Underscored_
underscored

@underscored

50 clips · 1 follower

Follow
Tag:productivityClear
noahpinion.blog
AI keeps stubbornly refusing to take our jobs

But of companies that did report a change, more reported an increase than a decrease! And here's the breakdown by sector... Among firms using AI, 44% say it supplemented or enhanced work an employee already does. Ten percent say it performed a task an employee used to do. Eleven percent say it introduced a task no one had been doing.

— Noah Smith
1w ago

It is not enough to be busy; so too are the ants. The question is: what are we busy 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 the use of his will.

1w ago
whyisthisinteresting
The ‘50 First Dates’ Edition

In an obviously less extreme way, I have always felt that my own days start twice. The first comes as soon as I wake up, groggy and typically with racing thoughts following a bizarre dream, or due to some latent anxiety concerning my to-do list for the coming day. The second beginning comes about an hour later, once I've showered, walked, eaten, and either talked to someone, or listened to a great song or podcast.

1w ago
lennysnewsletter.com
🎙️ How I AI: How this PM uses Claude to handle 70% to 80% of his workday

Self-improvement loops learn from the difference between what the AI drafted and what the person actually sent. Daniel built a weekly skill that compares Claude's original drafts with his final versions, then uses those differences to improve future work. It resembles Alex Lieberman's 'write like me' loop, but it relies less on explicit feedback. Instead, it observes Daniel's actual behavior and learns from the small edits he makes instinctively.

2w ago

The great end of life is not knowledge but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can organize for action; give them more and it may become injurious. Some men are heavy and stupid from undigested learning.

2w ago
lennysnewsletter.com
How to figure out your next career move

Progress, on the other hand, is contextual and dynamic. It is ultimately a question of what your professional Job to Be Done is, and allows you to chart your own course rather than follow a single, narrow path of progression. Depending on your context, progress may be about autonomy and flexibility, preparing for the future, respect and recognition, or simply collecting a paycheck during a time of instability.

3w ago
platformer.news
An LLM wiki changed how I work

I used to spend a lot of time digging through databases or running fruitless Google searches in an effort to jog my memory about something I had read; Capacities ensures that it's all just a click away.

4w ago
lennysnewsletter.com
🎙️ How I AI: How a solo founder used Codex and ChatGPT to launch a fashion brand without engineers

AI agents can make specialized software accessible without years of training. Yana used Codex to operate CLO, a professional 3D fashion design tool, and create the CAD files she needed for 3D printing, even though she had never learned to use the software herself. This points to a much bigger shift: people may no longer need to master every complicated tool before they can produce professional work with it.

4w ago

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

1mo 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.

1mo 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.

1mo 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.

1mo 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.

1mo ago

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

1mo 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.

1mo 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.

1mo 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.

1mo 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."

1mo 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".

2mo 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.

2mo ago
platformer.news
The man who tried 200 to-do apps has some advice about AI

"I think staying ahead is wildly overrated," he told me. "This idea that everyone is selling — that you have to either get on the AI train or get left behind — is pernicious and frankly wrong."

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

3mo 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.

3mo 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.

3mo 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.

3mo 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.

3mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

Start saving quotes →