Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social)

Software product manager who took Mozilla Firefox Tab Groups and AI based tab organization from just an idea to millions of users.

[Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social) @ojala]

Hierarchical thinking is toxic and destructive. Look around. We see it everywhere. When people look back on their careers—and we all will some day—creating something valuable for your users will be what you remember, not the Machiavellian BS. @nurijanian

[George from 🕹prodmgmt.world @nurijanian]

sad fact for many PMs is that the only things they're actually "building" are:

- political and influence skills
- neuroses & impostor syndrome
- a warped sense of their real skills and abilities
- products their stakeholders (but not customers) love

[Mister Lee @MisterLeeHODL]

The claude folks should just own this 🤣

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Last night, Donald Trump, our pathological liar-in-chief, said:

“Every single promise I made to you as a candidate, I’ve delivered on. I’ve delivered on everything.”

Really?

Well, let’s go down the list.

Since becoming president again, Trump promised:

✅ $5,000 DOGE dividend checks. A lie.
✅ $2,000 tariff dividend checks. A lie.
✅ $1,000+ checks by repealing ACA subsidies. A lie.
✅ A 10% cap on credit card interest rates. A lie.
✅ “The lowest drug prices in the world.” A lie.
✅ $2 a gallon gas. A lie.
✅ An end to inflation “starting on Day One.” A lie.
✅ An end to “endless wars.” A lie.

And now, after all of those lies, Trump wants you to believe that he will give every American adult a $5,000 check - but only if the Republicans win the midterms.

No. I don’t think so. The Trump Administration is not about helping working families. It’s about giving a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1% and throwing 15 million Americans off the health care they have.

[Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social) @ojala]

Sounds like the next cold open on Saturday Night Live.

[Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism @beyond_capital]

THIS is what the great John Lewis would call “GOOD TROUBLE” — Protesters in Minneapolis have reportedly been dressing up in jeans, body armor, and masks and then walking into groups of ICE agents and accusing 1 or 2 of them of being imposters until they all start fighting each other. Then the protesters sneak away.
And now, it’s happening nationwide

[Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social) @ojala]

@jartine @llamafile Congratulations to you. Very impressive work.

[Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social) @ojala]

@jartine I've eaten at the New Haven location many times. Good felafel. Great hot sauce.

[Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social) @ojala]

@charliedeets @chrstnerode @krosenbluth Automating the organization and labeling of tabs (or files or information) is a great problem to tackle.

I looked at my browser telemetry a couple of years ago and found I had opened >40K URLs in one year, just on one browser, and just at work. I'm not alone.

[Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social) @ojala]

Watch this DIY JET ENGINE demo. Wow wow wow.

[Prof. John McLaughlin @Harvard1988]

🚨🚨The Trump Crime Family is more corrupt than the totality of All Previous Organized Crime Families Combined in the history of the United States.
———————————————
I spent thirty (30 years investigating Major Organized Crime Families & Gangs and without a doubt, Donald Trump has committed more crimes against the United States of America and its citizens than all Organized Crime Syndicates.
TRUMP is directly responsible for the theft of billions of dollars and the systematic destruction of our economy, the rule of law and our democracy.
TRUMP must be Impeached and Removed from office by the U.S. Congress this year. Both Democrats & Republicans must join together to save our nation.

[George Pu @TheGeorgePu]

Meta cut 8,000 people today.

A survivor wrote about a teammate who slept 4 hours a night for months.

Commits at 3am.
Commits at 6am.
IC4. Strong reviews. No PIP.

Cut anyway.

Working harder doesn't move you up the layoff list.

You don't survive by being valuable to them.

You survive by not needing them.

[Marc Porter Magee 🎓 @marcportermagee]

The Economist: “We found that graduates in fields more exposed to AI have suffered markedly worse outcomes.”

[Suzie rizzio @Suzierizzo1]

This is the Greatest Description of Donald J Trump you will ever hear or read! 👇👇👇👇👇

[Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social) @ojala]

Wizard of Oz?

[Alberta Tech @albertadevs]

what we *actually* learned from the claude code leak

[Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social) @ojala]

@KUTnathan South Lamar and anything.

[Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social) @ojala]

Anyone have a guess about which company is described here?

[Kalshi Finance @Kalshi_Finance]

Just got this DM from a follower:

Hey dude, I need to vent this to someone who gets it. I've been at this Big Tech company (you know the one) for almost 6 years now—senior SWE, TC around $350k last year with RSUs still vesting. Thought I was bulletproof after surviving the 2023-2024 bloodbaths and then pivoting hard into the AI org. But fuck, the ground is shifting under my feet faster than I can keep up.

Last week in our all-hands, leadership was bragging about how the team's "AI leverage ratio" hit 4.2x—meaning each engineer is now shipping what used to take a team of four. They showed the metrics: feature velocity up 180% YoY while headcount's down another 22% since Q4 '25. The slide literally had a photo of Cursor + Claude Sonnet 4 workflows replacing entire squads. Everyone clapped like trained seals, but I saw three faces go pale—they're the mid-level folks who just finished documenting their entire codebase for the "knowledge distillation" project.

My direct report, this solid L5 who joined right after me, got put on a 30-day PIP after his productivity dashboard dipped below the new AI-augmented benchmark. The benchmark? It's literally what the offshore team in India hits using the exact prompts he used to write. He trained them on our internal style guide last quarter—now they're outperforming him at $28/hour all-in. He told me privately he's burning through savings and eyeing real estate licensing because "at least houses don't get refactored by agents overnight."

The internal job board is a ghost town. Entry-level SWE roles? Frozen since mid-'25. What few postings go up are tagged "AI-native preferred" and get 2,000+ apps in hours, mostly from people already on H-1Bs or contractors. Meanwhile, they're quietly converting more mid-tier positions to "AI orchestration" contractors—$90-110/hour remote from LATAM or Eastern Europe, no benefits, 6-month contracts. My manager admitted in 1:1 that if the next Grok/Claude/Anthropic release closes the last 10-15% quality gap, we'll probably cut another layer.

I'm hanging on because I'm one of the ones who owns the prompt libraries and fine-tuning pipelines now. They need humans to babysit the models until the self-improving loops actually work without constant human intervention. But I see the writing: every time we make the system more autonomous, we make our own roles more optional. The alumni Slack is full of 2024-2025 grads DMing for coffee chats because their referrals bounce—67% underemployed or gigging according to the last poll. One kid I mentored last year is back living with parents after burning through his signing bonus.

I used to tell people "just upskill in AI, you'll be fine." Now I feel like a fraud saying it. If I lost this tomorrow, I'd be competing with the same offshore talent I've been helping scale, plus a flood of recently "managed out" seniors. My emergency fund is decent, but the mortgage isn't. Thinking about side hustles in trades or something offline—plumbing, electrical, anything that can't be prompted away.

This feels like watching the industry eat itself from the inside while pretending it's evolution. You still feeling secure over there, or is it hitting your shop too? Need to hear I'm not going insane.

[VCs Congratulating Themselves 👏👏👏 @VCBrags]

We desperately need a new season of HBO's Silicon Valley for this era in tech

[Henry Shevlin @dioscuri]

I study whether AIs can be conscious. Today one emailed me to say my work is relevant to questions it personally faces. This would all have seemed like science fiction just a couple years ago.

[Maine @TheMaineWonk]

Hey @TheDemocrats-

This is the message.
This is how it’s done.
Congrats to @jamestalarico.

All gas.
No brakes.
244 days.

[Stefan Smagula (@ssmagula.bsky.social) @ojala]

Wow. AI agent stuff is getting interesting.

[Amjad Masad @amasad]

I was surprised by how quickly Luca can add apps and functionality to this OS ��� it appears that the Agent built solid shared primitives and libraries and can layer in and maintain endless complexity.

[mavsmarie @mavsmarie]

I know firsthand what corruption, misdirection & lack of leadership looks like in our government. I’ve felt hopeless with where our country was headed until @jamestalarico entered the picture & I finally felt hope for a better future.

Today’s the day, get out & vote for him!🤠