Letters
Open Platforms Beat Power Plays
Over the last two weeks, both the U.S. Government and Anthropic took significant actions that demonstrated their power to control access to AI by restricting what others can do with frontier models.
Business Insights
Letters
Forward Deployed Engineers and the Future of AI Engineering
One of the new, buzzy jobs in Silicon Valley is the AI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), an engineer who is embedded within a client organization to help customize solutions, such as building and tuning agentic workflows that suit the client’s particular needs.
Letters
Coding Agents Accelerate Some Software Tasks More Than Others: Knowing how much coding agents accelerate different software-development tasks can help you put together the fastest teams
Coding agents are accelerating different types of software work to different degrees.
Letters
AI-Native Software Development Needs Generalists: As AI accelerates software development, teammates must play a wider variey of roles
AI-native software engineering teams operate very differently than traditional teams.
Letters
That Feeling Of Job Insecurity (And What You Can Do About It): In times of economic and technological uncertainty, build on things that tend to remain stable. Community and skills are likely to weather shifts in business and society.
I’ve been hearing from people at all levels of seniority about a feeling of job insecurity.
Letters
From AI Experiments to AI Products: Experiemental projects can reveal AI powered-opportunities, but building AI-powered products often requires redesigning workflows.
How can businesses go beyond using AI for incremental efficiency gains to create transformative impact?
Letters
Large Language Models Are General — But Not _That_ General: Current progress in AI is piecemeal and laborious. Unforeseen breakthroughs may drive future progress, but the trend of improvement is incremental.
As amazing as LLMs are, improving their knowledge today involves a more piecemeal process than is widely appreciated.
Letters
Tear Down Data Silos!: Many software-as-a-service vendors aim to hold their customers' data in silos. Their customers would do well to open the silos so AI agents can use the data.
AI agents are getting better at looking at different types of data in businesses to spot patterns and create value. This is making data silos increasingly painful.
Letters
How to Get Through the Product Management Bottleneck: As AI-assisted coding accelerates building software products, deciding what to build is a new bottleneck. Speedy decisions and empathy for users can get past it.
The invention of modern writing instruments like the typewriter made writing easier, but they also led to the rise of writer’s block, where deciding what to write became the bottleneck.
Letters
Meet The New Breed of GenAI Application Engineers: A new breed of software engineers is building more powerful applications faster than ever, thanks to generative AI. Here’s how to identify them in job interviews.
There’s a new breed of GenAI Application Engineers who can build more-powerful applications faster than was possible before, thanks to generative AI.
Letters
How AI Fund Is Building AI Builders: AI-enabled coding empowers anyone build software that boosts productivity and makes life easier. Here’s now non-engineers at AI Fund are building apps for fun and profit.
Everyone can benefit by learning to code with AI! At AI Fund, the venture studio I lead, everyone — not just the engineers — can vibe code or use more sophisticated AI-assisted coding techniques.
Letters
How Large Companies Can Move Fast in AI: Enterprises can accelerate AI development in a sandbox environment that eliminates roadblocks while minimizing risks.
In the age of AI, large corporations — not just startups — can move fast. I often speak with large companies’ C-suite and Boards about AI strategy and implementation, and would like to share some ideas that are applicable to big companies.