Chat App Engineers Reveal Dark Secret Your Phone Is Hiding
By 813 Staff
Boris Cherny has gone public with a frustration that until now has only circulated in private Signal chats and off-the-record coffee meetings. The former Meta engineer and current founding CTO of the AI coding startup Codeium posted a single, fragmentary sentence on X on July 17, 2026: “I talk to engineers at other companies every day and hear the.” The incomplete thought was clearly intentional, and internal documents circulating among Silicon Valley engineering leaders suggest it was a deliberate provocation aimed at the industry’s growing reluctance to share candid feedback about developer tools.
Cherny’s post set off a firestorm. Within hours, engineers from companies including Stripe, Databricks, and Vercel replied, completing the sentence in their own ways. The most common completion, according to a log of replies leaked on a private Discord server for staff engineers, was: “same complaints about the same broken tools, but nobody will say it publicly.” Cherny’s original tweet was deleted after twelve minutes, but not before being screenshotted and reposted across half a dozen internal company Slack channels, per engineers close to the project who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The rollout for Cherny’s commentary has been anything but smooth. He had intended the tweet as the opening salvo for a larger, unannounced project called “Project Feedback,” which internal memos from Codeium describe as an anonymous, real-time sentiment aggregator for developer tooling. The plan, sources say, was to let engineers at competing firms submit honest evaluations of IDEs, CI/CD pipelines, and AI coding assistants without employer retribution. But the early leak and subsequent deletion have muddied the launch timeline. Engineers close to the project say Codeium’s leadership is now debating whether to accelerate the beta or shelve it entirely to avoid further scrutiny.
Why this matters to anyone building software: Cherny’s gambit exposes a dirty secret of modern tech. Developers are increasingly trapped between vendor lock-in and career risk. Complain publicly about a tool your company has invested millions in, and you risk losing your job. Stay silent, and you live with subpar infrastructure. Codeium’s potential solution—a trusted, anonymous channel—could reshape how tools are evaluated, but only if the industry trusts it. What happens next depends on Cherny’s next move. He has not posted since the deletion. A spokesperson for Codeium declined to comment, but an internal calendar invite seen by this reporter lists a meeting titled “Would you do it again?” scheduled for July 22. The invitees include Cherny and two board members.
