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crubier

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Head of Engineering at Skydio for Drones as First Responders (DFR) Autonomous drones are becoming a crucial piece of infrastructure, just like wireless networks

https://www.skydio.com/

If you consider yourself a [Frontend|Backend|Infra|Robotics|Machine Learning|Computer Vision] Engineer please reach out!

https://twitter.com/crubier https://github.com/crubier

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Waymo Premier 28 days ago

How do you fix this for public transport? You transform it into Waymo / Robotaxi.

Waymo Premier 1 month ago

Walking to the station isn't even the bad part. The bad part is then walking 3min in tunnels smelling like piss to get to the platform, then waiting 7min more for the train to arrive, then walk 3min more to get out of another piss-filled station. That's 10-15 of absolutely-not-enjoyable subway station.

Waymo Premier 1 month ago

Absolutely not.

At the VERY least, the road blockers should be fined the cost they caused to society.

Block Golden gate bridge for 1h30min for 10,000 people (Avg salary $50/h)? That will be 1.5 * 10,000 * 50 = $750,000 damage.

Skydio | Robotics / Drones / Cloud / Web engineers | San Mateo CA, Zurich CH, or Hybrid | https://www.skydio.com/careers

Skydio is the leading U.S. drone company and world leader in autonomous flight. Our drones are used for inspecting the energy grid, de-escalating life and death scenarios in public safety, inspecting bridges, giving soldiers better situational awareness on the battlefield, search and rescue missions, and more. We serve the core industries that our civilization runs on and have life-saving impact.

If you’re interested in being a core member of a 250+ person world-class engineering and research team that is defining the future of a major emerging industry,

We’re looking for a diverse combination of engineers, researchers, and managers with strong SW skills and experience across complex products. We’re particularly interested in people with robotics, web, deep learning, game dev, streaming or cloud experience.

I am a Senior Director of Engineering there and a YC S18 alumni, we're looking at all applications from the careers page. https://www.skydio.com/careers#job-listing

Come on, do you actually think "corporate engineers" care about what you are doing individually? Do you think they look specifically for you and make fun at your individual usage pattern? Do you think it gives them interesting information about your private life?

No one cares, there are millions of users, no one is going to look at your data, and even less be able to actually know which person a given user is.

We legit just want to know aggregated and objective information about how people use our products so we can make it better for you.

"Why do all corporate try to spy on our usage patterns?" Because the ones who don't have a crap product and all died long ago.

somethings can be one-shotted and some things cant

True but my point is that people vastly underestimate what is one-shottable.

In my experience, 80% of the times an average "non-believer" SW engineer with 7 years experience says something is not one-shottable, I, with my 15 years of experience, think it is fact one-shottable. And 20% of the time, I do verify that by one-shotting it on my free time.

I see your point, but

1. I am also on the receiving end of this. My boss often codes and vibecodes, and no one feels like they have to merge their stuff. We only merge it if it meets the high quality standard we have. And there is no drama for blocking a PR in our culture. 2. I am fairly deep in the trenches myself and I know when my PRs are high quality and when they are not. And that does not correlate with use of AI in my experience.

I get it, but as a "AI expert and senior leader" myself in my 1,000 people organization (in relative terms), the disconnect I have is:

A lot of what non-believers say matches "enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises". They would then say they need 2 weeks to work on a specific project, the good old way, maybe with some light AI use along the way.

But then I'm like "hmm actually let me try this real quick" and I prompt Claude for 3 minutes, and 30 minutes later it has one-shotted the whole "two weeks project". It then gets reviewed and merged by the "non-believers". This happens repeatedly.

So overall, I think the lack of enthusiasm is largely a skill issue. Not having the skill is fine, but not being willing to learn the skill is the real issue.

I see things changing, as "non-believers" eventually start to realize that they need to evolve or be toast. But it's slower than I imagined.

Skydio | Robotics / Drones / Cloud / Web engineers | San Mateo CA, Zurich CH, or Hybrid | https://www.skydio.com/careers

Skydio is the leading U.S. drone company and world leader in autonomous flight. Our drones are used for inspecting the energy grid, de-escalating life and death scenarios in public safety, inspecting bridges, giving soldiers better situational awareness on the battlefield, search and rescue missions, and more. We serve the core industries that our civilization runs on and have life-saving impact.

If you’re interested in being a core member of a 200+ person world-class engineering and research team that is defining the future of a major emerging industry,

We’re looking for a diverse combination of engineers, researchers, and managers with strong SW skills and experience across complex products. We’re particularly interested in people with robotics, web, deep learning, game dev, streaming or cloud experience.

Autonomy Engineer, Fixed Wing Planning & Controls https://www.skydio.com/jobs/20754382-05e7-4cb6-a0f9-0daf9338...

Autonomy Engineer, Deep Learning Model Acceleration https://www.skydio.com/jobs/cd6d8410-419b-4713-8d4d-7eb72b13...

Senior Software Engineer, Full Stack https://www.skydio.com/jobs/5655fbe3-66b0-4951-afdc-3b67f71e...

I am a Senior Director of Engineering there and a YC S18 alumni, you can reach me at { vincent dot lecrubier at skydio dot com } but please apply online first!

OpenAPI, JsonSchema, GraphQL all describe *Data*.

This describes *User Interfaces*. The closest alternative would be to just return React JS code directly.

But this adds a layer of constraint and control, preventing LLMs to generate e.g. malicious React JS code.

2025 Letter 7 months ago

The good thing about YouTube, TikTok, Facebook etc is you don’t have to use them if you don’t like them!

2025 Letter 7 months ago

Can someone elaborate on how growth is aligned with the general interest?

Empirically, the past 200 years have seen high growth globally, and human well being has improved massively as a result. Life expectancy has skyrocketed, infant death, hunger have gone down to near zero, literacy has gone up, work is much more comfortable, interesting and rewarding, etc. But at a more fundamental level, our material quality of life is that of literal kings. The 1st decile poorest people in the US or Europe have much better living conditions than a king of 500 years ago. We are so lucky to benefit from this, yet we completely forgot that fact. You complain about congestion and advertizing, but with degrowth you would complain about hunger and dying from cold during winter.

I mean, yes? The cameras do help solve a ton of crime. The real issue is using them for surveillance without a cause, and that imo this is what should be under scrutiny. But trying to fight cameras existing in general is a lost cause imo

The instant you start having to make the client smart enough to think about business logic, you are doomed.

Could you explain more here? What do you consider "business logic". Context: I have a client app to fly drone using gamepad, mouse and keyboard, and video feedback and maps, and drone tasking etc.