Issue #716, 14th August 2026

The Agentic Awakening: Why 10× Faster Coding Doesn’t Translate Into Proportional Organizational Productivity, and How AI-pilled Leaders Do It.
17 minutes read.

Liran Eshel and Adam Fisher found that even companies with 85-90% AI-generated code and 10x local acceleration never crossed 50% end-to-end productivity gain, because the organization around the engineers, PM handoffs, planning cadence, and review queues still runs at pre-AI speed. Individual velocity is the easy win; redesigning the org so faster engineers actually ship faster is the part almost everyone skips. So you need both bottom-up and top-down movements if you truly want to transform the business, not just automate the immediate parts. That may mean changing your leadership if they fail to set a different type of guidance for the team. Skip the parts you already do well and jump straight to areas you feel currently don't produce the outcome you seek.

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How Startups Measure Growth
1 minutes read.

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

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The Value of Software in a Fable World
4 minutes read.

Justin Jackson covers what will still matter once anyone can build software in days: distribution, taste, trust, and founder-market fit. "Indie entrepreneurs need to stack every advantage they have, and increasingly coding won't be the advantage it once was." We all built our careers on coding being the scarce skill, so it's worth rethinking what we're actually selling now.

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AI Adoption Is a Myth
6 minutes read.

To leverage AI across the entire org, mapping existing workflows and desired transformations ("I wish it was possible to...") is an exercise every leader in the organization has to drive, track, and put into action: "So stop reporting ‘adoption’ to your board. Report what share of the work today is manual vs hybrid vs fully automated. This is the only reporting and conversation that matters."

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Platform Engineering Still Matters
3 minutes read.

Evan Meagher points to Martin Fowler's related take: "The goal of refactoring an agentic code base is to spend tokens now in refactoring to make token consumption for future work lower." -- I think that's the missing half of most AI ROI conversations: we measure the tokens spent today and rarely the tokens saved next quarter.

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Being a Staff Engineer at Stripe in 2026
6 minutes read.

Not sure what to make of this post. A lot of it is generic and does not provide practical insight to use, still, one thing that is important to get comfortable (and learn to find balance) with is this: "There is a genuine pressure to get things done quickly, because there are always 10 more things in the pipeline waiting to get done. This ties back to my previous points on being effective with AI, and multitasking. You really need to be able to handle that kind of pressure."

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Using Agents Is Literally Engineering Management
4 minutes read.

Wonderful post by Jack Danger with a great take that truly captures the early days in managing humans and AI: "A first-time manager cuts hard toward either micromanaging or abdication. They’re either the bottleneck for their team, driving every decision through their own head, or they step away and “trust their team” as the team drifts off into misalignment. That’s the IC-and-AI spectrum right now. Either you hand-hold every line of output, or you YOLO it to production and hope. [...] let yourself accept that all of the models and all of the people are imperfect. Then commit to building the skills."

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A Fresh Definition of the Product Role
5 minutes read.

If the cost of building is lower, the value of knowing what to build is much higher. The problem is that many product managers think they're great because they can articulate what to build. Great PMs can deeply articulate why to build: "the hard part is knowing that it should exist, and knowing how it should exist."

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@naval: When truth is at stake, reasonable people will disagree. When power is at stake, they march in lockstep.

@chamath: The Build vs Buy Math Just Flipped. For thirty years a software renewal was a simple question of renew or shop for a cheaper seat, because building the thing yourself was never realistic. That has changed. Gartner now puts roughly a fifth of enterprise SaaS spend, around $234B, at risk of being done a different way by 2030. The reason is that the cost of building the workflows a company actually needs can now be done with tools like Software Factory. Keep renting commodity systems, and your business will perform like a commodity. Building software around the processes that are unique to how your business runs is worth pricing out before you sign another three-year contract for some off the shelf tool that will only ever approximate it.