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.
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.