Signals

Everyone is saying “it’s the harness, not the model.” But...no one is really explaining what that means. I wanted to understand harness engineering better, so on today's episode of How I AI, I built my own: a custom harness using @ClaudeDevs SDK to triage @sentry bugs, verify root cause, and ship fixes. The big unlock? Realizing a custom harness lets you stop micromanaging chats and get agents that do exactly what you want. Full tutorial now on YT: https://t.co/ky3uuQyQB8

I have officially moved the majority of my dev work over to Linux. I couldn't be happier. Here's a video about how and why I made the move. https://t.co/dYAgt3tsf8 https://t.co/H8Y0UizoiD

I've heard this too many times now. "We cycled through a few different Heads of Product... they never work out." The pattern looks like this... 1. Founders notice they aren't shipping product. 2. They think a Head of Product will fix it. 3. Head of Product comes in, and spends time/energy at the "strategy" level of framing. 4. The strategy from the Head of Product misses the mark. 5. Founders realize they probably have better ideas about strategy. 6. Founders explain what's important to the Head of Product. 7. Head of Product doesn't have the right skills to translate "this is what we want to solve" to a blueprint of what to specifically build. In the end, it's a mix of wrong output and no output. What went wrong here? The #1 mismatch I see is that founders don't know what to expect from the Head of Product, and vice versa. Founders think they should delegate strategy, which is often not the case. Heads of Product think they should contribute strategy, which is often not the case. What's missing is this ... very often Founders have a good nose for what needs to get solved. What they need is someone who can NARROW DOWN and TRANSLATE that into a specific concept with good UX that's technically legible. But instead what happens is both compete for the "set the strategy" role. And nobody is problems into frames into shapes to go build. My #1 advice to founders thinking they need a head of product. Ask yourself: do you actually NOT know what you want, strategically? Are you really looking to outsource strategy? If it's not actually about bringing in someone from outside to set the direction for your whole product ... then you need someone who is skilled ONE LEVEL DOWN in concreteness. Meaning someone who can listen to you about what matters, whiteboard the solution that pulls it all together, and work with technical people to make it happen. There is a HUGE gap in the market today. We need product people who can work ABOVE the level of Figma-visuals and BELOW the level of "company strategy". So much work of getting to what we actually ship — the blueprint — is in-between. And let me tell you ... if you EVER go to a product conference, prepare to be deeply misled. There are WAY TOO MANY talks about "strategy" when nobody in the room is truly responsible for strategy. Product is ultimately about understanding the purpose and translating that into a specific design. A Head of Product who can't whiteboard a UI flow or make technical trade-offs with engineers isn't heading product. They're trying to play CEO.

Senra podcast with @pmarca killed introspection, & his podcast with @danawhite nuked negative thinking & we are only halfway through 2026! https://t.co/iOHGsY3n9z

As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes: 1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship 2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra 3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance 4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit 5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS. A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product: - A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3 - A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5 - A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2 Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?

Google just dropped a free 8-minute lesson on building your first AI agent. This is the clearest explanation of AI agents and loops you'll find anywhere. People are paying $500 for courses that teach less than this. Watch it, then read the step by step guide on building loops for your agents below.

I stole this idea and now use it with every single employee. It’s the best illustration I’ve seen of teaching someone to be high agency. It says there are 5 levels of work: Level 1: “There is a problem.” Level 2: “There is a problem, and I’ve found some causes.” Level 3: “Here’s the problem, here are some possible causes, and here are some possible solutions.” Level 4: “Here’s the problem, here’s what I think caused it, here are some possible solutions, and here’s the one I think we should pick.” Level 5: “I identified a problem, figured out what caused it, researched how to fix it, and I fixed it. Just wanted to keep you in the loop.” Using this framework, here’s what I say to every new employee… You will live at Level 4 from Day 1 and as we build trust you will rise to Level 5. Being high agency doesn’t just mean tackling problems in this way. It means your entire way of working should be oriented to being a Level 4+ employee. Plz feel free to steal it as well. And ty @stephsmithio for the framework!

AI is moving fast. Most companies aren't. The loudest stories come from the edges - autonomous agents, massive job losses, whole industries about to flip. Read enough of these stories and it feels like you’re behind and everyone else is way ahead. This didn’t feel quite right to us. So we surveyed 6,000 professionals across 10 markets to map where AI at work actually is. Here's what we found 🧵

I get blown away every time I read this paragraph by Carl Jung: To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test.