Meri 8x💉“Exiled for Good of the Realm” Williams

CTO. NED @FlagstoneGroup. Chair @TheLeadDev 🎤 Advisor @Kindred_VC, @SkillerWhale1. Wife to @ellywilliams. #ND #EhlersDanlos 🏳️‍🌈

[Meri 8x💉“Exiled for Good of the Realm” Williams @Geek_Manager]

Incredibly honoured to feature on this year's Pride Power List. Honestly taken aback by being included amongst such illustrious and impactful company -- thank you! #PPL2024

[The Pride Power List @PridePowerList]

At 91 is the amazing CTO of @Pleo, @geek_manager. Keep up the great work! https://t.co/Iuklr4Xfaj #PPL2024

[JetBrains @jetbrains]

Companies are measuring lines of code again.

With flawed productivity metrics and spiraling AI spend, many leaders still don’t know what agentic development is actually costing them. Meri Williams (@Geek_Manager) calls metrics that look healthy while masking problems underneath “watermelon metrics”: green on the outside, red on the inside. That lack of visibility is one reason we made Air Governance, the organizational layer of JetBrains Air, our agentic development platform for engineering teams.

Get Meri’s full take on October 14, 4:00 pm UTC: https://t.co/kspAcyARmD

[Prof. Denim 𓅊 @DenimFarmer]

Here's the part most people don't want to hear. Each time you catch COVID, the risks don't reset. They stack. Every infection is another roll of the dice, and the odds get worse each time.

[Meri 8x💉“Exiled for Good of the Realm” Williams @Geek_Manager]

@triketora Love this for you! Happy birthday hon!

[Tiffani Ashley Bell @tiffani]

There’s been a case of tuberculosis reported at a high school here in my hometown. Nearly 300 people had to be notified about possible exposure

Like wtf. They really are bringing back all these Oregon Trail-ass diseases

How embarrassing

[Meri 8x💉“Exiled for Good of the Realm” Williams @Geek_Manager]

@GergelyOrosz Yeap, I’ve deliberately NOT taken another CTO role for my next gig, after more than a decade in them

[Simon Willison @simonw]

The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder

We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge

[Rhoda @Symply_rhoda1]

Sixteen months later she’s the person everyone goes to when everything is on fire.
Because once you’ve soothed a meltdown in a public place while still delivering results…
Monday morning Slack chaos feels like a light warm-up.
Working parents aren’t “less available.”
They’re battle-tested in ways most candidates never get tested.
If your interview process only works for people who have unlimited backup childcare,
you’re not selecting for talent.
You’re selecting for who has the most invisible support system.
Stop filtering for privilege.
Start filtering for the ones who already know how to carry more than one life at a time.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Adults with ADHD release melatonin about 90 minutes later than everyone else. In kids it's 45 minutes. Up to 80% report insomnia or disturbed sleep. Two Canadian doctors just published a paper arguing psychiatry has been staring at the wrong clock.

The mechanism is simple and brutal. Your brain flips a melatonin switch roughly two hours before your natural bedtime, and in a big subgroup of people with ADHD that switch flips late every single night. Bedtime arrives before the body is chemically ready, school and work start on everyone else's schedule anyway, and the next day's brain runs on a sleep deficit that looks exactly like inattention.

What convinced me this runs deeper than "night owl" is the tissue evidence. People with ADHD show blunted morning cortisol, smaller pineal glands, and dampened clock genes (BMAL1 and PER2) in cells far outside the brain. The delay is written into the body itself.

And the clock moves. Bright light in the morning plus low-dose melatonin advanced the sleep signal in both children and adults with ADHD, and emerging data ties that phase shift to symptom improvement. Sleep programs alone improved symptoms in kids.

So the treatment pathway the authors propose costs almost nothing. A fixed wake time, sunlight within the first hour of waking, dim screens at night, and melatonin only for confirmed delays.

Stimulants still work and nobody in the paper argues otherwise. But if a chunk of what we diagnose as an attention disorder is a body running 90 minutes behind the sun, the cheapest intervention in medicine has been sitting outside the window the whole time.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Good, human, writing, by a competent engineer suddenly feels SO REFRESHING to read, because it is becoming very, very sparse.

You can immediately tell when you read something like this.

Startups: forget AI writing if you want to stand out.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Seeing internships become fewer at many tech companies tells me a bunch of stuff:

1. No plans to convert a year out. You run internships when you know a year later you’ll do new grad hiring

2. Not enough capacity for mentoring. Interns need at least one mentor - which takes time away from an eng doing whatever they do. On larger teams there’s more “slack” time. On small teams, rarely

3. Team dynamics less important. Interns really boost morale on teams - found this underrated, always.

4. Career growth not important. Mentoring interns grows that mentorship skill that is (used to be?) important for seniors.

Food for thought on all

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

As someone who had been an engineering manager in the past, it's laughable for anyone to compare AI agents management to people management.

Engineering management is as close to this as The Minions and Gru is to the real word (and AI agents *are* like those Minions, seriously)

[Simon Willison @simonw]

The idea of "AI employees" feels so short-sighted to me - both disrespectful to humans and a complete misunderstanding of what these tools can do and how to best put them to work

You may as well start adding Excel spreadsheets to your org chart

[Meri 8x💉“Exiled for Good of the Realm” Williams @Geek_Manager]

@GergelyOrosz It’s sad though bcs a lot of people in tech have left bcs feel unsafe here — so less diversity of voices & discourse now bcs X has become such a hate filled cesspool. I worry about the people being silenced by it.

[tern @1goodtern]

You probably don't need me to explain this, but when Musk cut funding for health projects in Africa, the affected countries could not simply fill the gap. Funding, staffing, logistics and coordination cannot be replaced instantly.

That is why the outbreakss now are *so* serious.

[Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge]

Brendan Hopper, Matt Beane and I have a thesis, one that I've been sharing around lately, and we want CEOs and boards to hear it.

Before I get to the thesis, let's revisit Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma (ID), the theory he developed at HBS to explain why big companies often get eaten by upstarts during technology shifts.

In short, the ID says incumbents serve their best customers so well, and tune themselves so ruthlessly for doing exactly what they do today, that they can't chase the disruptor tech coming up from below until it's too late.

The classic solution to the Innovator's Dilemma is to create a "bubble" in your company. You carve out an innovation team with a budget and mandate, as unfettered as practical by the parent organization. This is to combat the 2-level trap presented by the dilemma.

The economic trap is Christensen's original point: a disruptive technology can't justify itself under your existing P&L, because it serves smaller or weirder customers at margins your real business would never accept.

The governance trap is what gets piled on top once you're big: SOC2, FedRAMP, etc. mean every new idea has to clear a lot of process before it can move. The bubble is intended to escape both at once, with its own economics and permission slips.

The standard innovation "bubble" solution famously doesn't work very well. You may solve the problem inside your bubble, but you often can't roll it out to the rest of your company for the original reasons. Everyone is focused on doing their current stuff, and nobody has time for a major change.

Our thesis is that there is an entirely different way out of the dilemma this time around. No bubble needed, as long as you follow a simple rule. That rule is, let your people play. Give them back any time they earn from automating their jobs with AI. Then incentivize them to use that time to improve the company's processes.

When you see an engineering team announce a 40% productivity boost from adopting AI — a number that's been showing up in plenty of LinkedIn posts lately — your first reaction as a CEO or manager is probably to say, that's awesome, we can do more work now! Or you might simply expect to see 40% more output from the team.

Either way, you have just asked them to spend their extra time building faster horses (your current business) instead of letting them go figure out what a car would look like for your company. They gained some productivity from AI, which could have been your ticket out of the Dilemma, and you immediately slurped it back for your existing business.

This will get your company killed in the medium to long haul, because your company tomorrow will look almost nothing like it does today. Conway's Law says your software and your org chart mirror each other; as AI rewrites how you build software, the org has to shift to match. But if you're stealing the hours back saved by your employees, then you're not letting your org pivot naturally in the direction it needs to shift.

@RealGeneKim and I saw this in person at @arkanalabs a few weeks back. As long as your people know they'll be recognized and rewarded if they improve the company's processes — public credit for cross-team workflow wins, promotion criteria that actually count process improvements, managers who treat freed-up hours as a feature rather than a budget line — then they will use their "play time" to seek out other teams, and start pivoting you to becoming AI-native. This way it can unfold in whatever bespoke way is most natural to your company, rather than in some ivory-tower research bubble. For every company, the way it unfolds will be a bit different.

I think of this approach, of giving the time back to the humans who automate parts of their jobs with AI, as the new solution to the Innovator's Dilemma. The old bubble solution was to separate a bunch of people from their regular jobs, and try to give them the freedom to solve the problem in isolation.

In contrast, by giving your regular employees their hours back, the innovation bubble is still there, but it's now dispersed across the company, as lots of very tiny bubbles: one bubble per person who has liberated some hours.

If you've ever read Slack by DeMarco and Lister, a great book from back in the 90s, then our thesis should resonate. What companies need is to empower their own employees, the ones who actually work together (even across departments)--the ones who know how the business works--to shift the company in the new directions together. Gradually, but with intentionality.

You still have the frankly awful problem of token budgets. For every employee you upskill into baseline AI literacy (which I'd define loosely as using coding agents throughout the workday), you've added a non-trivial opex spend — for the heaviest agentic users it can run into five figures a year. I won't sugar-coat it; you need to find that money somehow. I don't have a magic solution, but I'm very happy that other models are catching up to Claude, because they're becoming good enough for real work now.

But token budgets alone aren't enough. To live through the Innovator's Dilemma this time around, your employees need a time budget, too. Give it to the ones who earn it using AI, then incentivize them properly, and I think you're headed in roughly the right direction.

Thank you for coming to my TED tweet.

[Simon Willison @simonw]

Shopify's River agent system lives in Slack and can only be used in public so that other employees can learn from what you do with it

Reminds me of how Midjourney's Discord-only launch helped people figure out the weird & complex craft of image prompting by watching each other

[tern @1goodtern]

Here in England *three times as many people* are dying from infections as were seven years ago, as a proportion of all deaths, based on the 'main underlying cause of death' data from the ONS.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

This is a worthwhile read from Meta engineer @championswimmer (who I met last time I was in London - great guy)

His point is that a lot of these “AI layoffs” could well be backwards: they are prob happening because more AI spend doesn’t correlate with better business results…

[tern @1goodtern]

So if you're either *trying to be* a good person or *trying to look like* a good person, it's easier just to pretend that your actions don't have repercussions

See also:
Climate change
Non-sustainable farming
Fossil fuel use
Working conditions
Environmental harm
Over consumption

[tern @1goodtern]

Look:
There is no such thing as overdiagnosis.

There is just diagnosis (correct) or misdiagnosis (wrong).

If a diagnosis is correct, then you can't have too much of it.