“We always had to fight against spaghetti code, right? But now we're at this point where the spaghetti has a life of its own and actively wants to spill out of the plate. Before, people were like, okay, I've got to kind of keep it on the plate. No, no, no. The spaghetti wants out, and we have to almost red-team our own situation.”
The Pragmatic Engineer · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
Discussing platform work in a world where AI lets product teams ship very fast, Lemaire says codebase mess now grows on its own and platform engineers must build stronger guardrails than ever.
Transcript
no, no, I know. And I mean, like,
we can stop it or we can actually build better software, hopefully.
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think it's it is really similar to for folks who are familiar with like the embedded SRE model, like there's a reason why that's really, really effective. And I think that there's real parallels with product platform as well. I kept talking to my team about like, I mean, we always had to fight against spaghetti code, right? It's so easy. But now we're at this point where like the spaghetti has like a life of its own and it like actively wants to spill out of the plate. Whereas before people were like, okay, like I got to kind of keep it on the plate. No, no, no. The spaghetti like wants out and we have to almost like red team our own situation.
We do. Well, Moat, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you
so much for having me.
It was nice to get an insider look of what scaling up looks like inside of products we all know and use like Slack, GitHub, and Cursor. Until now, I'll admit, I never thought much about custom emojis causing a kind of scale problem, but Moat's example of the CEO sending out a everyone gets a Friday…
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