Jack Ellis

@JackEllis

Software engineer. Building usefathom.com since 2019. Sharing all the technical details from behind the scenes.

usefathom.com

Joined May 2008

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Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Jul 13
I’ve spent nearly seven years documenting how we built Fathom: outages, DDoS attacks, migrations, $100k AWS savings, my cofounder’s retirement, and a divorce. I write transparently because I want other people to learn from my mistakes. These 18 posts tell the story:
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Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
14h
“Computer science achievement was a massive, dominant predictor of success” It’s hilarious to me that they needed a study to figure this out. I could’ve told them this for free!
Superman
@thesupermanmx
Sep 5
China published the most uncomfortable paper on vibe coding. ETH Zurich tested 100 developers in a controlled, commercial-grade vibe coding environment to see who actually succeeds. The findings are brutal. The researchers tracked computer science achievement, written
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Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
18h
The results are in! 57% of you voted for Code A (Fable 5.1 Max in Cursor) and the other 43% voted for Code B (GPT Astra Extra High on Codex). The conclusion I’ve made, having used both over the last few days, is that Astra and Fable are effectively equivalent for Laravel work.
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Sep 5
Everyone is posting about which new model is better. I'm going to post two versions of some Laravel code and I want you to vote on which you prefer. Once voting closes, I'll reveal which model is which. None of this code will hit production as it's too sloppy.
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Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Sep 5
Everyone is posting about which new model is better. I'm going to post two versions of some Laravel code and I want you to vote on which you prefer. Once voting closes, I'll reveal which model is which. None of this code will hit production as it's too sloppy.
Code A57.1%
Code B42.9%
630 votesFinal results
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Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Sep 5
As a rule, I don't try new models until after the first few weeks. But I read enough about Astra to be intrigued. I asked it to audit my working tree. It found 14 high priority issues in the work created by Fable 5.1's planning & Opus 4.6's building. I'm pretty shocked right now.
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