Wrote up a series of nine short posts on interesting problems we encountered while building an internal agent framework (virtual files, compaction, LLM vs code-driven workflows, etc) lethain.com/agents-series/

Digital edition of my fourth book, Crafting Engineering Strategy, is up for purchase! (Print copy should start shipping in next 2-3 weeks.) Tried to apply "Staff Engineer" formula to eng strategy topic, with a lot more editing 😂 www.amazon.com/Crafting-Eng...

Any good patterns for loading a Notion page as modifiable prompt to respond to other Notion pages and Slack messages? Eg as a simple example you could imagine I want to write architecture guidelines and then use that to comment on RFCs. Is this just Zapier?

New post up, with a bunch of thoughts on what drives me personally, and my own 40-year career (h/t @lethain.com). I have a pretty unusual life story. But one of the reasons I love the tech industry so much is how common unusual stories like mine have historically been. charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...

Did my first podcast in some time as I start ramping up a bit around getting started as new CTO at Imprint and also getting close to releasing next book! Podcast up at www.executiveruntime.show/episodes/04-...

Over the last year, as I've spent more time working with LLMs to power product features, I've also been thinking about how LLMs impact me as a long-form author. Of the ideas I've had, I'm particularly interested in the idea of building, and selling, books as "datapacks" for LLMs.

Still only part way through the editing process, but excited to announce Crafting Engineering Strategy, my upcoming book with O'Reilly on engineering strategy coming later this year (sometime Q4).

My bi-decade update on my desk setup 😂 Finally found a dock that lets me swap from windows desktop with dedicated GPU to OSX laptop with a single thunderbolt cable! lethain.com/desk-setup-2...

This is a fascinating thread. And it has lots of my favorite thing: details. I could give a shit about people who pounce online, flaming on and on about how wrong I am. I love it when people reply with details about their very different experience. The details give it heft. I can learn from them.

Looking for startup to angel invest in that solves problem of chairs being routinely positioned to block video cameras in office meeting rooms. (I've tried petitioning to remove chairs from rooms, but this innovation has met substantial resistance, so we need to innovate here.)

Each time I open LinkedIn I pray I don’t somehow accidentally click on the brain teaser game and become shamed forever off the internet

This time experimenting with MCP server for generating and running systems models ( github.com/lethain/syst... ). I think it's pretty wild how well this works, especially the tool to inject domain-specific language usage documentation into the context window.

Got to zero inbox on my personal email address(es) for the first time in a decade or so. This was mostly (1) declaring bankrupt on anything older than 6 months, (2) unsubscribing/filtering spammy stuff, and (3) setting up a transient tag for emails I want to *briefly* see lethain.com/filter-old-g...

Another writing workflow tool I've found useful is using LLM API to describe images. Here's is an example of script that replaces empty image descriptions with reasonably good ones. To extent the images could be better, it's b/c my prompt needs some work gist.github.com/lethain/9c5e...

Threw together an MCP for navigating Markdown knowledge bases (e.g. recursive folders with markdown files with markdown headers). Very basic, and very vibe-coded, but works well and interesting learning experience github.com/lethain/libr...

Love this post from @keavym.bsky.social, really captures the right hand archetype of staff-plus engineer (ty to @kstewart.bsky.social who reminded me of Keavy's post) keavy.com/work/art-of-...

Small weekend project, I finally moved staffeng.com from Gatsby to Hugo. Gatsby is just fairly hard to maintain with so many JS dependencies for something I don't update frequently. Now actually possible to fix issues again 😅

And don't miss my full CTO Craft Con keynote, more conference highlights, book recommendations, and links featuring: @patkua.bsky.social, @sarahedo.bsky.social, @jackdanger.com, @lethain.com & @thiagodefaria.com! www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VXa...

Will Larson (@lethain.com) recently wrapped up an *incredible* streak of posts on engineering strategy on his blog, lethain.com. Strategy is hard, much harder than it looks. Especially since, much like design and management, when done well, it looks easy. Easy and obvious.

This one worked exceptionally well to create an SEO-driving FAQ page for page for new book. Done in a Claude workspace with entire book loaded into project via some light preprocessing plus repomix of all Markdown files.

So... should I make all the systems models look like Figma diagrams or Excalidraw diagrams? And why?

Now working on visual consistency of images for strategy book. One shot prompted a very simple script to build a static HTML page showing every image and descriptions used in the book. This is just a subset of the ~50 images overall, but gives a sense of starting point / problem to be solved.

Still enjoying my very basic, vibe coded typo/grammar fixer for blog posts 😂

The one where everyone’s GitHub actions turned out to be exfiltrating their secrets www.cve.org/CVERecord?id...

I'm still working on getting better at writing one-pass scripts using Claude. This one supporting a common blog editing workflow to incorporate grammar, typos, and other fixes (gist is gist.github.com/lethain/ce2a... )

This does not mean that execs should never be im the details!! "Hire great people and get out of their way" is horrendous, disastrous advice! You need to hire great people and create alignment. You have to be in the details together deep enough, LONG enough to do that!

This does not sound like a happy experience, but I actually think this is more or less how things are supposed to work? One of my most-cited bookmarks is this one from kellblog, on how there are really only three management levels: line manager, director, and VP. kellblog.com/2015/03/08/c...

It *does* take time for a team to gel. Yes. If you care about high performing teams, you should carefully weigh the costs of shuffling people around vs the hoped-for gains. According to Tuckman's theory of group development, these stages are called, * forming * storming * norming * performing

Continuing to experiment with how foundational models can help with writing book _without_ using them to actually write anything (which is, ya know, what I want to do as the author). This was feedback on 180 pages, which is pretty good feedback and took <30 seconds to get versus many days.

Great read from @nelhage.bsky.social

@lethain.com loved lethain.com/is-engineeri... — interesting side note — I also have often adopted an approach with a senior technical leader paired with a manager. I find it so interesting how people independently invent the same thing!

Has someone already coined term “spaghetti agents” for software lightly cobbled together by functioning but hard to modify strings of agents?

It's funny that when very complex apps send you instructions on e.g. getting tax documents, the labels in the instructions and the labels on the site are 100% guaranteed to never match. Really need ability to unify email templates and page templates in a unified, maintainable place.

The first actual strategy I ever worked on was Uber's service migration strategy back in 2014. There's a lot that went wrong with that work (I can't think of anything I ever worked on that I wouldn't describe that way, tbh), but also a lot that went right. lethain.com/uber-service...

The networked fire alarms in this house (presumably subsonic frequency, not to eg wifi) are both very helpful for detecting alarm and extremely hard to debug (which went off first?!?!). Really need two distinct tones for original and repeaters…

Whether serious or not @chiphuyen.bsky.social has a recent article on this: huyenchip.com//2025/01/07/... Not necessarily on agents themselves but also wrote a recent book: www.oreilly.com/library/view... (Honestly haven't read it yet but I know it'll be good)

I just published "Why aren't we all serverless yet?" trying to structure some of my toughts after mulling over @lethain.com's comment during the Xmas break. varoa.net/2025/01/09/s...

Have this bad idea of a podcast or book of interviews with working parents of younger children where it’s just discussing the weird compromises they’ve made to make pieces fit

At one of the #Atlanta #Tech Holiday mixers, @prpatel.dev and I discussed how we like to use the winter holidays to catch up on reading. I have a rotation of books that I start in December, but realistically, don't finish until March. This time, I thought it'd be fun to share what I'm reading.

One of my pointless personal goals was hoping the new book reaches 100 ratings on Amazon by end of 2024. If I miss, it will be by the narrowest margin 😂

lethain.com/refining-eng... As usual a terrific article from @lethain.com 🙏

A cup of tea ☕, rain sounds in the background 😌, and 'Staff Engineer' by @lethain.com - the perfect cozy combo to kick off some insightful reading 📚

Praying this is transient oddity so that I am not debugging my blog's build and deployment this evening 😆 Using latest is indeed my fault, but I've also had to debug end of life'd Ubuntu and Hugo versions. Entropy is real.

Great stuff, Will. I love your "goals for the decade" - I will steal that idea. I have been doing similar yearly reviews for a few years; you can find an overview of my approach here: esilva.net/articles/end... (balancing young children & work is also very present in my end-of-year reflection)

Putting up my 2024 year in review post on this rainy Saturday morning. lethain.com/2024-in-revi...

lol tornado warning indeed. Happy Saturday folks

This is a good baseline indeed. I like surveying devs as another metric. I ask them to capture how they spent their time (their last work day) based on a few buckets. These buckets are either value generating or non value generating time. I find it a valuable measurement.

Continuing to work on building confidence with wardley mapping, and this time tried to map out meta-developer productivity tooling space (e.g. tools to measure and improve dev productivity). lethain.com/measuring-de...

Finally took some time over past month to learn Wardley mapping. Still a technique I’ve rarely seen “in real life”, but glad that @mipsytipsy.bsky.social mentioned it a few times online in ~2018 and I’ve finally caught up 😂 lethain.com/learning-war...