Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Singleton primarily evaluates engineering candidates on their ability to use coding agents

David Singleton · Dreamer: the Agent OS for Everyone — David Singleton · Mar 20, 2026 · at 58:04

David Singleton, former Stripe CTO and co-founder/CEO of Dreamer, describes how the criteria for hiring software engineers has shifted toward agentic workflows.

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“One of the main things that I look for now when hiring engineers is how well do you work with coding agents?”

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More from David Singleton

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Singleton: Stripe deployed some of the world's first production AI agent systems
“I was working at Stripe, as you mentioned, and we had the opportunity to put some of the very first AI agent systems in the world into production.”
David Singleton Mar 20, 2026 ▶ 3:59 Dreamer: the Agent OS for Everyone — David Singleton
Insight
Singleton: TypeScript is the optimal language for AI-driven development
“TypeScript is an amazing language for AI because there's tons of training data. In the models and it's strongly typed. And actually at the company, we built most of the stack in TypeScript, and we have this amazing property, which is we have type safety all th…”
David Singleton Mar 20, 2026 ▶ 43:12 Dreamer: the Agent OS for Everyone — David Singleton
Insight
Singleton: Dreamer replaced Vector DB RAG for agent memory due to complexity
“Very early on, we were putting lots of facts into a vector database and doing embeddings and pulling them back out using, you know, reverse look of embeddings. Rag that actually worked, but turned out to be much more complexity than was actually required. So, …”
David Singleton Mar 20, 2026 ▶ 52:07 Dreamer: the Agent OS for Everyone — David Singleton
Insight
Singleton: Hands-on engineering managers have the ideal skill profile for AI orchestration
“It turns out being an engineering manager, as long as you stay very close to the code and are able to continue to craft it yourself, is actually a great skill profile for being able to make agents work for you and for your team in this in this age.”
David Singleton Mar 20, 2026 ▶ 58:21 Dreamer: the Agent OS for Everyone — David Singleton
Disclosure
Dreamer pays AI tool builders proportionally based on agent usage
“And we're actually sharing something for the first time on this podcast, which is tool builders on Dreamer get paid. So if you publish a tool to the platform and a lot of agents use it, you'll actually get paid in proportion to their usage.”
David Singleton Mar 20, 2026 ▶ 9:26 Dreamer: the Agent OS for Everyone — David Singleton
Insight
Singleton: Standalone AI apps cannot scale safely without an OS-like core
“Because if you try to pick off just one piece of this, you can't actually make it work for people at scale because you could build little vibe coded apps, but they're going to grab all your data willy nilly. They won't be able to work together. You actually ha…”
David Singleton Mar 20, 2026 ▶ 24:00 Dreamer: the Agent OS for Everyone — David Singleton
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