Weeknote

Intro

The theme of this week is dev tools are agent tools too. So good practices are still just that. AI will change some things but it will mainly just reinforce the good practices of before. If you don’t have those set up, throwing money at AI isn’t going to change things for you a whole lot either.

Highlights of the Week

The Factory Model: How Coding Agents Changed Software Engineering

https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/

The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.

The engineers who will have the most impact in this era will not be distinguished by how fast they type or how well they remember syntax. They will be distinguished by a different set of capabilities. Systems thinking. The ability to hold a complex architecture in mind, understand how components interact, and anticipate how a change in one place affects behavior elsewhere. This is harder to develop than typing speed and far more valuable when you are managing a fleet of agents whose outputs you have to integrate. Problem decomposition. Knowing how to break a large, ambiguous goal into well-scoped subtasks that an agent can execute reliably. Tasks that are too large tend to go off-track. Tasks that are poorly scoped get interpreted incorrectly. The skill of decomposing problems well, and then verifying that the decomposition was right, is a genuine

Intro

I’ve been quite late with this one but at least it is out in some shape or form. It still contains the things I read during the week 6 but a few days late. A lot of AI stuff again this time. I’m not sure if I am or am not that interested in all this still. Some is good but the way absolutely everyone is reading and writing about the same stuff all means there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t that useful or only slight variations of others.

Highlights of the Week

The Only Skill That Matters Now

https://worksonmymachine.ai/p/the-only-skill-that-matters-now

Anyway, yeah, like I said earlier, Gretzky could already skate. He was incredibly agile. He could stop on a dime. Change direction mid-stride. His edges were so good he could literally dance on ice.

He didn’t become great because he predicted the puck. He became great because he could actually get to ANY position on the ice and be open. The prediction was secondary to the skating.

That’s where we are now. Except our skates are prompts. Our ice is context windows. Our edges are knowing how to talk to Claude or Gemini or whatever comes out next that makes both of them obsolete.

The only skill that matters is being able to adapt to whatever scenario comes towards us. So instead of trying to predict where things are going, focus on having a good baseline and being able to adapt. Sounds good in theory and all that

Intro

More AI stuff this week again like the last before it. I don’t think anybody really knows how these things will all play out but that hasn’t stopped everyone making lots of predictions.

Highlights of the Week

Raising a Special Little AI

By Not Boring

Having said that, I do subscribe to the Chris Dixon views that The next big thing will start out looking like a toy and What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years, so if this many people are captivated, there’s something going on.

I left FAANG for a startup and regretted it

https://lawrenceztang.substack.com/p/i-left-faang-for-a-startup-and-regretted No highlights from this but a great read all the same. It is very difficult to give all hours to someone else’s idea.

The way I run standup meetings

https://marcgg.com/blog/2024/11/20/standup

The objective of this meeting is to share interesting things relevant to your team and raise blockers. What we find “interesting” will vary depending on context. Use your best judgment and don’t hesitate to ask the group if this is interesting to them.

You will hear updates not impacting you directly. Maybe things you don’t understand fully. This is normal and by design. However your goal is to pay attention to everything, be curious and try to understand what everyone is sharing. Don’t hesitate to ask questions after the meeting.

Lots of meetings are BS but the daily standup is one of the better ones, at least in my experience. Especially on remote teams it is easy to loose contact and context with what is

Intro

Spend a few days in Madrid this week and spent those days exploring the city rather than reading so a light one this time. I did read a lot of the book “Dead in the Water” and though I haven’t finished it yet it is really interesting. Reads something of a thriller though based on a true tale. I’ve read a few books on shipping and it seems like an awful industry for almost everyone involved. Little to no laws for the workers, margins are cutthroat for those at the top. It really seems to only benefit those of dubious morals who can and will take whatever shortcuts necessary to benefit the bottom line. Or just do the insurance as this book points out which seems to be a great business if once again you’re okay with turning the blind eye to a bit of fraud every now and again as a cost of doing business.

Highlights of the Week

Carney, Trump and the power of a good speech

https://www.ft.com/content/1b23eeb6-03a2-42c8-9d02-60c672ad6298

An underrated part of being a good leader is that you shouldn’t have to tell people what to do all the time. Instead, they should be able to anticipate what you want and what doing a good job looks like. There are lots of ways to do this — leading by example is one — but the bigger and more complex the organisation you lead, the more important it is that people know what you want without having to ask.

The speech itself was very good, from

Intro

Spend a few days in Madrid this week and spent those days exploring the city rather than reading so a light one this time. I did read a lot of the book “Dead in the Water” and though I haven’t finished it yet it is really interesting. Reads something of a thriller though based on a true tale. I’ve read a few books on shipping and it seems like an awful industry for almost everyone involved. Little to no laws for the workers, margins are cutthroat for those at the top. It really seems to only benefit those of dubious morals who can and will take whatever shortcuts necessary to benefit the bottom line. Or just do the insurance as this book points out which seems to be a great business if once again you’re okay with turning the blind eye to a bit of fraud every now and again as a cost of doing business.

Highlights of the Week

Carney, Trump and the power of a good speech

https://www.ft.com/content/1b23eeb6-03a2-42c8-9d02-60c672ad6298

An underrated part of being a good leader is that you shouldn’t have to tell people what to do all the time. Instead, they should be able to anticipate what you want and what doing a good job looks like. There are lots of ways to do this — leading by example is one — but the bigger and more complex the organisation you lead, the more important it is that people know what you want without having to ask.

The speech itself was very good, from

Intro

I read a few things this week around AI and code and how things are going. I’ve been trying to think what this all might mean but I’ve not yet been able to put all my thoughts together in a coherent way.

Other than reading this stuff I’ve been generating more code to see where the tools take it. One I’ve been using is amp to help me with this newsletter by pulling together all the articles I’ve read and highlights I’ve made the last week. Not being a frontend developer means something like that would take me ages before, but now I can put it together in a couple of hours no problem.

Highlights of the Week

I Sent This Message to Everyone at Ardan This Morning

https://x.com/goinggodotnet/status/2012209293651501069/

I need everyone to start focusing on their engineering skills:

• Being able to identify what needs to be built and why.
• Breaking that down into chunks of work and that be verified and tested.
• Knowing how to ask for the code you need written and when you need it.
• Maintaining a mental model of what is being built and coded.
• Code reviews by yourself and the AI coding agents.

Revisiting the iPod

https://paulstamatiou.com/revisiting-the-apple-ipod

It’s hard to imagine today what using an iPod in the early 2000s truly felt like. It was a dedicated device, singularly focused on helping you do one thing—play your favorite music—and do it well. It didn’t need to multitask or have any other complexity to function. It was simple,

Intro

I read a few things this week around AI and code and how things are going. I’ve been trying to think what this all might mean but I’ve not yet been able to put all my thoughts together in a coherent way.

Other than reading this stuff I’ve been generating more code to see where the tools take it. One I’ve been using is amp to help me with this newsletter by pulling together all the articles I’ve read and highlights I’ve made the last week. Not being a frontend developer means something like that would take me ages before, but now I can put it together in a couple of hours no problem.

Highlights of the Week

I Sent This Message to Everyone at Ardan This Morning

https://x.com/goinggodotnet/status/2012209293651501069/

I need everyone to start focusing on their engineering skills:

• Being able to identify what needs to be built and why.
• Breaking that down into chunks of work and that be verified and tested.
• Knowing how to ask for the code you need written and when you need it.
• Maintaining a mental model of what is being built and coded.
• Code reviews by yourself and the AI coding agents.

Revisiting the iPod

https://paulstamatiou.com/revisiting-the-apple-ipod

It’s hard to imagine today what using an iPod in the early 2000s truly felt like. It was a dedicated device, singularly focused on helping you do one thing—play your favorite music—and do it well. It didn’t need to multitask or have any other complexity to function. It was simple,

Intro

Lots more AI stuff this week I read and watched. I went to a few talks too around AI and again some of the same themes came up. I’m really not sure what this all means but reading around change is the only real guarantee.

Highlights of the Week

He Was a Supreme Court Lawyer. Then His Double Life Caught Up With Him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/magazine/thomas-goldstein-supreme-court-gambling.html

During this run he won a total of about $50 million, and even though he had sold roughly 75 percent of his stakes to investors, he still personally cleared about $12 million. Flush with his success against Gores, Goldstein sat down to a heads-up match with a real estate magnate named Bob Safai — and this time he didn’t spread the risk by taking on backers. “I just have convinced myself, because I won $50 million in heads-up poker, that I am a savant at heads-up poker,” Goldstein told me. He promptly lost $14 million to Safai, all out of his own pocket.

Nothing really to take away from this more just a really good story. Well bad if you’re him or someone close to him, but a good story all the same. Warning sign about getting too caught up in gambling or thinking you’re way better than all others. He believed in himself, and still does by all accounts, but often that is not enough. Hedge your bets too I guess, or at least don’t bet everything you have without hedging.

The Bitter Lesson

http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

One thing that should be learned from the