mooreds

I would not say the hiring has been highly competitive (certainly not FAANG level) but the number of jobs are low because they are small. The tech was not cutting edge.

Could be luck?

FYI, $curjob is hiring: https://fusionauth.applytojob.com/apply

The issue is less in the identity of the agent and more in that:

1. We need to get users and companies used to issuing and using these credentials.

2. The systems agents are interacting with need to recognize these credentials.

3. Critically, the systems need to be able to limit the actions of the credential holders.

The last one, #3, is probably the doozie because it requires all kinds of rethinking of authorization models. Which tend to be baked into applications and tied to business logic.

0: https://www.aauth.dev/

1: https://spiffe.io/

Maybe I'm a bit of a pollyana, but most places I worked had folks who cared and wanted to improve things.

tl;dr: even if you don't tell a speaker you like their talk, definitely pay attention. Or leave. People work hard on this stuff!

But guess what. The average person isn't going to want to build every piece of software they use. And if they do want to build it, they sure as heck won't want to maintain it.

I saw a colleague build a custom marketing workflow a few months ago using AI. It was cool, but I thought to myself "welcome to the world of software debugging".

OP here. I thought it was weird enough to be interesting.

I think the point is that you should be building your network of folks before you need them. And that you should go to your network with a specific ask rather than "who is a good engineer?".

Related, slightly: I had a business idea a few years ago when things were tighter for engineers to build a system that collected interested engineers email addresses and send them content about what the company was building. Basically a drip campaign tool for engineering talent rather than sales. I still think this would work for a company that was hiring regularly but that wasn't sexy enough to have name recognition.

0: https://zeihan.com/the-ai-race-to-regression/

- https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obl... from 1997 about how you shouldn't automate busted processes

- https://hbr.org/2018/06/before-automating-your-companys-proc... from 2018 about same

- https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/produ... about the productivity paradox with electricity in the early 1900s

- Review of "The Box" which talks about this situation w/r/t the shipping container and the re-engineering that had to happen

All of these focus on the effort to re-engineer based on a new technology, because you couldn't get the true benefits without doing so. That's slightly different than the thesis of OP, which is that bad behaviors are being papered over by AI. But I think the first step towards re-engineering is to accept that some papering over is occurring.

Early stage founders have one set of incentives: finding product-market fit.

Founders who bootstrap have another set of incentives: making customers happy.

Founders who take VC money have two sets of incentives: making customers happy and making investors money in a reasonable timeframe, which means certain amounts of growth. These incentives are sometimes aligned but can be at odds.

I wrote about this more on my employer's blog[0].

> The real long-term win is defining ground level permissions around common use cases, so that when composed they can alert as rarely as possible.

And this is an even larger effort to implement, especially as agent capabilities change over time (and they are changing rapidly).

0: https://fusionauth.io/blog/ai-authorization

That transition can be super super painful as you don't quite have enough work for the dedicated person.

I do know that very few systems are designed to handle a 14x increase in traffic painlessly (275M*52 = 14.3B), especially at scale.

   Commit volume went from 1 billion total in all of 2025 to 275 million per week by early 2026. 

and then click on 'view open positions'.

The reason for the 2 steps is because we may change ATSes in the future, but https://fusionauth.io/careers will always be a live page.