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It’s one thing to keep up with the latest models and best practices with your own personal workflows. It is another thing to keep an AI-powered product feature state of the art. Personal workflows can mostly adapt on the fly. User-facing features need evals, testing, and a higher degree of confidence that a model update did not inadvertently degrade the experience. This higher cost and the fact…
Last week I attended the 2025 AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco with a bunch of other founders from Seattle Foundations. There were over 20 tracks on specific topics, and I went particularly deep on Evals, learning firsthand how companies like Google, Notion, Zapier, and Vercel build and deploy evals for their AI features. While there were meaningful unique details in each talk, there was…
“Less is more” is a popular insight to the point of being trite. We reference it when designing products. We use slightly different language when invoking it for group decisions (“too many cooks in the kitchen”) or personal obligations (“priorities”). We as individuals and groups do best when working within constraints. Sometimes the constraint feels like pressure (only having so much financial…
Putting down into writing “what it is we want” is a difficult exercise. Life generally does not require such precision. How we live, succeed, and fail is, to a large degree, dictated by the random collisions of people and circumstance. We do not know who or what will influence us next. Often we fill in the narrative as we go. We take what life has dealt us, or what we have half-consciously taken…
One way to think about organizations is that they are decision-making machines. An organization’s mission constrains the things they make decisions about, and an organization’s culture dictates how they go about making these decisions. I believe there are a limited number of styles we bring to decision-making. Each organization can be thought of as a certain blend of these decision-making styles.…
Remember good old encyclopedias? Back in my (childhood) days, if you wanted to look up a fact like the capital of a country or the biography of Abraham Lincoln you’d flip through the pages of Encyclopedia Brittanica. It was a slow, manual process and for most of us required a trip to the library. Given how slow this process was, schools emphasized route memorization of facts. Nowadays, of course,…
If you’re into product development and haven’t watched Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview before, I highly recommend it. It’s currently on Netflix. One part that especially jumped out for me was this 90 second clip on content beating process. I suggest you give it a watch before continuing reading. Watching Steve Jobs you realize how contrarian his thinking was versus much of the conventional views in…
My goal in this post is to connect two things that for most of us are viewed as very different: social networks and work. Today, these things are superficially linked in our minds. For an individual, a social network like Twitter or Instagram is seen mostly as that distracting thing you can’t help checking while at work. In this way, work and social networks are competing for your attention, but…
I’m wondering how often this happens to you: You pick up a book and start reading it only to find it uninteresting and so abandon it. Years later you pick up the same book and are blown away by it. Maybe you’ve had the same thing happen with music or movies. Also, there’s the opposite experience, where you re-experience something you formerly loved after much time, only to find it to now be…
Last night I watched a fantastic philosophy documentary called “Being in the World” by Tao Ruspoli (and inspired by Hubert Dreyfus). I’ve been on a learning kick lately. Our environment is highly structured to effortlessly push us entertainment (breaking news, gossip, pop culture) but we have to put in our own work to make learning just as seamlessly accessible. With that in mind, I recently…
Over the last 10 years I’ve noticed a shift in tech. Well at the very least in myself, but as we are so much a reflection of our environment I can’t help but believe this shift is more than just a personal one. Namely, I feel we have shifted the central locus of our tech culture from one that venerates design to one that celebrates insight. Another way to put this is that we have tempered our…
A couple of months back I discovered the Japanese TV series, Sunshine Sento Sake. I had read a small blurb about it recently in some philosophy book I was leafing through, and decided to give it a try. It’s streaming for free on Amazon Prime now. At first I wasn’t sure what I was watching. The show is deliberately slow and formulaic. In each episode, the main character, Takayuki, a salary man,…