Co-founder and CTO, Cockroach Labs, Cockroach Labs.
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Co-founder and CTO of Cockroach Labs and an original creator of GIMP; earlier worked on Gmail and distributed storage at Google.
Why their word counts: Founder who has written database-grade code for years and describes his own working practice; the account is his own, in an interview with a newsletter author.
Profile from this source, checked 2026-11-08.
What I'm finding is the agents are getting better; you're having to give less and less scrutiny. I don't know if it's going to be this year or next, [but] we're materially going to stop looking at the code in the same way we don't look at assembly anymore.
Peter MattisCo-founder and CTO, Cockroach Labs · Executive, 
Cockroach Labs
Press report: Distributed databases with Peter Mattis, The Pragmatic Engineer (newsletter), September 30, 2026, at Takeaway 10.
It definitely feels a bit different. It's maybe a bit less intense, but you're managing more things cognitively. I'm thinking of ideas that normally would've taken me a week to experiment with. And I think of multiple of these experiments and then fire them off all simultaneously. [It feels as] if I was a college professor with a whole swarm of research assistants, and they're all off doing things and it's coming back really rapidly.
Peter MattisCo-founder and CTO, Cockroach Labs · Executive, Cockroach Labs
Press report: Distributed databases with Peter Mattis, The Pragmatic Engineer (newsletter), September 30, 2026, at Takeaway 12.