Works On My Machine

Discussions

• Should you really emulate famous tech CEOs, or did they just get lucky?

  I think a lot of famous tech-management advice only looked wise because of the environment around it. Rising stock prices, captive talent, and equity upside made a lot of bad management survivable. Most organizations do not have those shock absorbers, which is why I think people should stop treating founder mythology as management advice.

• Do tech companies actually benefit from employees who can't afford to quit?

  I've been moving through tech orgs long enough to recognize a pattern that many of you will recognize as well. Some teams are passive, they ship on time, hit targets, run clean processes, and yet nobody ever kills a bad idea in the meeting. Nobody says this is the wrong thing to build. The roadmap has a thing, or six, on it that three people privately talk about how it won't work, but it moves through planning without a word, with smiles even. You watch the lead engineers nod at something...

• Why do managers want everyone else to use AI but themselves?

  The thing that’s starting to irritate me is not the AI push itself. Some of the tools are genuinely useful. I use them every day now. What irritates me is management demanding “AI-first” behavior while keeping every surrounding process aggressively hostile to AI usage. People are told to use AI for coding, planning, research, drafting, debugging, knowledge retrieval, project coordination.. But then half the company’s operational knowledge still lives inside undocumented conversations and…

• Does AI make it impossible to tell great engineers from noisy ones?

  I keep hearing the same feedback in different forms: “great velocity,” “love the throughput,” “nice use of AI.” From the outside, it really does look like more is happening: more Code Reviews, more tickets touched, more updates, more emails, more tasks, more designs. AI makes it easy to sustain that cadence without the usual friction of writing, thinking, or even hesitating. But inside the work, there’s a dilemma that keeps getting bigger.

• Are most AI startups just a UI on top of some Agent.md files?

  Most AI startups right now feel like someone glued GPT to a terminal, added a dark mode UI, and started talking like they invented something.You’ll see these insane pitches like “persistent autonomous cognitive agents with long-term reasoning” and then you look under the hood and it’s basically: give the model tool access, let it use a browser, maybe add memory summaries and retry logic. That’s the “product.” You can get that on your own just giving access to Claude locally.