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lennysnewsletter.com
How Figma’s PMs actually use AI every day | Ezra Mechaber (PM, Figma)

When he joined Figma, he found almost no one outside engineering using AI to get real work done, so he and a couple of fellow PMs turned his personal Claude Code setup into PM OS, a shared repo of 31 skills that every PM at Figma now uses.

— Claire Vo
2d ago
upstartsmedia.com
A New AI Assistant Is Talking A Big Game

Instead of starting with a company's core knowledge and connecting out to its individual employees, Rocker builds a context graph for each individual user, defining their relevant people, projects, topics, and decisions by logic, and then combining those algorithms with math that measures semantic connections between them.

1w ago

The best protection against the future is a present worth protecting. Most managers spend their careers preparing for contingencies that never arrive while neglecting the compounding damage of small, daily decisions they consider beneath their attention.

1w ago

You don't get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

1w ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Saturday Selection, Vol. 125

The biggest empire the world has ever seen was run by a small elite who partied all night, drank liters of port, and stayed in bed until the afternoon.

2w ago

It is not by any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do. And yet most men live as if it were, and the scheme of their days is arranged accordingly.

3w ago
fs.blog
Ryan Serhant: How to Get People to Say Yes

Ryan explains his time management framework of treating each day as a bank of 1,000 minutes changed the way he works, and why success can still feel insufficient after you achieve all of your dreams.

3w ago
stratechery.com
Apple and a Hacker’s Future

The one I ignored was its recommendation that I not invoke Claude anymore; in fact, I used Claude to root out the malware — we eventually found the exact four second period where it gained access — create a tool to watch for it in the future, and then wiped the Mac Mini. All of this happened before I found the Ars Technica article detailing the vulnerability, and it was pretty remarkable. I understand that people are nervous about giving these agents access to one's computer — as I noted, the Mac Mini in question has nothing on it except for Codex and Claude — but in this case you could make the case that I would have been in much more trouble had I not had an agent running persistently.

4w ago

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Science of Waiting and the Art of Delay

Life might be a race against time, but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why. A wise decision requires reflection, and reflection requires pause. The converse of Socrates's famous admonition is that the examined life just might be worth living.

1mo ago
oneusefulthing.org
The Overhang

The capability overhang, the gap between what these models can do and what almost anyone is doing with them, is an opportunity because most people don't bring their own advantages to AI, and those who do get much more out of it. That is why I think we will need to focus on the individual traits we have that remain useful even as AI abilities improve. You are not trying to compete with AI in producing outputs, that is a losing game.

1mo ago
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.

1mo ago

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

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

2mo ago

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

2mo 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.

2mo 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.

3mo 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.

3mo 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.

3mo ago

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

3mo 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.

3mo 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.

3mo 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.

3mo 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."

3mo 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".

3mo 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.

3mo 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."

3mo 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.

3mo 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.

3mo 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.

3mo ago

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

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