Software Lead Weekly
Issue #692, 27th February 2026
This Week's Favorite
The Anthropic Hive Mind
13 minutes read.
Fascinating read from Steve Yegge on how he analyze what's going on now at Anthropic: "During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work. Larry Page told the company in April 2011, when he became CEO, “stop working on new stuff, we’re only going to do X, Y, and Z.” And they kept every single engineer, but cut the amount of work by a solid 50% or more. You could no longer work on any problem you wanted. And there wasn’t really enough to go around. That was the beginning of the end. [...] The center of the campfire is a living prototype. There is no waterfall. There is no spec. There is a prototype that simply evolves, via group sculpting, into the final product: something that finally feels right. You know it when you finally find it. As evidence of this, Anthropic, from what I’m told, does not produce an operating plan ahead more than 90 days, and that is their outermost planning cycle. They are vibing, on the shortest cycles and fastest feedback loops imaginable for their size. And the result, they tell me, is something like improv. [...] There is no central decision-making authority. They are just trying everything, and when magic happens, they all just kind of realize it at once. They’re making forward progress via mashups and exploration at the frontier of software development and knowledge work using AI. They’re finding their way like a floodfill search."
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13 minutes read.
Fascinating read from Steve Yegge on how he analyze what's going on now at Anthropic: "During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work. Larry Page told the company in April 2011, when he became CEO, “stop working on new stuff, we’re only going to do X, Y, and Z.” And they kept every single engineer, but cut the amount of work by a solid 50% or more. You could no longer work on any problem you wanted. And there wasn’t really enough to go around. That was the beginning of the end. [...] The center of the campfire is a living prototype. There is no waterfall. There is no spec. There is a prototype that simply evolves, via group sculpting, into the final product: something that finally feels right. You know it when you finally find it. As evidence of this, Anthropic, from what I’m told, does not produce an operating plan ahead more than 90 days, and that is their outermost planning cycle. They are vibing, on the shortest cycles and fastest feedback loops imaginable for their size. And the result, they tell me, is something like improv. [...] There is no central decision-making authority. They are just trying everything, and when magic happens, they all just kind of realize it at once. They’re making forward progress via mashups and exploration at the frontier of software development and knowledge work using AI. They’re finding their way like a floodfill search."
Read it later via Instapaper.
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Culture
Bizarre That I Have a Mental Model of Who Codex & Claude Are and It’s Basically These Two
1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
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1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
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Share it via Twitter or email.
End of Productivity Theater
3 minutes read.
"What does productivity even mean in the age of AI? What are we actually here to contribute? Are we supposed to be architects or butlers to LLMs? If AI absorbs all the shallow work, the only things left that genuinely require a human are the core parts that demands genuine creativity, judgment, taste, and the type of thinking that can't be prompted away. This raises the stakes considerably, and changes what "a productive day" even means." -- I don't think that AI will absorb all shallow work as a general statement. It will do so in areas where we know how to train it. What about new areas we barely discovered or figured out? I hope we'll be brave enough to discover new areas to explore, both in the universe and in ourselves. It's hard to imagine now, but often big leaps feel impossible in hindsight.
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3 minutes read.
"What does productivity even mean in the age of AI? What are we actually here to contribute? Are we supposed to be architects or butlers to LLMs? If AI absorbs all the shallow work, the only things left that genuinely require a human are the core parts that demands genuine creativity, judgment, taste, and the type of thinking that can't be prompted away. This raises the stakes considerably, and changes what "a productive day" even means." -- I don't think that AI will absorb all shallow work as a general statement. It will do so in areas where we know how to train it. What about new areas we barely discovered or figured out? I hope we'll be brave enough to discover new areas to explore, both in the universe and in ourselves. It's hard to imagine now, but often big leaps feel impossible in hindsight.
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In Elon Musk’s 2018 Leaked Tesla Memo, He Lays Out 7 Blunt Rules for Getting More Shit Done:
3 minutes read.
This memo is probably x10 more important in 2026 than it was in 2018, yet it feels like an evergreen piece of advice everyone should follow closely, way more than you're comfortable with. Both on meetings and on how to orchestrate them, but above all on how we let communication flow in the organization (by getting rid of bottlenecks).
Read it later via Instapaper.
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3 minutes read.
This memo is probably x10 more important in 2026 than it was in 2018, yet it feels like an evergreen piece of advice everyone should follow closely, way more than you're comfortable with. Both on meetings and on how to orchestrate them, but above all on how we let communication flow in the organization (by getting rid of bottlenecks).
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Peopleware
Every SaaS Is Now an API. Whether They Like It or Not.
7 minutes read.
This is a post for builders (across professions) to help them envision the user experience and orchestrate the infrastructure to enable agentic data exploration and agentic operations. I love this advice: "Audit your API surface. Not the one in your docs. The real one. Is it fast enough for an agent to call in a multi-step workflow? Is the data model clean enough for an LLM to reason over? Are error messages clear enough for an agent to self-correct?"
Read it later via Instapaper.
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7 minutes read.
This is a post for builders (across professions) to help them envision the user experience and orchestrate the infrastructure to enable agentic data exploration and agentic operations. I love this advice: "Audit your API surface. Not the one in your docs. The real one. Is it fast enough for an agent to call in a multi-step workflow? Is the data model clean enough for an LLM to reason over? Are error messages clear enough for an agent to self-correct?"
Read it later via Instapaper.
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If You Are a Software Engineer "Experiencing Some Degree of Mental Health Crisis", Now Hear This, Because I've Been Coding for 50 Years Since the Days of Punched Cards and I Have a Salutary Kick in Your Ass to Deliver. (Thread)
3 minutes read.
Great people will find ways to ride the wave: "Systems are still complicated. This shit is still difficult. The need for people who specialize in bridging that gap isn't going to go away. As usual, the answer is: upskill yourself and adapt. If a crusty old fart like me can do it, you can too."
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
3 minutes read.
Great people will find ways to ride the wave: "Systems are still complicated. This shit is still difficult. The need for people who specialize in bridging that gap isn't going to go away. As usual, the answer is: upskill yourself and adapt. If a crusty old fart like me can do it, you can too."
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Inspiring Tweets
@asmartbear: “I’m in stealth mode!” Yeah, everyone always starts in stealth mode. When you’re ready to “tell the world,” surprise! Almost no one cares. It will take everything you have to get even a few people to notice. So, maybe cool it with the stealth mode.
@fortelabs: Wait, so the founder of Anthropic is "Amodei," as in "loves god"? And he leads Anthropic, meaning "human-centered," which is being used in military strikes? And the creator of ChatGPT is "Altman," as in "an alternative to humans"? And he leads OpenAI, which is completely closed? And then there's "Gemini," meaning "two-faced," from a company that promised to do no evil? And the whole global AI arms race is being driven by people who claimed to be worried about AGI taking over the world? Either the universe is an extremely cliché writer, or has a brilliant sense of humor
- Oren
P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.
P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.