Explorer // Dog Lover // Sr. Product Manager at @Patagonia
Ventura, CA
Joined March 2009
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Jason Garcia retweeted
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
Jason Garcia retweeted
Head of Design at Stripe on how to stop creating zombie UIs
If we only use AI to make the things that we already make, just faster, then we're definitely missing out on the most interesting part.
From my talk at @lennysan’s Summit, here are four ideas for raising the ceiling, not just the floor:
- Have a point of view [5:38]
- Encode your standards into the machine [9:07]
- Don't confuse done with good [12:21]
- Unleash creativity and artistry [16:19]
Full talk here: youtu.be/GLvFTMtw4Jk?si=-5Ts…
Jason Garcia retweeted
Good read
🗞️ if your team is too busy doing their 'normal job' to experiment with AI, you're preparing them to be replaced
ghuntley.com/replaced/
In this post, I guess this's the last time I'll say it. AI use is no longer optional if you wish to be employed. What follows is advice for current employees and hiring managers on how to hire in 2026 to source AI-first candidates.
Jason Garcia retweeted
One of my favorite lessons from @rmstein's talk:
"People say the PM's main craft is that you do lots of things pretty well. That is somewhat true. But above all else, the craft of PM is one simple thing: decision-making. You should be students of what it takes to make great decisions."
it's never been a better time to be a product manager. thank you @lennysan for including me at this year’s summit. for anyone interested, catch my full talk here: youtube.com/watch?v=sTgM_sbL…
Jason Garcia retweeted
Pro tip: Install this new evals skill from @HamelHusain and @sh_reya, it'll save you many hours and a lot of mistakes
github.com/ai-evals-course/e…
Evals have been coming up more and more in my conversations with podcast guests and PM friends.
Nearly half of the 25 awesome PM job openings I shared last week ask for experience writing evals. And leading companies keep sharing what investing in evals bought them:
— @tryramp took its automatic receipt collection from 35% to 83% accuracy.
— @Shopify shipped an AI workflow builder that's 2.2x faster and 68% cheaper than the frontier-model setup it replaced.
— @harvey__ai rebuilt its AI contract reviewer, nearly doubling its internal quality score.
— @cursor_ai tuned its Auto Balance routing, with much higher user satisfaction at 41% lower cost.
So I asked the 🐐s of evals, @HamelHusain and @sh_reya, to write an advanced sequel to their very popular "Building eval systems that improve your AI product." Drawing on their work with 50+ AI companies, they share the key step most teams skip, what you should (and shouldn't) automate, and a free plugin that lets a coding agent do most of the heavy lifting.
Read it here: lennysnewsletter.com/p/advan…
Jason Garcia retweeted
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
Jason Garcia retweeted
“In technology, the world belongs to the fast, to the people who iterate, to the people who understand what’s costly and unnecessary and will prune away the rest. You have to do things different. You have to make them your own.”
Jason Garcia retweeted
I’m sick of reading AI slop, so today I’m open-sourcing my /no-ai-slop skill that removes 20+ slop patterns from any piece of writing.
📌 Get the free skill here: github.com/petergyang/no-ai-…
If you find it useful, please consider starring the repo so more people can find it.
Why I built the skill:
I use AI to edit my writing because it helps me fix spelling, grammar, and clarity.
But even the best models keep producing the same slop that this skill removes:
→ Binary contrasts: “It’s not X. It’s Y.”
→ Throat-clearing openers: “Here’s what nobody tells you.”
→ Fake-profound endings: “The future isn’t coming. It’s already here.”
Use this skill responsibly.
I always write a first draft manually before iterating with AI on edits and I make sure to do another manual pass at the end as well.
That’s in contrast to using AI to automate pumping out slop end-to-end.
📌 Read my full post for more on how I try to use AI responsibly to edit without giving into the dark side: creatoreconomy.so/p/use-my-n…
Jason Garcia retweeted
The Argentina come back against Egypt is one of the best matches in football history.
I analyzed ~50,000 games with Fable to show just how crazy it was.
Of the 10,138 times that a team has been up 2-0 at 79', only SIXTEEN times (0.16%) did they ever make a come back at the end of 90 minutes.
This is the first time it's happened in a World Cup.
Jason Garcia retweeted
Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.
400 of them are now worth over $100 million.
These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.
Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.
Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."
The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.
Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.
Jason Garcia retweeted
The takeaway from Fable 5 being BANNED by the government: GET GOOD AT LOCAL MODELS SO YOU HAVE 100% CONTROL.
My entire weekend was going to be building my craziest ideas with Fable 5. That's now cancelled.
So instead of building with Fable this weekend, I've decided I'll go deep on local models:
1. Start with the runtime. Download Ollama or LM Studio first. This is the thing that actually runs models on your machine.
2. Match the model to your hardware. A model's size is measured in billions of parameters (7B, 32B, 70B). Bigger is smarter but needs more memory. Rule of thumb: a 7B model runs on almost any laptop, a 32B needs a good Mac with 32GB+ RAM, a 70B needs serious hardware like a DGX Spark or a maxed-out Mac Studio.
3. Know which model for which job. Qwen 3 is the best all-around choice for most tasks. DeepSeek for reasoning and coding. Gemma 4 when you need something tiny that runs on a phone. Llama when you want the biggest community and the most fine-tunes.
4. Quantization. You can shrink a model to run on weaker hardware with barely any quality loss. Look for versions labeled Q4 or Q5. This is how a model that "needs" a server runs on your laptop. Learning this one concept changes everything.
5. Connect it to your agent. Point Hermes or your agent stack at a local model.
6. Context window is your real constraint locally. Cloud models give you huge context for free. Local models make you pay for it in memory. A bigger context window eats RAM fast. Keep your sessions tight and your prompts lean or your machine chokes.
7. Learn to give local models tools. A smaller local model with web search, file access, and code execution beats a giant model with none. The capability gap closes fast when you wire up the right tools. The model is the engine but the tools are the wheels.
8. Fine-tuning is more accessible than you think. You don't need this on day one, but know it exists. You can take an open model and train it on your own data so it gets good at your specific domain.
I'll probably do a breakdown at some point on this @startupideaspod if people are into it.
The lesson from this ban is basically don't build your entire workflow on something that can disappear with a single letter. Own part of your stack. Local models are insurance.
It reminds me when people realized they don't own social media accounts. And then you saw people build email lists etc.
I remember running a startup and my biggest traffic source was organic FB. All of a sudden, algo changed, and I lost 99% of my traffic.
Same sorta moment (but bigger) for AI.
This is a wake up call.
Jason Garcia retweeted
The hard part of a “Let Them Cook” culture: You have to lower the bar.
- Lower the bar for what people are allowed to make.
- Raise the bar for what gets in front of the experts/customer.
Most teams gate the front door, bury experts in approvals, and call it quality control.
It’s not. It’s a hallway with a stressed-out senior person at the end.
The better model:
1. Let more people prototype, draft, query, and test.
2. Use AI to catch, score, reshape, and route the work before it wastes expert time.
Wider sandbox.
Smarter filter.
That’s the org design shift.
Jason Garcia retweeted
great makers are liable to become managers/leaders. but the legendary leaders figure out how to remain (or once again become) makers.
AI unlocks the era of “leader makers.” Watching teams emerge w/ superior alignment, collapsed talent stacks, and unfathomable potential to build.
Jason Garcia retweeted
Some people think "leadership" is meetings, graduating from building.
True leadership in every organization from 2026 on out *is* building, and it won't be anything other than that into the future.
Either you're building or you're leting your org die slowly. Your choice
