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Tag:productivityClear

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.

— Amos Tversky, The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis (2016)
8h ago
ai-supremacy.com
How AI's Demand for Compute could Disrupt America

U.S. workers saw their share of the U.S. economy (GDP) slide to a record low in the second quarter amid an ongoing productivity boom that is producing output gains which are outpacing wage growth. The very same younger men who tend to use Generative AI more frequently and who are more likely to be power users are the very same workers who seem to be most hurt by the economic consequences of AI generally speaking.

22h ago

Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas; a man who has been beating his brains against a problem all week is in excellent condition to be amused.

4d ago

The biggest competitive advantage in business and investing is a quiet life that allows for more time to think. Being perpetually busy is a social signal, not a productivity strategy—and the market rewards those who can sit still long enough to see what others are too distracted to notice.

1w ago
lennysnewsletter.com
🎙️ How I AI: ChatGPT Codex Voice + browser + Sites: an expert’s AI workflow | Nick Baumann (OpenAI)

Voice may be the best way to give AI context because it removes the pressure of figuring out exactly what to type. People often get more useful results when they talk freely than when they stare at an empty prompt box trying to be precise. Across two-person voice chat, mobile dictation, and Codex's orb interface, the same pattern keeps showing up—people who talk to AI tend to give it more context, and more context usually leads to better work.

1w ago

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

1w ago

The man who is perpetually hesitating which of two things he will do first, will do neither. The man who resolves, but does not execute his resolution, has not yet learned to think.

1w ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Monday Media Diet with Matt Spevack

I guess some might argue that reading would have the benefit of expanding my mind, but I already have so many creative and administrative projects I'm excited about that I can hardly keep up with my own ideas. That's my unapologetic justification for not reading.

2w ago

A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all.

2w ago
platformer.news
The case for making your own apps

"What started as a little tool suddenly becomes this glorious massive app that wants to do everything," he said — and "sometimes those apps get more in the way than they actually help."

2w ago
ftav
A country is only as valuable as its eccentrics

The UK is the world's third-largest destination for private AI capex investment over 2013-25, behind only the US and China, according to Stanford's 2026 AI Index Report. Bank of America makes the argument that the takeover wave is a short-term facet of foreign direct investment that's shifting the UK economy in the longer term "towards higher productivity/capital intensity".

3w ago

It is not by augmenting the capital of the country, but by rendering a greater part of that capital active and productive than would otherwise be so, that the most judicious operations of banking can increase the industry of the country.

3w ago

The record of a man who makes consistently good decisions in complex situations is almost always a record of a man who has reduced the number of decisions he has to make. The more choices you face, the more your judgment degrades.

4w ago
lennysnewsletter.com
🎙️ How I AI: GPT-5.6 review, How a solo builder runs 24/7 local AI, and What an agent harness is and how to build one

The open chat field has been good enough, until it stopped being good enough. I acknowledge in this episode that just typing into Claude Code has produced real work. But this marks a shift in my thinking: general-purpose agents are now better used to orchestrate specialized harnesses than to do every job themselves. Giving a constrained agent a specific harness gets more consistent output than giving a powerful agent an open prompt.

4w ago
ftav
Not the future. Don't talk about the future.

A company that replaces a billing department with a chatbot interface records lower costs and higher output per worker. The national accounts register a productivity gain. But the hours that patients spend decoding their own tests appear nowhere — not in labour statistics, not in GDP.

4w ago
platformer.news
OpenAI's big launch — and bigger departure

My big takeaway is that both Sol & Fable represent jumps over previous models and have opened a large gap with the next-best AIs. People will have preferences for one or the other, but if you [are] doing any work where better intelligence matters, those two models are your only choices.

4w ago

It is not by spectacular achievements that man can be transformed, but by will. A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

4w ago
fs.blog
The Best Summary of Atlas Shrugged

The crisis was not caused by the producers. It was caused by a society that believed it could consume achievement while attacking the people who make achievement possible. Without the producers, the system that exploited them can no longer function, and society collapses.

4w ago
ai-supremacy.com
The Token Apocalypse

The peak of 'tokenmaxxing', this suspicious trend in Silicon Valley where a workplace culture frenzy of burning through as many AI tokens as possible as a shorthand for productivity—ran into a major reality check sometime in the early spring of 2026 when they got the Claude bills. The adoption of Chinese open-weight models coincided with the reaction to that. This is actually a failure of AI agents and productivity if you read between the lines.

1mo ago

The funnel of opportunity is wider than most people think, but the filter of execution is far narrower than most people realize. Ideas are not the scarce resource; disciplined follow-through on a single idea, long past the point of comfort, is what almost no one can sustain.

1mo ago
lennysnewsletter.com
How top PMs increase their leverage with AI

Not every task, workflow, or company demands that you move up to the highest rung to get the most out of AI. The right rung on each ladder is about the best use of AI for the work in front of you.

1mo ago
stratechery.com
2026.26: Summer Vibes

fretting about the future can foreclose an appreciation at how incredibly awesome this technology is, and that the possibilities really are endless. You can do anything — even organize your garage. That might sound silly, but technology, for all of its importance, is also fun, and I'm having a blast.

1mo ago
wired.com
28 Tips to Take Your ChatGPT Prompts to the Next Level

The model doesn't actually remember previous conversations unless you use the Memory feature or paste in prior context yourself. Each new chat window starts completely fresh, which means if you want consistency across sessions, you have to build that context manually.

1mo ago
lennysnewsletter.com
🎙️ How I AI: Claude Fable 5 review & How Braintrust uses AI agents, evals, and CI to ship better software

Practical quality beats theoretical quality every time. In theory, a human engineer with infinite time and focus might produce better code than an AI agent. In practice, humans lose context over days, have decaying attention spans on hard-but-tedious problems, and skip benchmarks they know they should run. AI agents maintain consistent focus, run every test, and can work on problems continuously for days or weeks.

1mo ago
ai-supremacy.com
The Business Engineer in the Era of AI

Inside the companies pulling ahead — Anthropic, Cursor, Cognition, Replit, and a small number of others — a different unit shape had emerged: five-to-ten people, direct CEO reporting, broad decision rights, hybrid roles, communication overhead at roughly one-tenth of a comparably-staffed conventional product unit.

1mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Saturday Selection, Vol. 108

This clearly brilliant person catalogs everything they've eaten, read, and listened to that day, then posts it here.

1mo ago
stratechery.com
The iPhone’s Last Stand

The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees' time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive; consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.

2mo ago
noahpinion.blog
How much more software do we really need?

For companies using advanced AI coding tools, only 18% of spending on tokens is translating into shipped coding products that reach real users, according to EntelligenceAI, a startup that aggregated data on more than 2,000 companies using advanced AI tools for coding. Jellyfish, a company that tracks AI usage, found rapidly diminishing returns in terms of converting tokens to actual software.

2mo ago

It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?

2mo ago
lennysnewsletter.com
The Codex feature that works while you sleep

Goals transform AI from a turn-based assistant that needs constant 'what's next?' prompting into an autonomous agent that can work for hours on complex, multi-step tasks.

2mo ago
platformer.news
Claude Code's creator on the end of the software engineer

I don't think we're going to call them engineers. But if we talk about people writing code, or using agents to write code, I think there will be 100 times more engineers than there are today. That's my prediction.

2mo ago
lennysnewsletter.com
Essential books for product builders—part 1

I've always thought it's so cool that the smartest person in the world on a topic I care about spends 2+ years of their life distilling their best ideas into an enjoyable read, and I can get this for just $20.

2mo ago
3quarksdaily.com
Maladaptive frugality

I realized I could either continue to drain myself for a small expense, or let it go and focus on the projects in front of me. I had, unknowingly, engaged in maladaptive frugality.

3mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Would You Try This AI-Powered Email App?

So much money and attention is focused on re-thinking our work tools and processes today, Gavini notes, with many of tech's smartest people bringing AI to verticals like legal or healthcare. "My workflow changes every three months now," he says. "So why are the apps that I use on my phone every day still the same?"

3mo ago
3quarksdaily.com
The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived

Those early adopters found, to their surprise, not only that the models were good at puzzles, but that they could help break genuinely new ground. Soon, mathematicians were using AI to discover and prove new results, accomplishing in a day what would have once taken them weeks or months.

3mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Celebration of Suffering Edition

There's a sense that if it's not hard, it's not real—and I think that's a much more sinister force in society than a move towards optimization.

3mo ago

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