Reading
I don't write well, and I won't have an AI write for me. So instead of articles, here is a digest of what helped me most, at work and outside it.
Books
Getting Real — BasecampBuild less, start with the interface, ship. Still the shortest book on making software.Shape Up — Ryan Singer, BasecampMoved a whole team onto it at Taster. Appetite is the best word product has borrowed.Escaping the Build Trap — Melissa PerriOutputs are not outcomes. The book I hand to a team that measures itself in features.Continuous Discovery Habits — Teresa TorresWeekly customer contact and the opportunity tree. The discovery routine I actually kept.Intercom on Jobs-to-be-Done — IntercomThe practical version of JTBD: the switch interview, the milkshake, and how to write a job.Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution — Uri LevineFrom the Waze co-founder. Keep the problem in front of you; the solution changes.
Articles
The Bitter Lesson — Rich SuttonTwo pages that explain why every clever hand-built feature I shipped got eaten by more compute.Software 2.0 — Andrej KarpathyThe frame I still use to explain to a team what changes when the spec becomes a dataset.Building effective agents — AnthropicWorkflows before agents. Saved me from over-building twice.Why chatbots are not the future — Amelia WattenbergerA text box has no affordances. Half of my lab notes start from this.Principles of mixed-initiative user interfaces — Eric HorvitzThe agent-versus-direct-manipulation debate was settled in 1999; we just lacked the protocol.Choose boring technology — Dan McKinleyInnovation tokens. I spend mine on the model, not the database.Things you should never do, part I — Joel SpolskyEvery rewrite pitch I have heard since reads differently.Maker's schedule, manager's schedule — Paul GrahamWhy I stopped putting meetings at 11.Magic ink — Bret VictorMost software is information software, and most of it should be a picture.Home-cooked software and barefoot developers — Maggie AppletonSoftware built by and for the people who have the problem — the case for small, bespoke tools.No silver bullet — Fred BrooksEssential versus accidental complexity. LLMs eat the accidental kind.Overcoming the articulation barrier — Nielsen Norman GroupNames the problem of the empty prompt. Hybrid interfaces as the answer.Software 3.0 — Andrej KarpathyThe autonomy slider and the generation/verification loop. My whole job in one talk.