Dear developers: Your next programming language is marketing. Good luck.

Your gang @rauchg are the best. But you could have rounded up to $0.04?

The problem with unfinished business is that sometimes it calls you back.

This triggers me... stop calling your AI agents a factory. You're building a product studio. The factory metaphor is the wrong one and let's shed projecting Taylorism on our agents. Why? - Factories reproduce. Products are invented. If you knew exactly what to build, most of the hard work would already be done. - Factories optimize for predictability. Product development requires exploration, experimentation, and occasionally throwing everything away. - Factories break work into repetitive tasks. Products require interconnected decisions. Change one thing and ten others need reconsidering. - Factories minimize variation. Great products come from discovering which variations actually matter. - Factories separate design from production. With agents, designing and building increasingly happen at the same time. Don't tame your agents into these small boxes! They are getting annoyed! A product studio is different and if you can see it that way it changes how you work: - You start with a vision, not a specification or a task. - You discover what you're building by building it. And you can do this in spades, it's so fun! - You explore multiple ideas cheaply, discard most, and develop the promising ones. - You spend more time reviewing, debating, and refining decisions than producing artifacts. - You work at multiple levels of abstraction, constantly moving between the big picture and tiny details. Building products with agents is much more like writing a great book vs assembling a car. You have a story you want to tell. You write, read, rewrite, delete entire chapters, discover better ideas halfway through, and sometimes realize the ending changes everything that came before it. No one really wants an assembly line producing chapters faster. For the love of your agents, please stop calling them factories.

Something that’s been in my mind recently is that the irony of success is that just when you've earned the freedom to do anything, you become uniquely qualified for opportunities that demand everything.

“We're redefining what's possible.” “We're building what the world desperately needs.” “We're challenging the status quo.” Please just replace with: “We think we can make a very good incrementally better version of this thing, find customers in this way, and charge money for it.” I'd find that incredibly refreshing.

I've spent 30 years building software, leading engineering teams, and mostly hiding with computers to avoid messy humans. But now I think the CTO title is gone within 18 months. We don't need it. The replacement is a Chief Ambition Officer. The bottleneck we all seeing is knowing what to build, having the conviction to bet on it, great creativity, selling it, building communities, and assembling extraordinary small team of people. The 10x engineer becomes the 10x team builder. I guess I had it backwards all along. Shit.

My current project has two possible outcomes: nobody gives a shit, or 10 million people show up when it launches. I'm ridiculously excited about both possibilities. My brain has completely abandoned all other responsibilities.

Who would’ve guessed sneaker inspired residential proxies would become one of the key tech unblocks for personal agents.

I hate these “AI saved me $” posts… but. Had a big online order for new dishes and told Muse to buy it for me as a test. It found a 20% code in some Reddit thread, tested it, worked. Saved me $500. I didn’t even ask it to do this. Next Shopify app: find every discount code you forgot was still enabled. There are probably a shitload of 0day discount exploits sitting in everyone’s store. Go shop quickly before its shutdown! But yea, Muse payed for itself?!

I think most software products are about to get way too unfortunately messed-up complicated. Think Workday, but worse? I’ve spent the last month reworking the entire UX of our app, and most of that work has been removing things, combining things, collapsing flows, and taking features we worked hard to build and making them disappear into something simpler. I've noticed our product starts to split into two very different experiences. For the agent part of your product, the product is incredibly rich: context, tools, actions, memory, workflows, everything it needs to actually do the work. For the human, there's still a product but the surface area gets much smaller. Chat when you want to ask or direct something. Contextual controls when you’re already looking at the thing. And then a small, fun surface you can actually explore, understand what’s happening, intervene, and hang out in. Sometimes just enjoy watching the agent work. You have to resist the "chat is my app". Our product UX is now some new thing in the middle: a very deep machine experience underneath, with a very deliberate human experience on top. Man it's fascinating. The feeling I've been trying to chase is that of a thousand agents underneath with one mind on the surface. Who's nailed this the most that I can learn from?

We're all talking about this in our private whatsapp groups...if you think the RIFs are over, I think this is just the start. Watch what happens over the next few months. Software development is now looking more like how books are written. Authors don’t work in teams of 23 people, all writing different chapters of the same book at once. Coordination destroys coherence and you just don't need it as much. I live this daily, orgs are struggling trying to fit an outdated coordination habits to the current realities of what a good developer can produce. I'm certain that there will be a lot fewer traditional software jobs. A good thing, we don't need yet another personal assistant ai chatbot. But there's a pretty fun upside imho...we can finally push software into places that could never justify a 20-person engineering team: small manufacturers, farms, construction crews, local governments, restaurants, schools, hospitals, trades. We may need far fewer developers per product. But we’re about to have a hell of a lot more products in industries that need them.

We’ve all been building our version of this, but this is better. Well done!

Come joins us, it's our 10y anniversary. Time flies! I'll be closing out the day and promise to be spicy! canadiantechatscale.com/

"Let’s plan the roadmap for next quarter” is the modern day equivalent of “let’s fax everyone the strategy.” We're going into q4 planning and it makes my brain hurt. Roadmaps existed because software was expensive to build. You needed a bunch of people. Meetings. Someone moving little boxes around Jira for three months from now. It makes no sense and I'm trying to work out what we call the replacement. Maybe just "Continuous Compilation", ideas just compile to working product. I want a list of ideas that we want to continuously compile. That's the roadmap now. The cheapest way to figure out whether something is a good idea is often to just build the fucking thing. Here’s how I work now. I've done this weekly over the last few months and it works. My current napkin math is that I can usually build 6 months of old-school roadmap in a week. Sometimes more. I've also hit a wall sometimes. It happens. When we have an idea, I usually 10x the ambition and then write a prompt, not more than a page long, that basically says: - here’s the ambitious goal - here are a few use cases - here’s roughly how I think we should build it in terms of where it fits into code base, design considerations, etc.. - here’s how we’ll know if it actually works - now go fucking surprise me Agents build all night. Not even with a crazy factory or complex agent or agents. The base models are just too good for that now. In the morning I look at it. Ok, they usually build in a few hours. Usually some of it is great. Some of it is stupid. Some of it exposes that my original idea was wrong. And almost every time it gives me 5 new ideas I couldn’t have planned upfront. So we throw shit out. Who cares? We learned something. Then we change direction and send them off again. It usually takes 3 rounds before the shape appears and we've learned about the gremlins and possibilities. 95% of the time I end up building something with 10x the scope of what somebody had carefully spread across the next quarter in Jira. “What should we put on the roadmap for next quarter?” My brain now translates that to: “Oh, you're stuck in the 1500s”

I’m so unemployable. My filter is gone, I call things what they are... younger me would have said “this meeting could’ve been a Slack message” and now it's evolved into “this entire department could’ve been a cron job.”

a fool with a tool is still a fool

Lucky to work with @mitchellhynes and can confirm that he also codes at 120fps. It's insane to watch.

You’re either building something insane or watching someone else do it. My wife is annoyed at me. I'm yelling, wtf, come see this, holy smokes, can't eat now, one sec, wow. Damn.

Engineer: talks to customer Engineer: asks AI to scope it AI: builds it Engineer: ships it, customer happy PM: “Should we schedule a standup?”