Software Lead Weekly 
Issue #722, 25th September 2026
This Week's Favorite
How to Unclench
24 minutes read.
Jonny Miller's core claim is that suffering doesn't come from feeling an emotion, it comes from clenching against it: fighting fear, grief or anger before you even let them land. With an amazing delivery (beautiful website), he maps a whole taxonomy of traps around this, including stoicism, over-efforting, and what he calls midwit grinding, that will feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who prides themselves on staying composed under pressure. Where in your own leadership style are you mistaking suppression for control?
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24 minutes read.
Jonny Miller's core claim is that suffering doesn't come from feeling an emotion, it comes from clenching against it: fighting fear, grief or anger before you even let them land. With an amazing delivery (beautiful website), he maps a whole taxonomy of traps around this, including stoicism, over-efforting, and what he calls midwit grinding, that will feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who prides themselves on staying composed under pressure. Where in your own leadership style are you mistaking suppression for control?
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Culture
This Guy Casually Looses 20TB an Hour.
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.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Everything You’ve Been Told About Burnout Is Wrong
3 minutes read.
Blake Scholl reframes how he checks in on a struggling team: "Once I saw this, I realized the standard solutions for burnout—breaks, rest, recharge—were not the solution. What we needed to do is ensure there were believable, inspiring, meaningful goals well within the team’s gratification window. So we broke the far-off, abstract goal of flying into a series of nearer-term individual milestones. We called these Mission Success Events—celebration points along the path to the ultimate mission. [...] When I—or a team—is feeling burnout, I don't start by checking the workload, I check the motivation. What's driving the team? What's the next milestone?" We all reach for rest as the fix first. Blake pushes you to question the goal's believability instead.
Read it later via Instapaper.
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3 minutes read.
Blake Scholl reframes how he checks in on a struggling team: "Once I saw this, I realized the standard solutions for burnout—breaks, rest, recharge—were not the solution. What we needed to do is ensure there were believable, inspiring, meaningful goals well within the team’s gratification window. So we broke the far-off, abstract goal of flying into a series of nearer-term individual milestones. We called these Mission Success Events—celebration points along the path to the ultimate mission. [...] When I—or a team—is feeling burnout, I don't start by checking the workload, I check the motivation. What's driving the team? What's the next milestone?" We all reach for rest as the fix first. Blake pushes you to question the goal's believability instead.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Why Good Product Ideas Don’t Survive
8 minutes read.
"AI is used to accelerate the feature factory rather than make it smarter" -- Itamar Gilad calls this outputmaxing, and it explains why more AI-assisted PRDs and code haven't moved the needle on product impact. The bottleneck was never how fast we produce ideas: it's the process that decides which ones survive. Faster output into a broken filter just means more mediocrity, faster.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
8 minutes read.
"AI is used to accelerate the feature factory rather than make it smarter" -- Itamar Gilad calls this outputmaxing, and it explains why more AI-assisted PRDs and code haven't moved the needle on product impact. The bottleneck was never how fast we produce ideas: it's the process that decides which ones survive. Faster output into a broken filter just means more mediocrity, faster.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
What Is a Staff Engineering Manager and How Can You Become One?
6 minutes read.
We'll see more and more leadership positions for managers leading ICs around a critical business value, focusing more on Product Thinking and execution than on org design and execution. AI has fundamentally changed how we think about org design and leadership. Anjuan Simmons lays out a path for engineering managers to grow in ways beyond increasing their impact and influence by leading more people.
Read it later via Instapaper.
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6 minutes read.
We'll see more and more leadership positions for managers leading ICs around a critical business value, focusing more on Product Thinking and execution than on org design and execution. AI has fundamentally changed how we think about org design and leadership. Anjuan Simmons lays out a path for engineering managers to grow in ways beyond increasing their impact and influence by leading more people.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Peopleware
Product Management Is Still All About Telling Stories
16 minutes read.
Josh Elman's definition of great product leadership in one paragraph: "Product management is about telling the story of people who are going to use the product, and why it will matter in their lives. It has to be immediately understandable, by whoever you’re talking to. And it has to be repeatable – people need to be able to pass it around faithfully, without you being in the room."
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
16 minutes read.
Josh Elman's definition of great product leadership in one paragraph: "Product management is about telling the story of people who are going to use the product, and why it will matter in their lives. It has to be immediately understandable, by whoever you’re talking to. And it has to be repeatable – people need to be able to pass it around faithfully, without you being in the room."
Read it later via Instapaper.
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If You Want Taste, You're Gonna Have to Eat
6 minutes read.
"Taste is a little bit of aesthetic judgment, knowing what's beautiful. But I think taste is really your ability to model out what people will like. It's curation versus consumption. And with AI there's so much more volume of work now that it's really easy to regress to the mean. In which case it's not really taste. Taste is a kind of risk-taking. You're choosing to deviate from the safe average." -- Beautifully written by Jason Liu. How do you develop your taste when you're constantly hit with dopamine spikes from endless content?
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6 minutes read.
"Taste is a little bit of aesthetic judgment, knowing what's beautiful. But I think taste is really your ability to model out what people will like. It's curation versus consumption. And with AI there's so much more volume of work now that it's really easy to regress to the mean. In which case it's not really taste. Taste is a kind of risk-taking. You're choosing to deviate from the safe average." -- Beautifully written by Jason Liu. How do you develop your taste when you're constantly hit with dopamine spikes from endless content?
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You
4 minutes read.
Alexandru Nedelcu offers a contrarian take (companies will pull back on AI), explaining why AI can't be trained on code quality: bad architecture only reveals its cost months or years later, so there's no reward signal to learn from, and models end up absorbing patterns from code in the wild, which is mostly mediocre. Do you still trust your linters and your reviewers, or has "the AI approved it" quietly become the new bar?
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
4 minutes read.
Alexandru Nedelcu offers a contrarian take (companies will pull back on AI), explaining why AI can't be trained on code quality: bad architecture only reveals its cost months or years later, so there's no reward signal to learn from, and models end up absorbing patterns from code in the wild, which is mostly mediocre. Do you still trust your linters and your reviewers, or has "the AI approved it" quietly become the new bar?
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Inspiring Tweets
@trq212: The right way to use model capabilities is not to ship 10x more features to prod. It's to spend more time understanding your users, trying experiments, building prototypes, learning about things you don't understand so that you can ship things that actually work
- 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.