"A bad map that looks like a good map is worse than no map at all." by @derekwwade.bsky.social

I run a recruitment process at Lunar Logic. Part of that is writing rejection messages. I write them all by hand. Yes, a simple automation would save me time. And yet, part of me considers crafting the message by hand a sign of respect. I can invest a couple of minutes in being respectful.

"The thing about including humans in the loop is that if the AI is selecting 80 targets an hour, as has been reported, the humans probably aren’t going to do a good job verifying those targets." Flood the zone, anyone? substack.com/home/post/p-...

"The work also found a correlation between self-reported AI brain fry and an employee’s intent to quit their company. Intent to leave rose by nearly 10 percent" With AI we change the cognitive nature of our work nie than we realize. futurism.com/artificial-i...

Real-time feedback on relative effort makes the hardest-working team members work less. If you fall into a collective intelligence rabbit hole, there's like a ton of such counterintuitive findings. www.youtube.com/watch?v=njor...

A non-deterministic product may produce different outputs with each use, which makes the traditional means of testing and debugging less useful. "It works well on my machine" will become even more of a joke than it is right now.

It feels like the difference between the deterministic and stochastic nature of tools should be the central piece of discussions about AI. And it's a side table at best. A very small side table.

Tech industry: With AI, investor loyalty is dead. Me: You must be kidding. Investor loyalty? That a thing? They'd throw a startup under the bus to marginally improve their chances of going supernova. pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/is-vc-broken

If you wonder why we won't unleash fully autonomous AI agents anytime soon, it's not because of technical capabilities, or lack thereof. It's because of psychology 101: brodzinski.com/2025/10/no-t...

"This private-market funding round is about four times larger than the biggest IPO ever." Is anybody doing the math on this? Save for circular economy where money goes back Nvidia and Amazon in infrastructure bills, that is. share.google/w7T1WCnPBtOJ...

"We've grown from 20 to 150 people in the last year." "Today we're introducing a set of new company values at Lovable." Anton Osika, Lovable. With that growth speed, their 130 new hires ARE the new culture.

1000 words about the recent "substack post that crashed the stock market" drama.

"* Producing code faster than we can understand it paints us into a corner * The fastest way to understand code is to write it" @jasongorman.bsky.social "When we are under cognitive load, carrying too much in active memory, our executive function degrades." @ourfounder.bsky.social Do the math.

The most important question a product manager should keep asking, especially in the AI era: Should we build it? My guest article at Ibrahim Bashir's Run the Business: runthebusiness.substack.com/p/invalidati...

We could discuss whether OpenAI is worth $300B or $500B, but they at least have the revenue and growth we can challenge. The new wave of AI startups? No product, thus no traction, thus no growth, thus no growth curve, thus no possible challenge. Welcome to the fantasyland! bit.ly/4rrYcjT

OH: So I got this code to review. Looked like AI-generated. I asked questions about it, but the developer had no clue. If I have to talk about the code with GPT, I would very much prefer to remove the proxy.

Q: “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.” A: "Tens of millions of dollars." Burning fossil fuel through being nice. Oh, well... techcrunch.com/2025/04/20/y...

If we consider dropping the idea altogether after a discovery phase a failure, then at least half of well-run discovery phases should fail. pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/50-of-disc...

The Starbucks Test 1. Check the revenues and profits of a SaaS 2. Assume it’s Starbucks 3. Figure out the valuation of the company Surprisingly, SaaS pass the test, i.e., their valuations are sensible, only *after* the so-called SaaSpocalypse (or SaaS culling). substack.com/home/post/p-...

Stumbled upon a profile of a person I've known for almost 2 decades. He used to be an agile/lean thought leader. Then, a crypto advocate. Now, it's all about AI careers. Most curious: the past "careers" are suspiciously gone from his current profile. Go figure.

"Software architecture and design is replete with woolly concepts – what exactly is a “responsibility”, for example? How could we instruct a computer to recognise when a function or a class has more than one reason to change?" by @jasongorman.bsky.social codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/02/18/1...

Digital product isn't a pizza. Not everyone has to like it. Enough people liking it enough to pay enough for it is, well, enough.

I read the recent viral article by Matt Shumer, it's compelling but I'm just not ready to buy the future he's painting. I wrote this to share my own thoughts on our pending future with AI... www.linkedin.com/pulse/histor...

Dario Amodei: “[We] may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.“ Is it only me, or is it a highway to a model collapse? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39048682/

The Secret AI Startup Funding Playbook™ 1. Get well-known names from major AI companies to co-found. 2. Define a moonshot AI goal. 3. Create an impression of progress for a quarter. 4. Get your hundreds of millions in the seed round. Voila! pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/secret-pla...

Imagine: as a part of a job form you have to decide which cultural aspects of the job are relatively more important. No LLM can tell that about you.

I want YOUR life philosophy. Will you share it with me? This is research for my next book. You get a chance to win $500 worth of prizes and signed books. 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝? 𝐈𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐬. And the questions may be useful to you. Thanks. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... #rulestolive

If your cycle time sucks, automating coding won't do anything to your delivery pipeline. You've got 99 problems, but the pace of coding ain't one. by @paulisthrivving.xyz medium.com/thrivve-part...

Can you tell human writing from AI-slop? samillingworth.itch.io/bot-or-not

Do you want to improve the engagement of your teams by 20%+ with literally no investment whatsoever? Easy. Distribute more autonomy across the board. Seriously. It's enough to move engagement from "meh" to "engaged." brodzinski.com/2026/01/lego...

"In time, he won’t just lose comprehension of what has been built; he’ll lose the ability to reason about it at all. Even if he can code, those skills will atrophy, along with the learning that sustains them." @swardley.bsky.social on swarm AI vibe coding www.linkedin.com/posts/simonw...

"A historic moment in solo founding and startup history." 36.3% of startups are founded solo. A good question to ask: What is their success rate as compared to team-led startups?

experienced engineers: one change, test, one change, test junior engineers: batch everything because they're in a hurry this is exactly backwards the person least capable of batching is the one most likely to batch

Realities of AI unicorns these days (which become unicorns before they even announce what they're working on).

Shipping something may be 10x cheaper. Shipping meaningful stuff is about as difficult as it was.

The new business plan: 1. Get a bunch of people from major AI companies. 2. Start a startup that will "rethink something-something AI." 3. Get half a billion in seed money round before you accomplish anything. 4. And they lived happily ever after. techcrunch.com/2026/01/20/h...

"The “wisdom of crowds” works only if the crowd is made of distinct individuals. When one operator can speak through thousands of masks, that independence collapses." by @garymarcus.bsky.social substack.com/home/post/p-...

"Many managers think they empower their teams to solve problems autonomously. Unfortunately, that autonomy only lasts when managers feel relaxed enough to “allow” that autonomy. When managers feel too much pressure, that autonomy vanishes." by @jrothman.com www.jrothman.com/newsletter/2...

If you already know what's in your backlog for the next N iterations of your product, you're not doing iterative development. You're working through a plan.

Gallup: "After dropping in 2020 during the pandemic, employee engagement is on the rise again, reaching a record-high 23%." That was 2 years ago. Now engagement dropped again. Actually, whether it's 23% or 21%, it's still appalling. Reason? Lack of autonomy: brodzinski.com/2026/01/auto...

"We optimized for shipping trash, because the metrics for trash are easier to track than the metrics for quality." www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-p...

Just 6 days remaining for my Effective Public Speaking Kickstarter. See the speaking myths here: www.jrothman.com/tag/speaking... and the Kickstarter here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/joh... #Speaking #Kickstarter #ProjectWeLove #Fiction

"This is Continuous Integration 101. While a build is in progress, the software’s like Schrödinger’s Cat – simultaneously working and not working." by @jasongorman.bsky.social codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/01/21/f...

1) Software engineering is not about building features 2) Refactoring is a business problem 3) Software engineering is not an engineering practice 4) LLMs will not replace software engineers 5) Architects don't make decisions by @swardley.bsky.social & @tudorgirba.com medium.com/feenk/rewild...

A discovery phase for a new product development should fail more often than not. Where I understand "failure" as not continuing the effort. Failure rate is, in fact, a success rate. pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/50-of-disc...

Reporter: “What makes you tick?” Tolkien: “I don’t tick. I am not a machine. If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder.” —J.R.R. Tolkien to Harvey Breit, New York Times Book Review, June 5, 1955, quoted in Letters, 217-18

The next multibillion-dollar funding series for OpenAI will starve tens of thousands of startups from their seed rounds. These are the tradeoffs the startup ecosystem is looking at this year. pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/2026-the-y...

"estimation reveals that the increase in static analysis warnings and code complexity acts as a major factor causing long-term velocity slowdown" Executive Summary: marathons are easy to start arxiv.org/abs/2511.04427

As AI's role grows, digital startups are becoming more like brick-and-mortar businesses in one critical respect: The cost of operations is substantial and has to be factored in. An average customer has to be net-positive for the business.

"When we talk about AI risk, most organisations think about hallucinations, bias, or compliance gaps. Few think about what happens when the training data itself becomes the attack vector." www.linkedin.com/posts/openno...