The reading order
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1.
AI Won't Shrink Your Team — It'll Expose Why You Needed a Bigger One
The contrarian thesis: AI surfaces the backlog you didn't have bandwidth to touch. The companies cutting headcount on the multiplier story will get outpaced by the ones that hold and absorb.
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2.
An AI Just Deleted a Production Database in Nine Seconds. Hire More Engineers.
Replit's agent ignored a code freeze and wiped 1,200 executives in nine seconds. The most expensive proof of the previous post.
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3.
When to Trust an Agent and When to Step In
The four-level autonomy ladder — read-only, bounded write, state-changing, public-facing — plus the five signals that mean a human takes the wheel immediately.
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4.
My Daily Agentic AI Workflow
Four to seven Claude Code or Codex sessions a day, scoped at the right autonomy level, with every diff reviewed. The actual loop, not the marketing.
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5.
AI-Assisted Engineering Isn't Faster Coding. It's a New Workflow.
Why "AI-assisted" is a category mistake. Review, decomposition, and what shipping means all change shape.
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6.
Your AI Product Needs a Telemetry Layer Before It Needs a Better Model
Stop tuning the model. Instrument the system. LangSmith, Helicone, custom evals — what to measure and why model swaps without telemetry are theatre.
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7.
Prompt Skills, Not Claude: Four Rules from Anthropic's Engineers
Four rules for Claude Code skills from Anthropic's engineers, tested in fractional consulting work. Why prompt-engineering moved from the chat to the folder, and the two flags most engineers don't know about.
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8.
The AI Coding Agent Bugs I Catch Every Week
The eight failure patterns from running agents daily — confident wrong answers, lost context, the bugs they reliably ship. The field notes behind the autonomy ladder.
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9.
How I Prompt Claude as a Staff Engineer (50 Prompts I Actually Use)
Fifty production prompts with five full worked examples. What the daily workflow actually sounds like at the prompt level.
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10.
Build an LLM Wiki Your Coding Agent Actually Reads
A three-layer markdown knowledge base your agent reads and maintains — ingest, query, lint — and the rules that stop it rotting.
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11.
Your CLAUDE.md Is the Onboarding Doc You Never Wrote
CLAUDE.md as executable tribal knowledge: the onboarding doc you never wrote for humans, finally read by something that acts on it.
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12.
The Claude Code Resource Bible: 46 Tools Worth Knowing in 2026
The ecosystem map — 46 tools across MCP servers, skills, multiplexers, and agent frameworks, organized so you can skip the other four hundred.
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13.
Ruflo (formerly Claude Flow): An Honest Deep Dive on the Multi-Agent Orchestration Platform
An honest teardown of the loudest multi-agent orchestration platform — what the 45,000 GitHub stars are buying, and what they aren't.
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14.
Amazon Let the AI Drive. It Hit a Tree.
Amazon mandated AI coding, let it touch infrastructure unwatched, and lost millions of orders. The case study the autonomy ladder predicts.
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15.
AI Made Tokens Cheap. It's Making Hardware Costly.
Tokens got cheap; the hardware to run them didn't. The cost story nobody prices into an AI roadmap.
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16.
Nadella Is Right About AI and the Firm. Mostly.
Nadella's 'token capital' framing is right about judgment and wrong about scale — the small-team version of the argument.
Other topic guides
- Security for startups A guided reading order for startup security — what to read first on SOC 2 as a revenue tool, vCISO hiring, and securing AI-native products.
- Engineering leadership Engineering leadership at startup scale — hiring from one engineer to fifteen, rituals that work at small teams, the staff-engineer interview loop.
- Elixir and the BEAM for AI systems Why language choice matters for AI systems — BEAM concurrency for agents, what Go frameworks cost you, and why Elixir is the language AI writes best.