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Real values aren't what you talk about, they're what you do when times get tough. That means values are most visible during big, controversial decisions.

One of the book's claims, which I found shocking at first, was that in a large organization, executives don't set strategy. Not even the CEO sets strategy. Why? Because it's an illusion to believe you can enforce a strategy.

Not exactly. It's harder than that. What executives need to do is come up with organizational values that indirectly result in the strategy they want.

(I later learned that my evil plan and/or information about my personality may have been leaked to the recruiters who may have intentionally set me up with especially clueful interviewers to avoid the problem, but this can neither be confirmed nor denied.)

But it's not perfect. Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.

We all make decisions for emotional or intuitive reasons instead of rational ones. Some of us admit that. Some of us think using our emotions is better than being rational all the time. Some of us don't. Smart people, computer types anyway, tend to come down on the side of people who don't like emotions. Programmers, who do logic for a living.

Most people find this out pretty early on in life, because their logic is imperfect and fails them often. But really, really smart computer geek types may not ever find it out. They start off living in a bubble, they isolate themselves because socializing is unpleasant, and, if they get a good job straight out of school, they may never need to leave that bubble. To such people, it may appear that logic actually works, and that they are themselves logical creatures.

Working at a large, successful company lets you keep your isolation. If you choose, you can just ignore all the inconvenient facts about the world. You can make decisions based on whatever input you choose. The success or failure of your project in the market is not really that important; what's important is whether it gets canceled or not, a decision which is at the whim of your boss's boss's boss's boss, who, as your only link to the unpleasantly unpredictable outside world, seems to choose projects quasi-randomly, and certainly without regard to the quality of your contribution.

It's a setup that makes it very easy to describe all your successes (project not canceled) in terms of your team's greatness, and all your failures (project canceled) in terms of other people's capriciousness. End users and profitability, for example, rarely enter into it. This project isn't supposed to be profitable; we benefit whenever people spend more time online. This project doesn't need to be profitable; we can use it to get more user data. Users are unhappy, but that's just because they're change averse. And so on.

What I have learned, working here, is that smart, successful people are cursed. The curse is confidence. It's confidence that comes from a lifetime of success after real success, an objectively great job, working at an objectively great company, making a measurably great salary, building products that get millions of users. You must be smart. In fact, you are smart. You can prove it.

Impostor Syndrome is that voice inside you saying that not everything is as it seems, and it could all be lost in a moment. The people with the problem are the people who can't hear that voice.

But I think Impostor Syndrome is valuable. The people with Impostor Syndrome are the people who aren't sure that a logical proof of their smartness is sufficient.

smol-ai description from the README:This is a prototype of a "junior developer" agent (aka smol dev) that scaffolds an entire codebase out for you once you give it a product spec, but does not end the world or overpromise AGI. instead of making and maintaining specific, rigid, one-shot starters, like create-react-app, or create-nextjs-app, this is basically create-anything-app where you develop your scaffolding prompt in a tight loop with your smol dev

The industry is now in this streamlining complexity phase of cloud computing. The most evident examples are integrated solutions that optimize for certain workloads or development models: Google’s Anthos, AWS Outposts, Azure Stack Hub or the Hashistack.

In one of the teams I worked on, it took on average several months to get a new developer onboarded and productive on a microservices based architecture. An SDK team is put into place to simplify the process, but they’re soon overrun by reasonable requests by feature teams. Papercuts increase over time as smaller features are harder to prioritize. The more adoption of the platform, the worse the problems become. Everything is an evaluation of existing tradeoffs.

He told me that he believes that the leverage on programming skills has gone way up in the last year. He thinks that the current generation of AI tools are inherently augmenting tools, not automating tools. They might change the bundle of skills you need to be a programmer—you might act more like a guide or a manager in many instances than writing code yourself.  But he believes that programming skills actually become more important in an AI-driven world. So yes, he still wants his kids to learn to code.

I wanted to make hacking easy, so you can have an idea and build it fast, instead of needing to plan a lot and set up a big development environment. It's been my obsession over my career to just make programming more fun and accessible.

Another way to say this is that these models are really good as copilots. And I think that will create deflationary pressure in the environment where individual companies may need fewer programmers. So it will have a significant impact on productivity from that perspective.

People were way undershooting on the potential of AI for a long time, and now they’re way overshooting. There’s a bipolar nature to markets like this. It’s something you have to come to terms with if you want to build companies.

The inherent benefit of Replit is that we bundle and vertically integrate the entire toolchain and lifecycle of software development. We help our users go from idea, to an end product that you can see and share with friends, to a deployment that you can share with the world. We’re even building in tools to help developers monetize what they build.

So vertical integration becomes a superpower for us. It’s technically possible for Microsoft to build that, but it’s extremely hard because their customers aren’t specifically asking for that. They’re not asking for bundling and vertical integration, most of them want less bundling and more customization.

The vertical integration of the car, the AI, and the physical power station created this incredible experience. It allows Tesla to suck at a lot of things – like build quality issues – but because they can provide an unparalleled end-to-end experience they win.

This type of bundling and vertical integration is something I’d recommend startups who want to build in AI think about as a strategy. It takes a certain type of founder who is very focused and able to do it for a really long time in order to build something like this.

It’s super hard. It will nearly kill you. And you can’t go for the vertical integration and bundling right out of the gate. There were a lot of startups founded around the time of Replit that tried to do this, and they all died. A few of them raised big seed rounds, and burned through it for five years, and closed the company.

You can’t get too ambitious too fast. What we did is we built a toy version of the complete thing.

Building a toy is helpful because it allows you to ship. You create progress for people like investors or talent to see, and it allows you to tell if you’re building something people find useful. Whereas if you’re hiding in a corner somewhere, even if you have infinite capital, it’s really hard to have the willpower to keep going.

This stuff is important, but I don’t think founders should over-strategize. Just build something useful and get it into the hands of people. You want to think strategically, but don’t do it so early on that the magnitude of the challenge depresses you.

These bridges are actually just an intermediate step. Since Matrix itself is an amazing chat network, eventually as more people start using bridges on Matrix, they’ll notice that their friends are already on Matrix, eliminating the need for bridges gradually over time.

Our goal is to make Beeper the best chat client for ambi-social people. Beeper (client) is to Matrix (protocol) as Gmail is to email. Interested?

We can look to the case of Siegfried Sassoon and ponder whether this is the case or not for poetry, but I think it's mostly true in software. You can’t worry about the big picture and ask intelligent questions about the direction of the product if you’re busy arguing about which database or alerting system to use.

My friend Andrew wears the same brand of black shirt every day. He thinks that if he conserves the brainpower it would take to pick something to wear, he’ll bank it and be able to use it later for something else.I don’t know if this makes sense for fashion or what have you, but I really think there is something to this

Now I don’t know the extent to which we should take tech company missions seriously. I am beginning to suspect that we should not take them seriously at all. But let’s be naive for a minute, and consider the implications that would result if they really wanted to do this.