Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Chemists, Chemical Engineers, and Plant Managers
Drawing on more than a decade at ThredUp, Ryan Moser proposes three work archetypes — chemists who discover, chemical engineers who build systems, and plant managers who run reliable operations — and explains how knowing yours guides a career, why talented people struggle in the wrong conditions, and how leaders can tell whether people outgrew the company or it outgrew them.
8 min · 1,900 words
I designed a nose guard for my dog and gave it away. Now 500 dogs wear one
Omri Hillel recounts designing a nose guard for his pitbull Billie after a sunburn scare, open-sourcing the pattern, and watching SnoutCover grow to about 500 dogs in a year—with lessons on giving product away and iterating with owners.
11 min · 2,493 words
Sanket Saurav argues that coding agents have inverted software economics, making building cheap and running expensive, yet products still look like 2015 because the industry hasn't shaken off doctrines born of rationing engineering time, and that winners will rethink categories from first principles and bundle more products.
6 min · 1,483 words
Tobias van Schneider argues that AI-era small teams can finally build specialized software for "unsexy" physical industries long ignored by top engineering talent locked into ads and social products—and that switching costs for legacy enterprise software are starting to fall.
2 min · 448 words
a16z's Seema Amble, Ivan Makarov and David Borecky argue AI is reshaping the CFO role from accountant to banker to builder: data stops being the bottleneck, finance engineers build their own tools, teams get smaller, planning becomes continuous, controls become product features, and finance's mandate grows.
9 min · 2,003 words
Looking back at more than 5 years at Shopify
Matt Burnett reflects on nearly five and a half years as an engineer at Shopify—the products he helped ship and then forgot, the people, and the odd disbelief of having ended up there—after leaving in August 2026.
8 min · 1,769 words
Agentic Systems Are the Future of Brands
A Little Plains research note arguing that growing teams and AI agents cause brand drift, and that studios should hand over agentic brand systems: living kits of positioning, voice, visual rules, assets, tokens and working components that people can browse and agents can read, so every new touchpoint strengthens the brand.
9 min · 2,158 words
Against the Personal Agents Theory of Everything
In a guest essay for The Leverage, Nathan Baschez argues that personal agents are not the end game: the next paradigm is AI factories, shared, specific, and scrutinized systems that teams build together, which he says are economically inevitable because they enable specialization and gains from trade. He also offers a pattern language for building one.
10 min · 2,223 words
Lessons From Dropbox - Part I: Was Steve Jobs Wrong?
Matan Zinger revisits Steve Jobs calling Dropbox "a feature, not a product," and unpacks what founders actually learn from Dropbox's early product and distribution story.
9 min · 2,168 words
If you read the news headlines these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Western labs are getting spawn-camped by Chinese labs en masse. The Distillation Drama Not a week goes by when Anthropic doesn’t release another article on how the Chinese are distilling their models](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/23/anthropic-accuses-chinese-ai-labs-of-mining-claude-as-us-debates-ai-chip-exports/), becoming a danger to humanity itself](https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-
2 min · 502 words
Software Goldilocks: the market for software is expanding but is the System of Record dead?
Sam Gerstenzang argues AI expands SaaS spend while splitting value into small opinionated point tools and large full-service “does the work” products—squeezing classic mid-market systems of record from both sides.
2 min · 520 words
Owed a billion dollars in NVDA stock
A first-person account of a 1993 NVIDIA stock option grant, a decades-later discovery of a vesting discrepancy, and how the statute of limitations settled it.
3 min · 779 words
Russell Sechzer on what's missing in agentic commerce: incomplete financial instructions, who authorizes agents, who pays for work that never becomes a purchase, and the invisible costs behind Muse, Instinct, Stripe, Visa, and AP2.
8 min · 1,882 words
Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words
Drew DeVault argues that Hacker News’s culture follows from Y Combinator ownership, founder privileges, and a contested “apolitical” posture—using policy and history to explain why the site feels the way it does.
15 min · 3,522 words
Jev introduces a new shape of LLM—System One, aka Decision Models
Simon Willison reviews TypeSafe AI’s Jev: a cheap, fast decision model that returns calibrated floats for yes/no, choice, and score questions—and why black-box bias and evals matter more than for chat LLMs.
3 min · 796 words
Arcturus Labs compares OpenAI’s emerging decision-model direction with TypeSafe’s Jev—and asks whether a frontier lab can absorb the System One / structured-decision niche startups are building.
12 min · 2,748 words
Patrik Inzinger on AI-polished internal writing: a robot emoji says an agent typed the post, not whether a person owned the ideas—and why that can make a small team less legible.
3 min · 758 words
PgDog’s Lev Kokotov on why engineers fix open problems they care about, why ownership beats closed-source support tickets, and how free-as-in-freedom Postgres sharding funds itself with enterprise SLAs.
2 min · 387 words
Kyle Harrison argues opaque succession and closed information kill company dynasties—using historical and modern cases to show why sunlight matters for lasting enterprises.
18 min · 4,200 words