For years, MXroute has had problems that I couldn’t solve. I’m a backend developer. I have been knee deep in mail systems since 2013, and before that I spent the beginning of my career cleaning up compromised websites and even patching vulnerabilities by hand. I know how these systems get compromised, because I’ve dealt with the fallout first hand. But I’m not a frontend developer. I’ve never been a frontend developer.
Backend skill that can’t be translated into something a customer can actually use is a useless skill when customers are constantly asking for a better user experience. Nearly every feature request I turned down over the years, or put on a roadmap that simply disappeared over time, all traced back to this single problem.
MXroute was never priced to hire a development team. That has never been a secret. The whole business was designed to be lean, to focus heavily on automation, and to pass the savings to you instead of payroll. That worked, and it created something that you all liked. But over the years you changed. You wanted more. And I couldn’t give that to you, because I wasn’t a frontend developer.
So I waited. I knew a solution would eventually exist. I was right, and that solution is AI.
So let me introduce you to our two developers who work side by side:
- MXroute’s founder, me.
- Claude.
Claude is my frontend developer. It also helps me ship backend faster, but the backend is different: my hands are on every function. Because I’m the subject matter expert and I know every surface that can be exploited, how it gets exploited, and how people will try. That isn’t hard when you’ve spent this long juggling a fleet of open source software across a pile of different distributions and versions. I’m not claiming to be flawless at security, or that I don’t have improvements to make on that front. But a human developer who works alone isn’t inherently better at these things either, and the last decade of compromises at nearly every major company in the world makes that pretty clear.
Every single function that contains the potential to be exploited is audited after being written. Every audit is considered to be suspect, and then the function is tested against all methods of exploit. Can a problem slip through that? Absolutely. Can it slip through that process if a team of human developers work on it without AI? It’s not even questionable, it happens every day. It’s also true that some functions don’t need to be audited or tested. A function that adds two hard coded constant values together cannot be exploited. Every function should be treated for its potential to be exploited, and the weight of its audit should be relative to that.
Claude does not have access to customer data. Claude is not running MXroute. Claude is helping me to build MXroute faster. MXroute is something I’ve been building since 2013. It’s not finished, it will never be finished. But it will progress faster.
Until recently, relying heavily on automation and technological process wasn’t controversial. Automation over hiring has been the stated model since day one, out loud, in public, for over a decade. Nobody had a problem with it. Then hating AI became fashionable, and suddenly the thing I’ve always done became the thing I have to defend.
I’ll be honest about where I land on that. My entire life I have sided with advancing technology, and I have never cared much for people who plant a flag against it. I remember everyone who swore they’d never move off Windows 2000. They moved. They just wanted to complain about it first.
I’d rather ship the feature that you’ve been asking me for than meet some arbitrary standard held up by people who protest every advancement of technology. We’re a technology company, we don’t live in the stone ages.
And we’re not alone. Microsoft claims that up to 30% of their code is written with AI. Where are the complaints about that? I don’t see them. Because the standard isn’t universally held, it only gets applied to companies that people feel they can survive without. Because it doesn’t rock their recliner to ditch them. Well it rocks mine to ditch MXroute or let it slide into irrelevance. This is my baby, and it will outlive me. So this post is here to loudly proclaim that we are technologically progressive, and that we have no intention of catering to fashion trends. When new technology arrives that helps me to ship better product, I will be there on the front lines. Every single time.