Dan Kim

Literally anyone can use AI to blindly make a thing. What will differentiate you is how you demonstrate an ability to use it critically. It’s a tool, and just like any other tool it’s going to be good at some things and fail miserably at others. Your ability to understand, socialize, and operationalize all of that, together, is worth so much more to a team than some bro who can slap together yet another slop dashboard.

I like the premise that engineers are “lazy”, understanding that it’s very much a virtue and compliment when used appropriately. From Bryan Cantrill’s “The peril of laziness lost”: We undertake the hard intellectual work of developing these abstractions in part because we are optimizing the hypothetical time of our future selves, even if at the expense of our current one. When we get this calculus right, it is glorious, as the abstraction serves not just ourselves, but all who come after us.…

I sent this out last Friday, and now after a week has passed where I was AI-ing a lot, it feels even truer. I cannot stress enough how important it is to regularly (or entirely?) unplug from the robots and find hands-on, creative work to lean into. I’m pretty certain you’ll find a level of satisfaction and joy that you may not consciously realize you’ve been missing. I’ve spent the entire day so far OUTSIDE of Claude, haven’t opened it once. Wasn’t intentional, it just turned out that the work…

This is wildly helpful yet hadn’t heard about it til now. Can finally have FileVault enabled and still remotely login to a Mac if it reboots. Previously you had to either be at the physical machine or keep FileVault off to get back in.

I don’t know what is says about me and/or the state of tech in general but I absolutely LOVE, LOVE, LOVE plaintextsports.com. An absolute thing of beauty in its simplicity and function.

Along with some broader points about responsible AI usage, Fastmail CEO Bron Gondwana reminds us how important email is. In an age where anything and everything can change (or be hallucinated), having your own copy of history is even more important: In a world where there’s enough AI capability to process the entire web and rewrite every page to remove something, the cost of “changing history” is much reduced, so we can expect more of it.

Worth a reminder: everyone you work with is going through something outside of work. They might be dealing with tricky relationships (kids, parents, partner, friends), health concerns, financial pressures, emotional distress or grief, or like a hundred other possible stressors. A little grace and humility can go a long way in helping your coworkers have an OK day at work, and as a result make things a little better for them at home. 💙

Trust me, when someone signs up for your service, nobody wants 50 emails in the first week explaining all the amazing things it does. Like one email every couple weeks, fine, but blasting people every day of the week with your app is just annoying. If your product works well and does what it says, I assure you we’ll come back and use it.

Please never change Dropbox, you’re still BY FAR the best at file sync and file management. Every other service (iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive) is either bad at the actual job of syncing or is littered with a bunch of cruft nobody wants or asked for. Doing one thing well is so underrated. 🏆🔄

It’s well known that multitasking is a myth and that constantly jumping around wastes more time than it saves, but now we’re supposed to “orchestrate” like 17 different agents at once and expect amazing outcomes? Sure.

When I block an AI hype bro on LinkedIn (“I’ll teach you how to 10x your engineers with AI!”) it says they won’t notify the person that I blocked them. But really I want the opposite – give me an option to definitely let them know I blocked their dumb posts from my timeline forever.

Good one by Nathaniel Fishel on hype bros locking in on AI vanity metrics: The winners will be the ones with the discipline to measure what matters: Does the user’s life get better, or did we just make our repo bigger?

I’m still pretty new at my current gig and it’s reminded me that the hardest thing to figure out in any new role, especially as a manager, is knowing out how much to get involved, what to change, what to keep, and maybe most importantly when to just stay out of the way. The last part is the toughest. Maybe if you’re joining a wildly dysfunctional team it’d be easy to justify moving all the cheese, but in a lot of cases you’re probably jumping into something semi-functional. But at the same ti...

Say it with me for the people in the back (aka, those stuck in the AI slop hype bubble): WRITING CODE HAS NEVER BEEN THE BOTTLENECK.

It’s such an odd but kinda fun feeling to be the old, grizzled, experienced dude in the room. By virtue of sheer volume and having seen some truly brain-meltingly-stupid stuff, seems like the best thing I can do is to share my lived experiences and perspectives so we can hopefully avoid making the same mistakes for the 10th time (see terrible tech bros doing terrible tech bro stuff). So when you see me going on and on about some specific theme (layoffs, AI slop, hype bubbles of late), it’s ve...

This entire post about when and how to slow down in the age of AI by James Stanier is full of great stuff, including this: If the decisions that precede execution are flawed, AI will faithfully implement those flaws in a way that looks like fully featured code. Looks can often be deceiving, especially with powerful and confident models. It will generate thousands of lines of code based on a misunderstood requirement. It will happily build an elegant solution to the wrong problem.