So what was agile actually about? Build small. Ship it. Get feedback. Adapt. That loop is more relevant now than ever. The frameworks around it? You can throw those away. @allenholub.bsky.social stellarwork.start.page

Anthropic, the AI safety company, accidentally published 512,000 lines of Claude Code's source code to npm. open.substack.com/pub/stellarw...

"Big consultancies get hired by upper management to tell upper management what they already want to hear." @allenholub.bsky.social says he's never seen a consultant-led transformation actually work. stellarwork.start.page

Choosing the Right Claude Model — covers the current lineup, the two approaches that actually work, and why a good eval set matters more than the model itself. Read it here → www.stellarwork.com/captains-log/choosing-the-right-claude-model---a-practitioners-guide-to-not-overthinking-it

If your entire job is: receive spec, write code, hand it off, repeat... you should be worried. As @allenholub.bsky.social put it: coding was maybe 15% of the job. The rest was thinking, designing, testing, talking to people. AI made it impossible to ignore. open.spotify.com/episode/41gZ...

Agile is dead. At least the word is. @allenholub.bsky.social won't use it anymore. Neither will @kentbeck.com with XP. Not because the ideas failed. Because the industry turned them into a certification machine. -> stellarwork.start.page

Well, I guess it’s time to go outside and touch some grass…

This week's Stellar Work newsletter: OpenAI killed Sora 30 min after a Disney planning meeting. A jury called Instagram a defective product. A Dutch court caught Grok lying about AI nudes. open.substack.com/pub/stellarw...

Most AI adoption doesn't die because of bad tools. It dies because someone bought a license and sent an email. That's my biggest takeaway from recording with Matas Rastenis from Uber 🧵

"Create an analytics dashboard" is not a prompt. It's a vibe. And Claude doesn't do vibes. Here is how it works: www.stellarwork.com/captains-log/prompting-best-practices-with-claude

Everyone's talking about AI agents. Very few people are talking about what agents do to your org chart. This clip is from my episode with Matas Rastenis from Uber. What actually changes when agents start handling most of the work? Full episode here: stellarwork.start.page

This was the week the AI industry’s supply chain turned into a spy novel except the spy used a hair dryer, communicated in sobbing emojis, and worked at one of America’s most important server companies. All that and much more on my latest newsletter. Subscribe! We have memes! 🧵

"Cool, but we're not Uber." I hear you. Most companies don't have a dedicated developer platform team with a budget that would make a small startup cry. So I asked Matas: what can a normal company actually do? Full conversation: stellarwork.start.page

31% of Uber's code is now AI-authored. Not in a hackathon. In production. I sat down with Matas Rastenis — Senior Staff Engineer at Uber's Developer Platform — to talk about how they got there. 🎙️ stellarwork.start.page

Speaking at Decompiled last Thursday was a blast 🔥 What a well organized conference 🥰 Thanks for everyone who joined my talk. Talking into a mic without hearing myself was the oddest experience 😵‍💫

This week's bill arrived. All of them, actually 😱 open.substack.com/pub/stellarw...

My top 3 takeaways talking to Matthias Wagner (beyond the Crazy Frog Jamba Ringtone Earworm...) 🦞 The real disruption isn’t “a better PCB tool.” It’s removing the emotional tax: when a workflow is annoying enough, smart people simply avoid it.

Crazy Frog → Burning Man → AI startup: @MatthiasWagner was part of the team behind the music for Crazy Frog… and now he’s ramping up @buildwithflux an AI hardware engineering company. Listen: stellarwork.start.page

Your first quarter is almost over. Now is NOT, and I repeat, NOT a good time to AI-Work-Slop your OKR Deliverables into Jira ❌ But if you do 🤷‍♂️, give Claude Cowork a chance, I switched from Perplexity and it felt like this 👇

@buildwithFlux just announced new funding — $37M total raised, including a $27M Series B led by 8VC. @MatthiasWagner talks about what this kind of round really buys you when you’re building “software to make hardware” Full episode: stellarwork.start.page

Jack Dorsey laid off 4,000 people and blamed #AI. Any other news from the tech. world 👇 open.substack.com/pub/stellarw...

1. You're not bad at executing. You're bad at prioritizing 2. The thing you're avoiding is literally draining your battery even when you're not working on it. 3. At the leadership level, don't debate projects. Debate the criteria for evaluating projects 🎙️https://stellarwork.start.page

Im speaking at DecompileD in Dresden on the 12th 🤩 If you’re at Decompiled, come say hi. If you’re not — maybe you should be 🤷‍♂️ #codeandconnect

If you’ve ever thought “PCB design feels like it’s stuck in another decade”… you’ll like this clip. Matthias Wagner explains Flux’s core idea: use AI to help you go from plan → schematic → layout Full episode: stellarwork.start.page

Wait… hardware can move like software? 😱 I had the chance to interview @MatthiasWagner, Founder and CEO of Flux.ai - a company that lets you design PCBs with a single prompt. You can get our full episode over here: stellarwork.start.page

The main struggle within large companies is connecting vision to execution. Having the right priorities in mind and being able to stick to them is key. Learn more about how priorities actually work within our latest episode with Harry Max: stellarwork.start.page

🔥 Anthropic told the Pentagon: no. → Michael Burry vs Nvidia's balance sheet. → Jack Dorsey cut 40% → PayPal is now takeover talk → Schaeffler is pivoting to robots and defense drones → PROTOTYPE Capital ranked #2 substack.com/home/post/p-...

Horsetrading resources is slowing you down ...🐌 When prioritizing, always against an external reference! Get the full episode: stellarwork.start.page cc: Harry Max

"The magic you are looking for is in the work you're avoiding" Get the full episode here: stellarwork.start.page

AI can't fix your broken organization. It'll just help you ship broken things faster. That was one of many uncomfortable truths from the Pragmatic Engineer Summit last week. Wrote up my takeaways: www.stellarwork.com/captains-log...

I sat down with Harry Max in our new San Francisco podcast studio to talk about the one thing that's quietly killing your company's momentum: priorities. Full episode: stellarwork.start.page

🦞 **The AI trade-secrets era:** fewer open doors, more locked rooms, higher stakes. 🦞 **RentAHuman:** bots hire humans for errands, stunts, and “please touch grass on my behalf” energy. 👉 open.substack.com/pub/stellarw...

I went to San Francisco to learn from OpenAI how they build Codex and use AI to create Software and all I got was a pair of Codex-Socks. And some cool insights I summarized in the latest Captains (b)log: www.stellarwork.com/captains-log...

post a tree you photographed

This week’s tech dumpster fire: 💥 The "SaaSpocalypse" 🚀 Thomas Dohmke’s new company costs $60 million. 🤝 OpenAI, Anthropic & Google’s awkward threesome 🐕 Amazon tried to sell surveillance with a lost puppy ad. open.substack.com/pub/stellarw...

Organizations who gave up their digital transformation, who gave up their cloud or agile transformation, will also give up on their AI transformation.

-Elon merged SpaceX + xAI while somehow keeping xAI's $17B debt at arm's length (financial engineering or financial yoga?) -Anthropic ran Super Bowl ads with cougar-dating jokes mocking ChatGPT's ads -Sam Altman responded with a 400-word essay about how he's definitely NOT mad

This conversation with Sander stayed with me much longer than the recording. It challenged a lot of what is taken for granted in our industry. Here are the three things that hit me the most:

Most onboarding is a tour through JIRA, roles, and recurring meetings. At iBOOD, onboarding looks very different. New developers don’t land in a thick process manual; they land in a team that expects them to write production code within days, with support. Some elements Sander described:

There’s a quiet risk almost no transformation roadmap mentions: an aging tech industry. Sander calls out what happens if everyone “only hires seniors” while AI supposedly replaces juniors -> stellarwork.start.page

Open source maintainers are drowning in AI-generated security reports. Node.js is locking down. Django is ditching HackerOne. The founding principle of "anyone can contribute" is being sacrificed because validating garbage now costs more than generating it. open.substack.com/pub/stellarw...

Most teams don’t need “more Scrum”. They need the courage to design their own way of working. Sander describes agile not as a process, but as “the ability to create your own process” and to continuously drop practices that no longer add value. stellarwork.start.page

In our latest episode Sander Hoogendoorn, CTO at iBOOD, shares how his team ships to production 50–80 times per day 😱without sprints, Scrum Masters, product owners, retrospectives or even JIRA as most know it. 🤔 👉 Listen to the episode here: stellarwork.start.page

This week’s issue zooms in on Bayer’s attempted comeback: a bruised giant trying to rebrand itself as a serious pharma growth story while still dragging Monsanto baggage behind it. open.substack.com/pub/stellarw...

Ive done an episode with Stuart Munton from AND Digital and my brain is still buffering, but here are my top 3 takeaways: 1️⃣ AI is not “eating” consulting – it’s eating the old mechanistic ways of running it. If your model is just “throw more people at JIRA tickets”, you’re in trouble.

Something Stuart said in the episode is still echoing: “The big problem soon won’t be how fast people can run, but how we organize the race.”

📱 Apple gave up on Siri and called Google. 🔧 The AI talent war is now about electricians. 🍿 OpenAI raided Mira Murati's startup. HBO, you watching? 🤖 Grok made deepfakes of Musk's ex. She sued. -> stellarwork.substack.com/p/the-week-i...

One thing that stuck with me from the chat with Stuart: AND Digital is basically in the business of “selling JavaScript developers by the day” – and then GenAI + CodeGen walked in and asked: “Are you sure that’s still the business you’re in?”

Just launched a new episode of the Stellar Work Podcast. This time with Stuart Munton, CIO at AND Digital. We talked about how AI is reshaping consulting stellarwork.start.page

Just shipped a new edition of my newsletter: this week is all about who really runs the chip world (spoiler: Apple × TSMC), how AI models are starting to *teach themselves*, and what that means for our jobs, companies, and energy grids. 👉 open.substack.com/pub/stellarw...