Software Lead Weekly 
Issue #715, 7th August 2026
This Week's Favorite
The Antithesis Principle
5 minutes read.
Shreyas Doshi is spot on. Any truth about human nature can be pointed two ways: outward as a tactic for working people, or inward as a warning about your own defaults. Smart people chase the tactic, wise people eliminate the default in themselves first: "You will not only reach the obvious conclusion that everyone who’s smart reaches, but perhaps also the non-obvious one that only the wise do." Which one are you actually doing right now?
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5 minutes read.
Shreyas Doshi is spot on. Any truth about human nature can be pointed two ways: outward as a tactic for working people, or inward as a warning about your own defaults. Smart people chase the tactic, wise people eliminate the default in themselves first: "You will not only reach the obvious conclusion that everyone who’s smart reaches, but perhaps also the non-obvious one that only the wise do." Which one are you actually doing right now?
Read it later via Instapaper.
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Culture
VC Catches Founder Euromaxxing
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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Don't Be a Meat Proxy
2 minutes read.
Verbose writing is often lazy writing. Copying it straight from the output you got from AI is an even worse type of laziness. Niklas Gruhn's sharpest reframe: writing a response in your own words isn't about politeness, it's a decent certificate that you actually read. Think what Hemingway would write; make it a skill if you have to.
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2 minutes read.
Verbose writing is often lazy writing. Copying it straight from the output you got from AI is an even worse type of laziness. Niklas Gruhn's sharpest reframe: writing a response in your own words isn't about politeness, it's a decent certificate that you actually read. Think what Hemingway would write; make it a skill if you have to.
Read it later via Instapaper.
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What's Gone Wrong With AI & Labor — A Thought Experiment
4 minutes read.
Arvind Narayanan reaches for Simon Willison's line to explain why coding agents haven't replaced engineers: "Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw." -- Our industry open-sourced every intermediate artifact, from specs to pull requests to code reviews, giving agents a training set that teaches collaboration instead of just imitation. Every profession chasing its own AI moment should be asking whether it can manufacture that same missing middle, or whether it's stuck training AI on finished outputs alone.
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4 minutes read.
Arvind Narayanan reaches for Simon Willison's line to explain why coding agents haven't replaced engineers: "Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw." -- Our industry open-sourced every intermediate artifact, from specs to pull requests to code reviews, giving agents a training set that teaches collaboration instead of just imitation. Every profession chasing its own AI moment should be asking whether it can manufacture that same missing middle, or whether it's stuck training AI on finished outputs alone.
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ARR Doesn't Mean What It Used To
5 minutes read.
"ARR... Is it revenue or GMV? Is it recurring? Is it quarterly \* 4? Or is it 365 \* daily revenue (not kidding - have seen that too!!)?" -- Niko Bonatsos sums up why Simon Wu's poll of VCs found ARR itself the most distrusted metric in the room right now. Which flavor of ARR is sitting in your own deck? Founders who spell out their ARR math up front build more credibility than any growth rate can.
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5 minutes read.
"ARR... Is it revenue or GMV? Is it recurring? Is it quarterly \* 4? Or is it 365 \* daily revenue (not kidding - have seen that too!!)?" -- Niko Bonatsos sums up why Simon Wu's poll of VCs found ARR itself the most distrusted metric in the room right now. Which flavor of ARR is sitting in your own deck? Founders who spell out their ARR math up front build more credibility than any growth rate can.
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Peopleware
Escaping the LLM Coding Rat Race
6 minutes read.
Aaron Stannard checked whether the AI speed race is actually producing happier customers, and the numbers say no: "30% increase in total supply; 3% growth in utilization: this does not sound like customers clamoring for more LLM-authored applications." Is shipping speed really the bottleneck, or is it effective distribution (e.g., being paid for) and adoption?
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6 minutes read.
Aaron Stannard checked whether the AI speed race is actually producing happier customers, and the numbers say no: "30% increase in total supply; 3% growth in utilization: this does not sound like customers clamoring for more LLM-authored applications." Is shipping speed really the bottleneck, or is it effective distribution (e.g., being paid for) and adoption?
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Data Lessons From Inside Meta
13 minutes read.
Great interview with Shridhar Iyer, sharing many observations and insights about working at a big company like Meta. One takeaway for me is around data quality: "But I would point to a few things Meta did earlier than others, and at scale. One was to schematize, both online and offline, strongly typing schemas and enforcing them all the way upstream to the log statement. That was a big undertaking, and it is what made column-level lineage possible, which was fundamental to the privacy work." Another takeaway is how much the entire industry is still in the discovery phase when it comes to AI: "Teams are becoming larger because the middle layer is being removed, and a lot of managers have been asked to become individual contributors." -- Can you actually lead a team that size (20-30 ICs) without weekly 1:1s?
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13 minutes read.
Great interview with Shridhar Iyer, sharing many observations and insights about working at a big company like Meta. One takeaway for me is around data quality: "But I would point to a few things Meta did earlier than others, and at scale. One was to schematize, both online and offline, strongly typing schemas and enforcing them all the way upstream to the log statement. That was a big undertaking, and it is what made column-level lineage possible, which was fundamental to the privacy work." Another takeaway is how much the entire industry is still in the discovery phase when it comes to AI: "Teams are becoming larger because the middle layer is being removed, and a lot of managers have been asked to become individual contributors." -- Can you actually lead a team that size (20-30 ICs) without weekly 1:1s?
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Why Do I Write?
3 minutes read.
Michael Lopp's real point: writing isn't just how he communicates, it's how he builds, and what breaks people is failing to build in some form, not failing to write. We all have our own version of that outlet, whether it's code, docs, or a Friday newsletter, and the ones who lose motivation are usually the ones who stopped treating it as building anything at all.
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3 minutes read.
Michael Lopp's real point: writing isn't just how he communicates, it's how he builds, and what breaks people is failing to build in some form, not failing to write. We all have our own version of that outlet, whether it's code, docs, or a Friday newsletter, and the ones who lose motivation are usually the ones who stopped treating it as building anything at all.
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Inspiring Tweets
@paulg: When you go talk to users, don't (just) ask them what features they want. Ask them what problems they have. In the best case this will lead you to think of features they'll love but would never have thought to ask for. And expect to go through multiple cycles of ask-and-build.
- 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.