Software Lead Weekly

The Peril of Laziness Lost
5 minutes read.

Everyone in software needs to read this post. LLMs are just a tool. Powerful one, and dangerous one: "Of course, the implicit wink here is that it takes a lot of work to be lazy: when programmers are engaged in the seeming laziness of hammock-driven development, we are in fact turning the problem over and over in our heads. [...] Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters. [...] The best engineering is always borne of constraints, and the constraint of our time places limits on the cognitive load of the system that we’re willing to accept. This is what drives us to make the system simpler, despite its essential complexity."

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Running a Company in the Past 6 Years
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile. Sometimes, it just works.

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High Amplitude Disagreeableness
5 minutes read.

This is the type of culture if you want to compete for the long run: "When you see a mid-level person politely but firmly disagree with some member of the C-suite in front of a hundred people, you’re seeing the startup spirit at work. [...] What this means is that if you never seriously disagree with people, even when it’s warranted, startup people won’t respect you. Your inability to reach a high amplitude of disagreeableness is actually an indicator that you aren’t a part of the tribe: You’re an extractor not a creator. They are people who are willing to fight for what they believe in with righteous anger; if you aren’t the same, they’ll think that you’re weak at best or lack integrity at worst. Startup people will quit working for these sorts of managers. [...] You can often recognize a healthy entrepreneurial culture because it accepts people being highly disagreeable (within reason) without permanently branding them as a troublemaker."

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AI Won't Reduce the Need for Developers. It's Going to Explode It. (Thread)
7 minutes read.

Jevons Paradox in motion is here, and I very much agree with it: "This is Jevons Paradox playing out right in front of us. When you make a resource dramatically more efficient you don't use less of it. You use vastly more. Steam engines didn't reduce coal consumption. They made coal so useful that demand exploded. Cars didn't reduce the need for roads. They created suburbs." – interesting discussion worth checking over reddit.

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Vibe → Environment → Culture: Why Leadership Gets This Backwards
6 minutes read.

Read the section "The Real Framework" a few times. I think it's an excellent insight, and maybe why people hate the process of crafting values, where it should be what already emerges from the "vibes" (as Hiten calls it). This is how inertia works: "Here’s the part that kills companies. If you don’t intentionally design the environment, something else designs it for you. Convenience. Comfort. The path of least resistance."

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“Good Taste” Is Just Experience
3 minutes read.

Taste: "When people say “taste,” what they actually mean is experience. Pattern recognition built up over years of doing the work. But calling it “taste” instead of “experience” does something subtle and harmful: it makes a learnable skill sound like a gift. The taste will come, as it usually does. And if someone tells you that you either have it or you don’t, they’ve probably just forgotten how many reps it took them to get theirs."

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The More Enterprises I Talk to About AI Agent Transformation, the More It’s Clear That There Is Going to Be a New Type of Role in Most Enterprises Going Forward.
4 minutes read.

Aaron Levie is spot on here on new positions that will be created to deploy a new type of workforce to achieve a business outcome: "In general, it’s going to be in areas where if you threw compute (in the form of agents) at a task you could either execute it 100X faster or do it 100X more times than before. [...] This person’s job is to figure out what the future state workflow needs to look like to drive this new form of automation, and how to connect up the various existing or new systems in such a way that this can be fulfilled."

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34 Lessons From Writing Every Day for Two Decades
6 minutes read.

I love Ryan Holiday's writing. Reading his lessons learned and approach to developing the skills he has is inspiring.

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@aakashgupta: Major cheat code in life: Forgiveness isn't about them. It's about you carrying weight that's slowing you down. That grudge you're holding isn't punishing them. They're sleeping fine. You're the one replaying it at 2am. Let it go. Not for them. For you.

@SahilBloom: I'm increasingly convinced that burnout doesn't come from working long hours or weekends. The people I know who burned out were the ones who were really bored with their work, not the ones who worked the most hours. Burnout comes from working on things that don't energize you.