Distributed databases with Peter Mattis

CockroachDB's CTO says AI coding agents now let expert engineers produce more, higher-quality, production-grade code than ever before.

• Pre-AI output: Peter Mattis wrote ~100,000 lines of production code per year at Cockroach Labs pre-AI, including a 40-50K line rewrite replacing RocksDB with Pebble in 2019.
• AI comeback: After stepping back from coding 2022-2024 to manage, Mattis returned via Claude/Opus models; a database auto-scaling benchmarking tool 'materialized' over a 4-day span last Thanksgiving.

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