Five Signals is a collection of topics that cut through the noise for me this week.
Agentic coding
The Lost People of Mountain Village
Segmented controls vs. Tabs
Renewables vs. Nonrenewables in eng mgmt
Layoffs at tailwind
Bonus: What I’m reading
Let’s dive in.
Agentic coding
A friend sent me this earlier in the week:
Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
Linear’s CEO just described the biggest shift in product team structure since Agile. For decades, product work meant: PM defines requirements → designers create specs → engineers translate to code. The middle step, translation, absorbed 70% of the time and created most of the
12:45 AM · Jan 4, 2026 · 752K Views
77 Replies · 253 Reposts · 3.08K Likes
It was sent with an accompanying thought about how shaken he felt about the future of software engineering, or more specifically, what the job of a software engineer will look like going into 2026.
Unlike some other folks in my life who seem to be putting their fingers in their ears on the topic, this individual is embracing AI whole-heartedly, acknowledging (correctly, I think) that more and more, the end result “aren’t actually trash”.
Which is awesome, and scary.
Correction: it’s scary if your job security is based upon your ability to type code into a code editor.
I believe the engineers who will thrive going forward will be the ones who can communicate and treat the AI agents like a team, and guide them appropriately. Provide guardrails, examples, patterns, specify the “what” at a high degree of detail, as well as the “how” at a high level, and then get out of the way.
I think it’s anxiety inducing because it’s showing how little so much of our hard earned judgement about specific code patterns and rules matter to the end result.
Someone once told me that the best technical leaders are a combination of systems thinkers and clear communicators, and it’s something I’ve never forgotten. I think it also applies to this current….crisis? Are we calling it that?
The other common thread I’m seeing is concern around companies. e.g. is my product still defensible now that chatGPT can trivially replace it, is my company’s culture a place where I can trust I’m staying modern in my skills, have my leaders lost their minds, etc etc.
While cost/benefit still applies to most decision making in this realm, historically the cost of changing software has dwarfed the cost of creating it from scratch. That’s what might be changing here. But, all that would mean is that software is going to change more. There still needs to be someone in the driver’s seat.
I refuse to take a victim attitude though. It’s totally within our skills and ability to thrive in the new world. We just have to adapt. I refuse to put my fingers in my ears and pretend it’s all going to blow over.
There is obviously a lot more here. Other related topics that I hope to write about in the future:
Our code as a black box - how much do we need to understand it? How much does a nontechnical CEO understand it today? How about any one engineer?
The importance of clear communication in the era of agents
How do we trust agents
The importance of QA (and…can we automate it?)
Engineering velocity not being the bottleneck anymore, and what that means for teams (hint: it’s context!)
General management skills being as important as ever (and just as lacking in many contexts)
My experience working on an almost identical project as OpenAI’s Sora for Android using Codex
The Lost People of Mountain Village
A surprisingly hilarious mockumentary about a mountain resort in Telluride, told from the point of view of a fake future anthropological perspective.
This one actually made me think how little of this type of thing I see anymore. Maybe it’s my information diet, but the combo of its length, the effort that went into it, and even the cast, combined with the fact that it’s obviously not shot with professional equipment reminded me of high school and college.
(Also it touches on very relevant topics that remain today in mountain towns like Telluride, Tahoe, etc. Cost of living for locals, tourism as the primary revenue source, and more.)
Segmented Controls vs. Tabs
Over the last year at my day job we’ve rewritten our Android app from scratch using modern tech. The iOS app has been around for something like 17 years and has a lot of established UI patterns, for which we often wrestle with decisions about how to port to Android. We want to provide users a common experience that doesn’t change much, if at all, between platforms, but also respect the platform idioms and conventions so that Android users don’t feel they’re using an app copied pixel-for-pixel from iOS. Android as a first class citizen.
To that end, we aren’t using a cross-platform layer like Flutter. We went full native with Kotlin and Jetpack, etc. In hindsight, I believe this was clearly the right call.
One interesting topic came up this week and I learned a bit more about UX design: Segmented controls on iOS vs. Tabs.
In our app, users can perform inspections and submit checklists. When they open an inspection or checklist, it creates that record as a draft, and they can save those drafts and resume them later. So we have a screen where the user can pull up a list of prior drafts, and we decided we wanted them to live on the same screen, but organized according to a list of inspection drafts and a list of checklist drafts (vs. having them interleaved in the same list).
So we had to decide: do we use a tab or a segmented control?
This is a segmented control on iOS:
And on Android:
The single-choice certainly does look and behave like a tab. So which should we use?
What I learned is that there are three potential semantic roles that a control like this could play:
Mode switch (same data, different lens)
e.g. “List | Map”
“Active | Completed”
“Day | Week | Month”
Category navigation (different datasets)
e.g. “Overview | Tasks | History”
e.g. sections of a feature
Filter or scope
e.g. “All | Mine | Team”
e.g. status filters
Instead of telling you which we decided upon, I’d first like to ask you what you would choose?
Analogizing renewable resources vs. Non-renewable resources in engineering management
To quote Donella Meadows:
Non-renewable resources are stock limited. The entire stock is available at once, and can be extracted at any rate (limited mainly by extraction capital). But since the stock is not renewed, the faster the extraction rate, the shorter the lifetime of the resource.
Renewable resources are flow limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they re-generate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable.
This came up for me this week when thinking about my engineering team’s velocity vs. the company’s ability to spec out product requirements. Thinking about the stocks (PRDs) and flows (defining those requirements, shipping them) was a helpful framework that clarified where our current bottleneck is. Along those same lines we’ll be closely watching the oscillations that occur as the bottleneck changes.
Layoffs at Tailwind
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388
The comments. My god, the comments. Who are these people? A RIF is a truly awful experience, for everyone involved.
What I’m reading
Sapiens. This is my wind-down book before bed. I’m thoroughly enjoying it. My favorite part so far is that I don’t feel talked down to - the author assumes some knowledge already of human history, which I daresay is pretty refreshing.
The Revenge of the Analog. Just started. Morning reading. As a lover of both physical books and paper notebooks, I don’t expect to be particularly challenged by this one, but it seems like it will be a fun read. It’s already used Rdio as an example of streaming music (compared to vinyl) instead of Spotify, so it’s already won me over.
Be Who You Are. I’ve always loved Alan Watts, but primarily via audio. I’ve actually obtained his entire works on MP3, due to the AI slop that has very, very unfortunately proliferated on YouTube. I find reading his work to be very different. Admittedly this is also what I’ll reach for if I’m awake at 2am and need to fall back asleep!
That’s it for now.
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