Thanks, might be the best blog I've read in 2026. AI can of course do architecture as well but oh boy will you have a bad time when your application breaks and neither you or AI can fix it.
Why, what is the play here? I know PayPal is used extensively in some countries (like Brazil?) but in most countries there are other/local services that have substantial market share and I do not think that PayPal can compete.
Don't forget Venmo - PayPal smartly gobbled that up many, many years ago, and it has a great amount of mindshare (though I don't know how profitable it is). Zelle popped up later and somehow has plenty of users, but unlike Venmo, Zelle is a steaming pile of sh*t of user experience, due to it being a consortium of all the famously-tech-backwards big banks, which stood it up out of fear and jealousy that those "Internet" guys might find a way to disintermediate them somehow.
1. Bank apps are terrible, slow, and poorly organized, because banks. They suck at software. Venmo and Cashapp are good at software.
2. (Insert healthy amount of distrust of anything the banks all want, because there's zero chance it's in consumers' best interest)
3. We don't control anything, Zelle does. I have 5 bank accounts (multiple banks). I have one cell phone number, and of COURSE Zelle, like the banks that run it, insists on using cell phone numbers as basically their primary key and only identifier. When someone pays me by putting in my number, where will the money go? F--k if I know!
If I'm buying something from a website and they don't offer Apple Pay, I'll opt for PayPal instead since I already have my credit/debit cards saved there and don't want to hand over numbers to a random website. Also, when I used to do more freelancing, all of my clients preferred to be invoiced and pay through PayPal (who skimmed a decent chunk of change off the top).
Not sure if either of those reasons would be what Stripe wants here, but just my two cents. I'm American fwiw.
Interesting that you'd mention Brazil. I consider it one of the very few examples of countries successfully replacing PayPal with a publicly owned service. Pix is ubiquitous in Brazil and has been for years. It has not only displaced PayPal but also cash and (in large parts) Visa/MasterCard, even in the face of US tariff threats.
It's actually pretty common for local payment systems to exist, it's not just Brazil. I've seen such systems in Europe, Asia, Africa and I'm sure they exist in other places I've never been to
> partly because it causes annoying delays for those trying to get to the site
This is true but usually a small issue. It’s further alleviated by cached tokens so you only have to solve the challenge once in a while per site, and a login token may let you skip it.
> partly because it seems inevitable that the scrapers will eventually find their way around it…A proof-of-work requirement is not a huge obstacle when you have millions of other people's machines to do the work on.
It follows directly from the bitter lesson - a frontier model can be relatively cheaply distilled into anything you need to run quickly (and a frontier model like Mythos will help you distill it quickly), decidedly not true the other way around.
This is an fantastic article (atleast for me as a swede). Most of it can be true depending on your situation but please remember "Being a manager can be fun and fulfilling".
Seeing a peer grow into seniourship or be instrumental fixing a problem in a team is the reward. Yes being a manager costs but there are fantastic moments when it's clear that it was worth it.
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