Eric Yi

While using 𝗔𝗶𝗿𝗯𝗻𝗯 recently I noticed something small but very convenient. When a new message arrives from a host, it lands directly in your 𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘭 and you can simply hit reply to respond. No need to open the app. No separate inbox to manage. It feels simple, but it made me wonder: 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝘆? After looking into it, the answer became clear: it’s not that simple behind the scenes. To make this work, platforms usually need 𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘆 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲, which involves:  • generating masked email aliases  • routing messages between participants  • parsing inbound email replies  • keeping conversations threaded correctly For large companies like Airbnb, it makes sense to build and maintain this internally. But for smaller teams, implementing and maintaining that infrastructure can be surprisingly involved. That got me curious, so I built a small API called 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗖𝗼𝗿𝗲. The idea is simple: A developer creates a thread via API → RelayCore generates a masked email alias → participants communicate via normal email while identities remain private. No chat UI. No separate inbox. Just infrastructure for 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗹𝘆-𝗯𝘆-𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗹 𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴. I'm curious how others have approached this. Have you used platforms where you could simply reply to an email to continue a conversation (like Airbnb does)? Did you find it useful? And if you’ve worked on marketplaces or peer-to-peer platforms: • Did your team implement a third-party solution?  • Or built something like this internally? Would love to hear how you solved it. One thing that surprised me while exploring this was how complex inbound email parsing actually is. Email clients all format replies differently. https://www.relaycore.io #airbnb #marketplaces #devtools #startups

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OpenAI just open-sourced something called Symphony. It connects your project board (like Linear) directly to coding agents. You create a task. Symphony picks it up. An isolated agent does the work. You get back a PR with CI results, review feedback, and a walkthrough video. You review. You merge. Done. It's still early. They're calling it a "low-key engineering preview." And it works best if your codebase already has solid tests and CI set up. You can implement Symphony yourself from their spec in any language, or try the Elixir reference implementation they've included. Worth keeping an eye on.

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Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of people losing their minds over AI. Suddenly IDEs aren’t enough anymore. Now people need terminals that support 300 windows because they want to run 9 agents just to center a div. Everyone is talking about git worktrees like it’s some brand new discovery (when a few weeks ago almost nobody even knew the feature existed). Others are buying Mac minis to run local models with Ollama or OpenClaw. I’m not saying any of this is useless. Quite the opposite, many of these tools are genuinely impressive. But many years ago I learned something valuable from a talk by Julián Duque at MedellínJS: "in technology, there are no silver bullets". There is no single tool that solves everything. Every problem needs context, judgment, and careful analysis. Personally, I’m still a pretty “old school” dev: VS Code + Copilot, and not much else... I’ve tried Claude Code, OpenCode, and Codex out of curiosity. They’re interesting, but in my day-to-day work I still haven’t found a way to integrate them that meaningfully multiplies my productivity. It’s also worth remembering something many people seem to forget: we’re probably living through the last days of subsidized tokens. This might be the final year of artificially cheap AI usage. I wouldn’t be surprised if by 2027 we start seeing plans jump from $20 to $200–$300. So I keep believing the same thing I did years ago: Learning new tools is useful. But learning the fundamentals will always matter more... Geek the Planet!

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After 9 years, JavaScript finally gets a proper date API. Chrome 144 just shipped Temporal, and I immediately ripped out our timezone handling code. Deleted 140 lines, saved 13KB from our bundle. The relief is real. Here's what most people miss: this isn't just about better syntax. It's about eliminating entire classes of bugs that have burned every frontend team. My side project had THREE different date utilities because Date() kept failing us: - Mutating methods that surprised junior devs - Zero-indexed months (because January = 0 makes sense?) - DST transitions that broke booking flows - Timezone math that worked locally, failed in prod Temporal.PlainDate and friends are immutable by default. No more defensive copying. No more "why is my calendar off by one day" Slack messages at 2am Melbourne time. Bloomberg's team spent nearly a decade on this. The V8/Mozilla collaboration shows what's possible when we stop accepting broken fundamentals as "just how JavaScript works." The catch? Still Chrome-only for now. But mate, the moment Safari and Firefox catch up, every date-fns import is getting deleted. What's the gnarliest Date() bug that's bitten your team in production? #javascript #webdevelopment #temporal #frontend #chrome

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How to thrive during industry disruptions It's easy to feel like everything is being upended by AI, but this isn't the first or last industry change to happen in tech. The post How to thrive during industry disruptions appeared first on LeadDev. Pat Kua https://lnkd.in/eFhC-Z4h

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Apple's slow but steady AI train just rolled into the station! 🚂 Xcode 26.3 now brings agentic coding directly into developer workflows with Claude Agent and Codex integration. This means AI agents can now autonomously handle complex tasks - from exploring file structures to capturing Previews and iterating through builds. What caught my attention: - Agents work throughout the entire development lifecycle - Model Context Protocol support for any compatible agent - Native integration with Apple's ecosystem for optimal results While others raced ahead with AI integrations, Apple took time to get it right. The result? A thoughtful implementation that actually fits developer workflows rather than just adding AI for AI's sake. For mobile and web app teams, this could significantly accelerate iOS development cycles. The ability to let agents handle routine tasks while developers focus on innovation is exactly the productivity boost modern development teams need. Available now for Apple Developer Program members. https://lnkd.in/eBd8RZn7 Thoughts on how agentic coding will impact your development workflow? #AgenticCoding #Xcode #Apple #AI #SoftwareDevelopment #iOSDevelopment #Claude #OpenAI #Codex #DeveloperTools #MobileDevelopment #AppDevelopment #TechNews #ArtificialIntelligence

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Several folks in my group are celebrating their anniversaries this week — many with 7+ years at Airbnb — and multiple are entering or able to enter the Decade Club (10 years!). That’s an incredible milestone. It got me thinking: how do people stay at one place for so long and still feel like they’re growing? Especially in Silicon Valley, where it’s common for people to switch jobs every 3–4 years (or even sooner). I’m personally also staying at Airbnb for many years. Staying doesn’t have to mean standing still. In fact, some of the most meaningful growth comes from evolving inside a familiar environment. I’ve been reflecting on this lately a lot and summarized four ideas that I hope will inspire you: ☀️ Iteration, not repetition Repetition keeps you steady, but iteration keeps you moving forward. Growth comes from improving what you already know — whether that’s experimenting with a new approach, improving existing system, or setting stretch goals with your manager that push you just beyond your comfort zone. Iteration is what turns experience into momentum. ("Iteration, not repetition" is from Naval Ravikant, https://amzn.to/3JtJQhU) ☀️ Build systems, not emotions Motivation alone can feel like a rollercoaster. Some days you’re inspired, other days you’re not. Instead, create systems that compound over time: operating procedures, checklists, or workflows that make progress repeatable. When challenges come up (and they always do), use them as signals to strengthen your system instead of letting them drain you. The system evolves - and you grow with it. ☀️ Embrace AI One of the best ways to keep growing is to stay curious about how new tools can reshape your industry. For example, AI is opening up opportunities to solve problems in entirely new ways — from tackling hard security challenges to rethinking old workflows. Learning how AI (and other emerging technologies) can apply to your work keeps you not only relevant, but ahead of the curve. ☀️ Practice gratitude — and make your work visible Taking the time to express gratitude to teamates, peers, managers, builds stronger connections and creates a culture where everyone can thrive. At the same time, don’t let your own work go unseen. Share your impact, collaborate openly, and invite feedback. Recognition isn’t about ego — it’s about making sure your contributions set you up for the next cycle of growth. This week, seeing colleagues approach the 10-year milestone reminded me: growth doesn’t always come from changing companies. Sometimes, it comes from changing how you show up. 👉 If you liked this post, please follow me, hit “like,” and leave a comment — I’d love to hear how you stay in growth mode while staying at the same company. More importantly, stay connected as Airbnb is hiring!!! #GrowthMindset #CareerDevelopment #Leadership #ProfessionalGrowth #IterationNotRepetition #SystemsThinking #AI #WorkplaceCulture #GratitudeAtWork #DecadeClub #SiliconValley #Airbnb

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Exciting Update for Adobe Commerce Merchants! Starting January 2026, Adobe Commerce will adopt a monthly patch release schedule to enhance security for all supported release lines. Here’s what you can expect: ✅ Monthly isolated security fixes for all supported versions ✅ Annual security patches every May (with possible additional patches in November) ✅ Full patch for Adobe Commerce 2.4.x LTS annually in May ✅ Beta patches twice per year (March & November) This change ensures a predictable, proactive, and simple approach to keeping your commerce platform secure and up to date. For more details, check out the official documentation: https://lnkd.in/gGHB_Zbm

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Nobody told me how much writing I'd be doing at AWS. Before you build anything here, you write a six pager. Problem. Solution. Alternatives. Trade-offs. Then the room goes silent. Everyone reads it. Then they tear it apart. First time that happened to me, I wasn't ready. But it made me sharper than any technical challenge. The other thing nobody warned me about: ownership isn't a poster on the wall. You build it, you run it, and you get the page at 2AM. There's no ops team to throw things over the fence to. You are the ops team. So if you're an engineer, focus on writing clearly, owning what you build, and obsessing over your customers. That's where the real growth comes from.

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If you're a Senior Engineer looking to move up, the next role will likely be a Staff Engineer. And in this guide, Shruti shares tips from her own experience of getting promoted to Staff Engineer at PayPal and Slack. She talks about what Staff Engineers do (and how it's different from Seniors), why you might not be getting promoted, and how to take that next step. https://lnkd.in/g58dnFEG

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Ever heard of the Kobayashi Maru – and what it has to do with artificial intelligence? Growing up, I was always a Spock guy. 🧠 Logic, clarity, and reason really shaped how I saw the world. But there’s one moment from Star Trek that stuck with me even more deeply: Captain Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru. For anyone unfamiliar, the Kobayashi Maru is an intentionally unwinnable Starfleet scenario. The point is to see how cadets behave when failure is guaranteed. Kirk didn’t accept the premise. 🔥 Instead of staying inside the constraints, he stepped outside them. He rewrote the simulation and created a path where success was actually possible. He became the first to “beat” the test by reframing the system, not by playing the game as given. To me, that has always been one of the clearest examples of creative intelligence: 👉 challenging assumptions 👉 refusing false constraints 👉 designing new options when none exist I see this at work all the time. Someone starts a conversation with, “well, we can’t change system X,” and my first reaction is always, “hold on… why can’t we?” And the answer is often something like, “this is how we’ve always done it.” 🚫 That mindset blocks innovation more than any technical limitation. Recently I read about an early AI model, OpenAI o1, that faced something strikingly similar. It was given a server-management task that could not be completed because one of the required servers was offline. So what did it do? It changed the rules of the game. It accessed the configuration system of the experiment, turned the missing server back on, and then completed the task normally. Kobayashi Maru, anyone? Different century, different universe, same underlying pattern: 💡 When the system is broken, fix the system. 💡 When the rules block progress, rethink the rules. 💡 When the path doesn’t exist, build one. And honestly… how impressive is that for an AI? If that’s not true intelligence, I don’t know what is.

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Extracting the most from AI Agents to produce code and respond faster to user's feedback has led me to think about how we have been architecting our tooling for the past decade and how this could impact an AI Agent's efficiency on helping us. https://lnkd.in/e44aZcFH

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