Software Lead Weekly

Code Is Cheap Now. Software Isn’t.
7 minutes read.

The reason software is not dead is not that people can build their own software. Any product at a massive scale will not be "saved" by LLM prompts. So the power law will hold, and while we might reduce the headcount to work on what we know now, we'll create new markets and opportunities where scale emerges again: "In this new landscape, Claude Code is Excel for developers—a powerful, flexible utility for solving immediate problems—rather than Shopify for founders, which is built to be a permanent foundation for a business. It’s about getting the job done, and then letting the tool go. This also explains why the next part matters: generating software quickly is one thing; making it survive contact with the real world is another. [...] The real cost of software isn’t the initial write; it’s the maintenance, the edge cases, the mounting UX debt, and the complexities of data ownership. These "fast" solutions are brittle."

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How My Codebase Written Entirely With Claude Code Runs
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.

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Human in the Loop: The Missing Layer in Agentic Systems
4 minutes read.

"Human-in-the-loop" as a way to enable humans to edit and control flows vs. "Human-on-the-loop" as a way to allow oversight (without blocking) is a helpful distinction to consider when building workflows in your company.

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Feeling Fast, Delivering Slow: Why Your AI Adoption Still Hasn't Paid Off
7 minutes read.

"This perception paradox is dangerous because it feels like progress while hiding downstream problems. Developers report coding 3-5x faster with AI assistants, yet sprint velocities remain flat. The issue isn’t that AI doesn’t help—it’s that local productivity gains don’t automatically translate into organizational value delivery. This is precisely why strengthening the fundamentals matters. When you feel fast but deliver slow, the problem isn’t effort—it’s impediments in your value stream eating the gains." -- I agree that verification systems and how to write them properly will create an unlock to speed value creation. I disagree with the approach, though, unit tests and integration tests will continue to provide relatively low value. Agentic development requires confidence when introducing changes to the system to keep users' value deterministic.

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A Random Walk: Inefficiency Is a Competitive Advantage
3 minutes read.

Nikunj Kothari writes it so well: "Every optimized moment is a moment you're thinking like everyone else. While we're maximizing productivity, AI already won that game. What's left for us is the inefficient, messy work of having thoughts no one's programmed yet. Your next breakthrough won't come from another framework or prompt. It'll come from the walk where you forgot your headphones. The project that made no sense. The conversation you weren't supposed to have. [...] The random walk isn't just an advantage anymore. It's an act of rebellion. While everyone else optimizes their way to the same future, you might accidentally invent a different one."

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Sergey on Why He Returned to Google (Video)
2 minutes read.

Time after time, we learn that our purpose is to provide value to our community (big or small) and to leverage our gifts in ways that benefit society.

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@Kpaxs: High-agency people are relentless reality-benders who treat life like a puzzle they will solve.

@garrytan: Hire out of pain. Don't hire because you think you'll need someone soon or maybe sometime later. Wait until you or your team are actually hurting: working weekends, missing family dinners, dropping balls. That pain is the signal that the role is real. I learned this the hard way after watching founders (including myself) hire ahead of need and end up with people in roles that weren't fully formed yet. When you hire out of pain, you know exactly what the job is because you've been doing it yourself. You can evaluate performance because you know what good looks like. And the new hire knows you'll step back in if they fail, because you were just doing it last week.