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Recent discussions

• Stack ranking turns coworkers into enemies

  Stack ranking always ends in politics because it changes what competence means inside an organization. Once employees are judged relative to each other instead of against a stable standard or objective, your smartest coworker stops being an asset that you can learn from and collaborate with, and starts becoming competition. Their success can lower your standing. Their visibility can cost you promotion space. Their expertise becomes a threat to your own security.

• AI makes it extremely hard to differentiate 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.

• 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…

• Most AI startups are just UIs 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.

• AI can make you lose your mind. If you don't think so, you're even more at risk

  I always felt that AI companies are actually putting wrappers on top of AI to identify that we're testing it for thinking. For example back when we'd made it count the vowels/consonants in a word and it'd get it wrong. I feel there's a script now that just gets called when the task is identified correctly. I also feel that it gets trained on these memes. Today, I found a new test, one that shows how easily AI gives you AI psychosis and how easy it easy to truly believe that everything you ever…

• Cultural criticism goes both ways!

  I had one of those big-tech team dinners. The conversation turned to how people met their partners. A few of my Indian coworkers talked about arranged marriage, family involvement, and how much more normal it is in India for marriage to be treated as a family matter and not just a private romantic choice. That part is ok, different cultures and all. It was interesting to see their perspective, even though I wouldn't share it. The problem started when one of them stopped describing the custom...

• Most jobs converge into sales given enough seniority

  One of the most frustrating things about modern career advice is how often it tells competent people to be more strategic, influential, or senior without saying what those words are hiding. A lot of the time, what they are hiding is sales.

• AI is making managers medically insane

  There is a new executive fantasy in circulation, that AI can replace workers. Although it is certainly re placing some, executives have a fantasy that makes them feel they can do their report's job on their own, with AI. That they can code! Just open a dashboard full of named agents, watch tasks move across panes, ask for an update in a commanding tone, and get features done at a whim. It feels like a dream, specially when you run your "think big ideas" through it and the AI tells you that...

• AI can't replace office jobs on it's own. But a person with AI can replace several others

  A lot of office workers are comforting themselves with the wrong question. They keep asking whether AI can do their whole job. That is not the threshold their employer will use. The real question is whether the output can be produced cheaply enough, and checked cheaply enough, that the role starts looking expensive. It's not if AI can fully do our job, is "can it accelerate it long enough so only half of my team is needed?". Because the answer to that, sadly, is yes.

• Tech companies think they benefit from employees who can't 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...