I continue to avidly build with the robots on a daily basis. One of the more continually helpful use cases is summarization. Plop in the long, useless marketing email from United Airlines and figure out if there’s something useful in my endless quest for airline status. The answer: it usually finds something worth my time.… more
Last Friday, Reddit had its worst day since its IPO, with a drop of almost 30%1. It didn’t matter that they beat their third-quarter estimates; what mattered most was a weak Q4 forecast and the quote from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, “Our search referral traffic was down meaningfully in Q3, with the decline accelerating later… more
My observation of air travel is that if there is one significant impact on a flight, there are guaranteed two additional impacts. An example: if my gate changes at the last moment, it is quite likely that departure from the gate will be delayed, followed by a further delay on the tarmac. Unexpected changes in… more
There is one. Wait, two. No, three. Ok, four humans who directly inspired my writing. (Ok, five.) The list is not in order of importance, but by time: Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (Fall 1988) Think what a better world it would be if we all—the whole world—had… more
I’ve updated the Apple Charging Guide to account for all of the new hardware announced at the September Apple event. One of the recurring marketing blurbs from Apple was the claim “Up to 50% charge in around 15 minutes.” This line resonates because this strategy maps to how most humans construct their charging strategy: “Crap,… more
Robot writing has no voice. That’s why you find it annoying. Like it or not, your brain is currently one of the best organic pattern matchers in the known solar system, and that means you can detect patterns. Like breathing, you just do this. All the time. You are not being triggered by the endless… more
A consistent by-product of periods of intense building (software, a book, a team) — really anything where I am heads-down focusing on the craft — is that all the utilities and habits surrounding building said craft get scrutiny. Why? Because small imperfections or inefficiencies stand out when my brain is in build-it mode. Put simply,… more
Having been robot-wrangling for a solid year now, I continue to feel like they give me superpowers. However, like all of us, I have a front-row seat to increasingly attractive garbage the robots are capable of generating at scale. I like to think that I am human enough to detect the slop, but the rate… more
In our 101st episode, we kick off a new era of episode titles as your best engineer becomes the interim manager of their own team — delegation, one-on-ones, the three-year rule, a visit from Chili Palmer, the Cadillac of minivans salesman himself, and the only question that matters: do you actually want this job? Down… more
I’ve used Claude quite a bit for both the upcoming new book and the next edition of Managing Humans. I wrote the entire book, but, as I’ve done for years, I’ve used the robots for editing, research, and data wrangling. When Anthropic announced they were going to do “text and image” watermarking, my eyebrow was… more
