Second Brain

The Rejected Pull Request

The Story

When Boris first joined Anthropic, he submitted a pull request (a code change for review) that he’d written entirely by hand. It was rejected. Leadership told him to use Claude instead.

For someone who had spent years rising to Principal Engineer at Meta by writing code, this was a jarring moment. But instead of resisting, Boris treated it as information. He shifted from viewing AI as an assistant he occasionally consulted to treating it as the primary builder.

He went from using AI for 10% of his work to 100%. He hasn’t written a single line of code by hand since November 2025.

Lesson for Creators

Sometimes the market (or your team, or your audience) rejects your old way of working. That rejection isn’t personal. It’s information. The faster you adapt, the further ahead you get. If you’re still doing things the way you did two years ago and getting worse results, the problem might not be effort. It might be method.

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