel with that use case in mind. Powered by our tooling and model.
Excited to announce Project Sentinel: a code review and verification agent, built for mobile apps, powered by @apex__ai model.
Early benchmarks look promising:
āŖprecision: 82.5%
āŖrecall: 40%
āŖseverity alignment: 80%
We're rolling it out internally today. GA š
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Yes! useReducer (and state machines, when needed) have ALWAYS been the better default.
Devs just avoided them because upfront modeling felt like too much work.
Agents don't care. They're not lazy, and explicit logic keeps them from doing dumb things.
We just built this for an internal hackathon with EAS simulators. Glad its becoming more common š
When agents can verify their changes you start to unlock true agentic workflows.
Excited to announce Project Sentinel: a code review and verification agent, built for mobile apps, powered by @apex__ai model.
Early benchmarks look promising:
āŖprecision: 82.5%
āŖrecall: 40%
āŖseverity alignment: 80%
We're rolling it out internally today. GA š
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Iād love to buy @spolsky a coffee and ask him whether AI has changed his thinking on rewriting software.
Does he still stand by his 2000 article? And how would he think about moving from React Native to Native today?
For more than a decade, I was firmly against rewriting software from scratch. AI has changed my view of the economics enough to make me reconsider. I still think itās a high-stakes decision, but some of my old assumptions deserve another look.
It reminds me of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile: seeing someone do what seemed out of reach can change what others believe is possible.
But thatās also where I get cautious.
When we read about companies moving from React Native to Native, weāre seeing a selected set of stories i.e. Shopify, Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. A successful transition makes a compelling engineering blog post. An abandoned rewrite is probably less likely to get one.
We donāt know how many teams tried, failed, and quietly moved on.
AI may be changing the cost of a rewrite. It doesnāt remove the need to understand why youāre doing it, what you could lose, and whether your team can carry it through.
Iām more open to rewrites than I used to be. Iām still wary of treating the stories we hear as evidence of how often they work.
Has AI changed your threshold for considering a rewrite?
joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/0ā¦
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Debating just straight-up banning useState in my React apps
Push the agent into the black hole of success
Iād love to buy @spolsky a coffee and ask him whether AI has changed his thinking on rewriting software.
Does he still stand by his 2000 article? And how would he think about moving from React Native to Native today?
For more than a decade, I was firmly against rewriting software from scratch. AI has changed my view of the economics enough to make me reconsider. I still think itās a high-stakes decision, but some of my old assumptions deserve another look.
It reminds me of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile: seeing someone do what seemed out of reach can change what others believe is possible.
But thatās also where I get cautious.
When we read about companies moving from React Native to Native, weāre seeing a selected set of stories i.e. Shopify, Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. A successful transition makes a compelling engineering blog post. An abandoned rewrite is probably less likely to get one.
We donāt know how many teams tried, failed, and quietly moved on.
AI may be changing the cost of a rewrite. It doesnāt remove the need to understand why youāre doing it, what you could lose, and whether your team can carry it through.
Iām more open to rewrites than I used to be. Iām still wary of treating the stories we hear as evidence of how often they work.
Has AI changed your threshold for considering a rewrite?
joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/0ā¦
Adrian Carolli retweeted
šØĀ app store banners can autoplay videos now
new in iOS 27, and almost nobodyās using it yet
super easy to build with claude motion design šš»
preview videos already lift installs up to 30%
add it to your release checklist
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Starting to see more and more of this agentic workflow across our customer base š
The mobile factory is humming @expo - everyone is reaching for this type of setup:
1. agents pick up linear tickets
2. spawn simulators to fix them
3. submit PRs
4. 10-20 going at a time
5. Run your test suite
6. Deploy to Production via Update or Build
Adrian Carolli retweeted
The mobile factory is humming @expo - everyone is reaching for this type of setup:
1. agents pick up linear tickets
2. spawn simulators to fix them
3. submit PRs
4. 10-20 going at a time
5. Run your test suite
6. Deploy to Production via Update or Build
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Starting to hear of more teams skipping PRs and doing true trunk-based dev.
The argument: PRs make less sense in the age of agentic coding.
The agent is the author, not me. So I, the prompter, am the first reviewer. One or more AIs operate as second reviewer.
Eliminating PRs unlocks radically more throughput - At Amp they do over 100 releases a day.
21 people, a single meeting a week, no quarterly goals, no pull requests, no mandatory code review, no titles (except one dictator), a hundred releases a day, bugs fixed in minutes, famous for killing features.
@sqs and @thorstenball on how the Amp team works:
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Thereāll be times where you over-guide the AI. It knows better than you and is more intelligent than you.
Thereāll be times where you under-guide the AI. It can go off-track, have the wrong biases, or miss context.
How well you manage this superpower is the #0 skill I look for.
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Same, wrong level of abstraction for this next phase. They had a good run.
Adrian Carolli retweeted
Why a 3x CTO went back to a 25-person team. From Will Larson @lethain, Imprint CTO and 4x book author.
"It's a hard time in middle management, right? There's a lot more competition for these roles. What I found personally very rewarding is getting back into the details of writing software.
When I left Carta, my team was around 250. When I joined Imprint, the team I was leading was 25.
This a unique moment to actually re-skill. If you're in management, I think right now either you have to get back into the details, or the world is changing so radically that the profession you know will not be valued in three years. You sort of have to decide, am I retiring now or am I re-skilling?
I think there has to be some openness to taking a backward step or a lateral step. What I knew I wanted was getting back into the details and relearning how to do software in the current age. That's what I believe is going to be the unlock to the longevity of my career."