# jobs to be done (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 3 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover jobs to be done. Page: Feed: --- ## [AI: a technology in search of a job](https://asymco.com/2026/08/20/ai-a-technology-in-search-of-a-job/) _2026-08-20 · Hathaway Field Notes_ AI, from a consumer point of view, is still a technology searching for a job to be done. I’m not in any way a bear on AI. I’m not dismissive of it. But what they call product-market fit hasn’t happened. It has niches, and they’re not consumers. There are individual users and buyers of the technology, and they might be using it on a day-to-day basis, but that’s very early days. It doesn’t have that… ## [Most Advanced Yet Acceptable](https://thepsychologyofcreativity.substack.com/p/new-but-not-too-new) _2026-08-19 · Hathaway Field Notes_ One man designed all of it. The fridge, the cigarette pack, the bus, the logo, the locomotive, the car. His name was Raymond Loewy, a French engineer who stepped off the boat in New York in 1919, and by mid-century you could live most of your day inside his imagination. In 1949 he became the first designer ever to make the cover of Time. Later he'd do the paint job on Air Force One for Kennedy and… ## [AirPods could give Siri peripheral vision](https://hathaway.engineer/notes/airpods-could-give-siri-peripheral-vision/) _2026-08-19 · Hathaway Field Notes_ AirPods with cameras could be far more useful than they sound. The cameras would not need iPhone resolution. A rough, wide-angle view paired with Apple's Gemini-powered AI could provide enough context to understand what you are looking at, what is around you, and what you may want to remember. The placement may be the best part. A camera on each side of your head could approach a 360-degree view… ## [When Product Managers Build Their Own Products](https://scottburleson.substack.com/p/when-product-managers-build-their) _2026-08-18 · Scott Burleson · Scott Burleson's Product HiveMind_ Exploring "Mostly Rational Bride" by Yael Mark ## [The perfection of minor details](https://hathaway.engineer/notes/the-perfection-of-minor-details/) _2026-08-16 · Hathaway Field Notes_ When you see a successful individual, a champion, a "winner," you can be very sure that you are looking at an individual who plays great attention to the perfection of minor details. — John Wooden ## [Ambition becomes a superpower](https://hathaway.engineer/notes/ambition-becomes-a-superpower/) _2026-08-16 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Ambition becomes a superpower when you stop expecting achievement to satisfy you and learn to love the pursuit itself. ## [Unforgetful: Never lose a task](https://unforgetful.app/) _2026-08-14 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Another great app from Marco Arment. The introduction post tells the story behind it so well. I've been a fan of Overcast for well over a decade. When a developer cares about the problem they're trying to solve and puts in the effort to solve it well, you can feel it in the finished product. Permalink → ## [ShieldFont: Designed for humans. Toxic for AI.](https://shieldfont.org/) _2026-08-13 · Hathaway Field Notes_ ShieldFont is an open-source creative technology project that offers a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and disrupts what is collected when that choice is ignored. It swaps 45.8% of content words (around 24.4% of all words) in a page’s source code for other (partially) random words, while the font restores the original text on screen. Readers see the work as intended; mass scrapers… ## [Vision Pro and glasses: the job is seeing, not capturing](https://asymco.com/2026/08/11/vision-pro-and-glasses-the-job-is-seeing-not-capturing/) _2026-08-11 · Hathaway Field Notes_ When it comes to wearables on the face, the job is going to be optics. When the Watch came out, they said: by the way, it's a timepiece. It took a lot of cues from timepieces, a very old category. So if you study eyewear, you have to study deeply what people are using it for. It isn't natural at all to use eyewear to take pictures. What's natural is to see better. The whole objective of eyewear is… ## [A bug becoming a feature (1972 edition)](https://unsung.aresluna.org/a-bug-becoming-a-feature-1972-edition/) _2026-08-11 · Hathaway Field Notes_ I could have fixed it, but it turned out to be important, because if you get two good players they could just volley and play the game forever. And the game has to end in about three or four minutes otherwise it's a failure as a game. So that gap at the top, again – a feature. So that was sort of a happy accident. "Happy" primarily in the context of the industry – the goal of an arcade game was,… ## [Recipe PDFs Ready Fast (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/EYe3RDw60FfI) _2026-08-11 · **Sponsored**_ Turn online or personal recipes into clean, printable PDFs in seconds. ## [The Future is for Everyone](https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/) _2026-08-10 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Meta's philosophy for how it intends to build and distribute superintelligence, at roughly 6,500 words. It rests on three principles: individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety. Here's the short version. The first half describes what Meta plans to build. A personal agent for everyone, tools for… ## [The backlog was always a credit card](https://randsinrepose.com/archives/r-i-p-your-backlog/) _2026-08-10 · Hathaway Field Notes_ An engineer putting a piece of work on their backlog is effectively deferring it to never. It's important enough to write it down somewhere and document that it exists as a bug or a feature enhancement, but it's not important enough to act. Yes, sometimes we ambitiously carve out time to "burn down the backlog", but do you know what we pick from that list? We pick the interesting work. Interesting… ## [Why do I write?](https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-motivation/) _2026-07-28 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Why do I write? I deeply believe it is important for humans to build stuff. I think this is a primary reason we are on the planet, and I think that the ways a human can build are as varied as the humans who do the building. Failure to build is abhorrent to me. Much of the anger on the planet right now is from humans who aren't building, believing they are owed a free lunch because they showed up,… ## [The Product Failed Due to the Decision Nobody Remembers Making](https://scottburleson.substack.com/p/the-product-failed-due-to-the-decision) _2026-07-21 · Scott Burleson · Scott Burleson's Product HiveMind_ The Importance of the Market Lens ## [The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed](https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-bread-paradox-why-convenience) _2026-07-16 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Economists call this the "make-or-buy" decision: a rational actor produces something themselves only when the total cost, including time and opportunity costs, is lower than the cost of buying it from someone else. When a company pays for Notion, or Jira, or Basecamp, or any other tool, they're paying for what thousands of engineers, compliance officers, security auditors, and domain experts have… ## [Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't](https://www.normaltech.ai/p/why-ai-hasnt-replaced-software-engineers) _2026-07-16 · Hathaway Field Notes_ This is the clearest case I've seen for why cheaper code doesn't mean fewer engineers — it means more software, and more software still needs people to decide what to build and stand behind it. Permalink → ## [Capturing Eyespace: plotting Apple's disruption of eyewear](https://asymco.com/2026/07/16/capturing-eyespace-plotting-apples-disruption-of-eyewear/) _2026-07-16 · Hathaway Field Notes_ This is one of the reasons Spatial Computing is so strategic. By the time this opportunity arrives, vision computing technologies will allow the injection of software into eyeglasses that would solve incremental problems for many users on a continuous basis. We call this jobs-to-be-done and as display, input, and capture/sensing data will flood into the eyewear product, consumers will find new… ## [OpenAI releases a $230 keyboard for Codex](https://openai.com/supply/co-lab/work-louder/) _2026-07-15 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Designed with Work Louder, the kbd-1.0-codex-micro brings your agent workspace into reach. Keep active chats close, spot what every agent is doing through live RGB feedback, and map your most-used Codex actions to tactile controls built for the way you actually ship. $230 sounds steep until you count how many hours a day some of us now spend talking to Codex instead of typing into an editor.… ## [Is GPT-Live the iPhone multitouch moment?](https://hathaway.engineer/notes/gpt-live-iphone-multitouch-moment/) _2026-07-15 · Hathaway Field Notes_ New interfaces show up before the products that need them. The mouse came before the Mac. The click wheel came before the iPod. Multitouch came before the iPhone. OpenAI shipped GPT-Live last week, a voice model that listens and talks at the same time instead of taking turns . Every voice assistant before this has felt like a walkie-talkie: you talk, then you wait, then it talks back. This one… ## [The Difference Between Customer Noise and Product Signal](https://scottburleson.substack.com/p/the-difference-between-customer-noise) _2026-07-14 · Scott Burleson · Scott Burleson's Product HiveMind_ Customer research rarely arrives clean. ## [Non-Custodial Crypto Gateway (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/73TVZCW8gjnf) _2026-07-14 · **Sponsored**_ Accept multi-chain crypto, automated fee handling, and trustless escrow with real-time settlement. ## [Fredkin's paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox) _2026-07-13 · Hathaway Field Notes_ The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them—no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less. Permalink → ## [The job was never driving](https://hathaway.engineer/notes/the-job-was-never-driving/) _2026-07-13 · Hathaway Field Notes_ I bought my first Tesla in 2020, a Model X, and there's been one in the driveway ever since. A month ago we picked up a new Model Y, this one on Tesla's newer hardware platform, with a fresh set of cameras and sensors built specifically for full self-driving. I expected an upgrade. What I got was a different category of product. The 2020 X came with whatever Tesla was calling Full Self-Driving… ## [DISCOVER Is Now Available](https://scottburleson.substack.com/p/discover-is-now-available) _2026-07-12 · Scott Burleson · Scott Burleson's Product HiveMind_ Follow a realistic team through the entire process ## [The second 90 percent](https://hathaway.engineer/notes/ninety-ninety-rule/) _2026-07-10 · Hathaway Field Notes_ The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs, via the Ninety-ninety rule This rule is so true it barely reads like a joke. Anyone who has shipped software has watched a project reach "almost done" and then stay there while the real… ## [DISCOVER Arrives Sunday](https://scottburleson.substack.com/p/discover-arrives-sunday) _2026-07-09 · Scott Burleson · Scott Burleson's Product HiveMind_ What if each new customer study could build on everything your organization had already learned? ## [What DISCOVER Is Really About](https://scottburleson.substack.com/p/what-discover-is-really-about) _2026-07-08 · Scott Burleson · Scott Burleson's Product HiveMind_ Mentality, Process, Jobs-to-be-Done, System to Bind it Together ## [Sample Chapter from DISCOVER: The Moderator’s Mindset](https://scottburleson.substack.com/p/sample-chapter-from-discover-the) _2026-07-08 · Scott Burleson · Scott Burleson's Product HiveMind_ A Head Start ## [The Interview Discussion Guide Is Not the Interview](https://scottburleson.substack.com/p/the-interview-discussion-guide-is) _2026-07-07 · Scott Burleson · Scott Burleson's Product HiveMind_ Structuring Success with Customer Interviews ## [Why I Wrote DISCOVER](https://scottburleson.substack.com/p/why-i-wrote-discover) _2026-07-03 · Scott Burleson · Scott Burleson's Product HiveMind_ From Isolated Research Projects to a System ## [Hackers asked Meta's AI for high-profile Instagram accounts. It worked.](https://www.404media.co/hackers-simply-asked-meta-ai-to-give-them-access-to-high-profile-instagram-accounts-it-worked/) _2026-07-02 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Over the last several days, Telegram groups for security researchers and hacking groups have been sharing videos and screenshots of the steps taken to steal an account, which appeared to be shockingly easy. One video shows a hacker starting a conversation with Meta's AI support bot and asking it to link the target account with a new email address: "Just link my new email address. This is my… ## [Home of the Agentic Pull Request (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/4lSrbGB3o836) _2026-07-02 · **Sponsored**_ CLI-first, TUI-ready toolkits and a moshscript installer — join the waitlist ## [OpenAI reportedly found a way to halve inference costs](https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/ai-agenda/openai-discovers-new-way-cut-inference-costs-half) _2026-06-30 · Hathaway Field Notes_ This one's paywalled, so I can't see the details. But if it's true that OpenAI found a way to more than halve the cost of inference, it could be a huge deal. Inference is the cost that scales with every query, and so far the race has mostly been about buying more chips to keep up. Bringing it down in software would shift the math for the whole industry. Permalink → ## [If Your Strategy Doesn’t Change Decisions, Is It Really a Strategy?](https://scottburleson.substack.com/p/if-your-strategy-doesnt-change-decisions) _2026-06-30 · Scott Burleson · Scott Burleson's Product HiveMind_ Action! Action! Action, Not Words! ## [OpenAI is teasing new hardware… for Codex](https://x.com/openaidevs/status/2071639953927438440) _2026-06-30 · Hathaway Field Notes_ A dedicated macro pad for Codex is an unexpected move, and I'm intrigued. Partnering with Work Louder, who actually make these things, tells me OpenAI is thinking about the whole workspace. Curious to see what they show on the 15th. Permalink → ## [morgan-wallen-at-death-valley](https://hathaway.engineer/notes/morgan-wallen-at-death-valley/) _2026-06-30 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Morgan Wallen at Death Valley on Saturday. What I kept thinking about was how plainly he loves the work itself: making the songs, playing them, being up there. That's the part you can't manufacture, and from the stands it was the most obvious thing in the place. ## [The outcome takes care of itself](https://hathaway.engineer/notes/the-outcome-takes-care-of-itself/) _2026-06-29 · Hathaway Field Notes_ I can get real caught up in the outcome. I just really need to remind myself that the outcome will ultimately happen if you just focus on the process. It takes care of itself. — Rory McIlroy ## [A problem like an opportunity](https://fs.blog/brain-food/june-28-2026/) _2026-06-29 · Hathaway Field Notes_ The person who approaches a problem like an opportunity has an advantage that the person who sees an obstacle will never understand. — Shane Parrish Permalink → ## [Find the few things you love](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/28/matt-om) _2026-06-29 · Hathaway Field Notes_ If you're going to get into something, you ought to pursue it to its full extent. If you're not interested enough to do that, don't bother getting into it. Find the few things you love; don't waste your time on the many things you merely like. — John Gruber Permalink → ## [SpaceX, Newly Public, to Acquire Cursor for $60 Billion in SpaceX Funny-Money Stock](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/18/spacex-cursor) _2026-06-19 · Hathaway Field Notes_ SpaceX is an amazing company but this valuation is insane. The idea that it's even close to as valuable as Microsoft or Amazon is bananas. SpaceX still isn't even profitable, so its price-to-earnings ratio is literally infinity. It's halfway through Thursday as I post this and SpaceX is down ~10 percent on the day, so a touch of sanity is being restored, at least at the moment. Cursor, with $1… ## [Snap's Specs](https://www.specs.com) _2026-06-16 · Hathaway Field Notes_ New AR glasses from Snap, on pre-order for $2,195. Pricey, but if they deliver they could be worth it. I'm skeptical, but curious. What I'm really watching for is whether Apple does a glasses version of the Vision Pro. Glasses like these only work well when one company controls the whole stack, down to the phone in your pocket, and that kind of vertical integration is exactly Apple's strength.… ## ["Anthropic's Safety Superpower"](https://stratechery.com/2026/anthropics-safety-superpower/) _2026-06-15 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Ben Thompson, on how Anthropic's safety rationale keeps lining up with its commercial interest: I expect Anthropic to increasingly expose their model's capabilities to end users through endpoints increasingly tailored to different workflows, even as they start to restrict the API. This replacement of software and restriction of access will be done in the name of safety. The company really believes… ## [Fox buys the box](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/business/fox-roku-acquisition-streaming-media.html) _2026-06-15 · Hathaway Field Notes_ The New York Times, on Fox Corp.'s $22 billion deal to acquire Roku: Since the Disney deal, which slimmed down the family's media holding significantly, Fox Corp. has focused more narrowly on sports, news and entertainment, along with building up its streaming abilities. The deal with Roku will immediately put Fox Corp. into greater competition with other major providers of connected-TV devices,… ## [So why not have all forms of computing?](https://asymco.com/2026/06/09/intent-computing-vs-spatial-computing/) _2026-06-15 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Horace Dediu, on why each new computing interface tends to add to the others rather than replace them: The touch UI did not immediately obviate the need for traditional personal computing interfaces. The smartphone brought computing to more people and more contexts but keyboard and pointer computing cannot be fully replaced by touch. We have a situation where there is co-existence between touch… ## [Without human direction, you have compute running in circles.](https://snscratchpad.com/posts/frontier-ecosystem/) _2026-06-15 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Satya Nadella, making the case that the model itself becomes a commodity — and that the value moves to the learning loop a company builds on top of it: Every company is going to have to build what I think of as human capital and token capital. Human capital comprises the knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition of its people, while token capital is the firm's AI… ## [Measuring the wrong company](https://hathaway.engineer/notes/measuring-the-wrong-company/) _2026-06-13 · Hathaway Field Notes_ Companies are taking a hard look at their AI spending and deciding the numbers don't add up. Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months — on a coding tool its engineers couldn't stop using. Another company spent half a billion dollars before anyone thought to set a limit. Forrester now expects enterprises to postpone about a quarter of their planned AI investment into 2027 because… ## [Why Virtual Is Real: It’s About the Jobs](http://jayhaynes.net/why-virtual-is-real-its-about-the-jobs/) _2026-05-30 · Jay Haynes · My blog_ Bill Gurley has a great post about monetizing social networks. He analyzes TenCent, a Chinese IM company, and uses virtual world examples to demonstrate how social networks could monetize their huge base of users.