Noteds

But school is not like the rest of life. Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course. In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant—but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage.

Ways to Get Ahead

Three components of fast career growth:

Luck Talent Grit

I do appreciate he put luck first.. as a graduate into the 2008 economic meltdown it certainly felt like bad luck

The reality is. You can’t have it all. There are trade offs. Embrace them and optimize.

_{Quote Citation: Sidwyn Koh, “Work-Life Balance Slows Careers (E9 Engineer, ex-Meta)”, 2024-08-31, https://www.pathtostaff.com/p/work-life-balance-slows-careers-e9}

ANTHROPIC REVOKED OPENAI’S API access to its models on Tuesday, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell WIRED. OpenAI was informed that its access was cut off due to violating the terms of service.

“Claude Code has become the go-to choice for coders everywhere, and so it was no surprise to learn OpenAI’s own technical staff were also using our coding tools ahead of the launch of GPT-5,” Anthropic spokesperson Christopher Nulty said in a statement to WIRED. “Unfortunately, this is a direct violation of our terms of service.”

There is, however, some skepticism around the extent to which AI is truly responsible for layoffs. “As a founder, seeking investments, of a company that’s in a public market that trades stock, you don’t want to rattle the market and say ‘Oh we’re actually in a really tough position because we can’t borrow money cheaply and the economic condition isn’t great,’” said Mr. Vu, “You want to be able to at least try to shape the narrative on why your company’s headcount isn’t growing as quickly as it should, and in fact right now, AI certainly seems like a good reason to attribute that to.”

Companies building AI dev tools report positive results. Cursor calls it “the smartest coding model we’ve used.” Windsurf says it has “half the tool calling error rate” of other models. Vercel praises its frontend capabilities.

Beyond the tool companies, some founders and developers have shared their early experiences. GitHub’s CEO mentioned that GPT-5 shows promise for complex refactoring tasks. Several startup founders have noted improvements in code generation quality, though most emphasize they’re still in early testing phases.

Jason Leverant, the COO and president of AtWork Group, told Newsweek that automation tended to hit jobs that fell into what he called the “Three D’s”: dull, dirty or dangerous. Many white-collar positions in the “dull” category are already being replaced by AI tools.

Feels like this is an assertion without citation.. but it has been a rough few years.

_{Quote Citation: Newsweek, “US Hits Highest Layoffs Since COVID - Newsweek”, 2025-08-12, https://www.newsweek.com/us-hits-highest-layoffs-since-covid-2111794}

Fast forward to today, and that joy of coding is decreasing rapidly. Well, I’m a manager these days, so there’s that… But even when I do get technical, I usually just open Cursor and prompt my way out of 90% of it. It’s way more productive, but more passive as well.

I’m not sure I agree with this post.. Yes with AI you can be dangerous again and sling some code. But finding Joy in writing functions? No.. find joy in shipping. ABC always be committing..

At Meta, a diff is a pull request and DAT focuses on the inner development loop – the writing, building, testing, and debugging of code. The tech giant emphasizes diffs should be kept small and reviewable, which, in part, accounts for its average DAT of 50 minutes across 87% of available diffs.

I feel like it’s the continuous application of scientific management (Taylorism) here that fall short. Gallup has found time and again that effective workers have a lot more to do with environment than DATs..

In 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that, over the preceding decade, the proportion of adults who read at least one book a year had fallen from fifty-five per cent to forty-eight per cent. That’s a striking change, but modest compared to what’s happened among teen-agers: the National Center for Education Statistics—which has recently been gutted by the Trump Administration—found that, over roughly the same period, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent. Predictably, college professors have been complaining with more than usual urgency about phone-addled students who struggle to read anything of substantial length or complexity.

Monolith: the backend service is mostly a large monolith, and is deployed as one. This is a reminder that monoliths work pretty well for early-stage startups and can help teams move fast.

This is a shameless plug for Martin fowler as well. first get it working, then make it better.

_{Quote Citation: Gergely Orosz, “Real-world engineering challenges: building Cursor”, JUN 10, 2025, https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/cursor}