March 17, 2025. It feels like another typical day at the office, but there’s something different in the air. I can hear the murmur of LLM-assisted copilots assisting engineers across multiple desks. The AI-native tools have truly arrived, and it’s both a blessing and a curse.

The AI Copilot Conundrum

Today, I spent some time debugging an issue with one of our new AI copilots. We’ve been using these copilots for months now, with mixed results. On good days, they help us streamline workflows, suggesting optimizations or even writing parts of the code. But today was a reminder that we’re still dealing with the complexities of integrating AI into production systems.

For context, our platform team is responsible for owning and maintaining the infrastructure pipelines that feed these copilots. We’ve seen some impressive gains in productivity, but there are also growing pains. For instance, one particular copilot started generating code snippets that were slightly off, leading to subtle bugs that took a while to track down.

Wasm + Containers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I had an interesting debate with my colleague about WebAssembly (Wasm) versus containers for certain parts of our platform. The recent convergence between these two technologies has opened up new possibilities but also introduced some complexity. We’re leaning more towards using Wasm for edge computing scenarios where performance is critical, but there are still debates around the security implications and management overhead.

A couple of weeks ago, a small team started experimenting with running part of our monitoring stack in Wasm. While the initial results were promising, we encountered issues when trying to integrate these Wasm modules with our existing Kubernetes clusters. The debates about whether this is worth it or if we should stick with containers for now are ongoing.

UBLock Origin and the Chrome Store

On a more mundane note, I noticed that uBlock Origin was no longer available on the Chrome Store. This came as a bit of a shock; it’s an essential tool for us when working in browser-based environments. The lack of availability has forced us to explore alternative extensions, which is proving to be a challenge.

Happy 20th Birthday, Y Combinator

Today also marked the 20th birthday of Y Combinator, the incubator that started many of the companies we now rely on for various services. Reflecting on how far tech has come in two decades, it’s both humbling and a reminder of the importance of innovation.

The Unending Debugging Session

After lunch, I spent some time diving into an issue with our eBPF-based monitoring tools. These tools have been production-proven over the past few years, but they’re not without their quirks. This particular issue involved tracking down a kernel module that wasn’t behaving as expected under high load.

The experience was a mix of frustration and satisfaction. Frustration because these debugging sessions can take hours, sometimes days; satisfaction because it’s also an opportunity to learn more about the intricacies of the system we’re working with. eBPF is powerful but complex, and every bug we fix makes us better engineers.

Conclusion

As I close out my day, I realize that the tech landscape continues to evolve rapidly. AI copilots are here to stay, Wasm and containers coexist in a complex ecosystem, and uBlock Origin’s absence reminds me of the importance of tools in our daily work. Despite all this, there’s always that unending debugging session waiting for us—proof that while technology can make life easier, it also introduces new challenges.

Stay tuned for more adventures in tech!

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Until next time, Brandon