Bjartur Sigurbergsson

Engineering leader. Building AI-powered products and helping teams become AI-native. Writing about small teams, product engineering and organizational scaling.

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

@teej_m @linear Really excited for this update, great work 👏

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

Small teams are magic.

The biggest leverage of AI isn't faster coding.

It's the ability to systematically eliminate the operational work that would otherwise force teams to grow.

https://t.co/nRAlYEz1DO

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

Whispr Flow on iOS has one of the most delightful onboarding experiences I've seen in a while. Love how they hand-hold you while you update your settings. Also just a lovely, clean app ✨

[Naval @naval]

Is Traditional Software Engineering Dead?

“Does this mean that traditional software engineering is dead? Absolutely not. Software engineers—even the ones who are not necessarily tuning or training AI models—these are now among the most leveraged people on earth. Sure, the guys who are training and tuning models are even more leveraged because they’re building the tool set that software engineers are using.

But software engineers still have two massive advantages on you. First, they think in code, so they actually know what’s going on underneath. And all abstractions are leaky. So when you have a computer programming for you—when you have Claude Code or equivalent programming for you—it’s going to make mistakes.

It’s going to have bugs. It’s going to have suboptimal architecture. So it’s not going to be quite right. And someone who understands what’s going on underneath will be able to plug the leaks as they occur.

So if you want to build a well-architected application, if you want to be able to even specify a well-architected application, if you want to be able to make it run at high performance, if you want it to do its best, if you want to catch the bugs early, then you’re going to want to have a software engineering background.

The traditional software engineer is going to be able to use these tools much better. And there are still many kinds of problems in software engineering that are out of scope for these AI programs today. The easiest way to think about those is problems that are outside of their data distribution.

For example, if they need to do a binary sort or reverse a linked list, they’ve seen countless examples of that, so they’re extremely good at it. But when you start getting out of their domain—where you have to write very high-performance code, when you’re running on architectures that are novel or brand new, when you’re actually creating new things or solving new problems, then you still need to get in there and hand code it.

At least until either there are so many of those examples that new models can be trained on them, or until these models can sufficiently reason at even higher levels of abstraction and crack it on their own…

And remember: there is no demand for average. The average app—nobody wants it, at least as long as it’s not filling some niche that is filled by a superior app. The app that is better will win essentially a hundred percent of the market. Maybe there’s some small percentage that will bleed off to the second-best app because it does some little niche feature better than the main app, or it’s cheaper, or something of the sort.

But generally speaking, people only want the best of anything. So the bad news is there’s no point in being number two or number three—like in the famous Glengarry Glen Ross scene where Alec Baldwin says, “First place gets a Cadillac Eldorado, second place gets a set of steak knives, and third place you’re fired.”

That’s absolutely true in these winner-take-all markets. That’s the bad news: You have to be the best at something if you want to win.

However, the set of things you can be best at is infinite. You can always find some niche that is perfect for you, and you can be the best at that thing. This goes back to an old tweet of mine where I said, “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.”

And I think that still applies in this age of AI.”

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

A reality check from one of the strongest engineers I know:

With Opus 4.5 + Claude Code, and enough context + planning, there are basically no tasks left that the model can’t tackle, even in a 1M line Scala codebase.

What a time to be alive!

#claudecode

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

@karrisaarinen @cursor_ai @linear Really enjoying it so far! Github Coding Agents next? They are a bit easier to set up in a neat way since you can re-use all of your CI setup on Github.

[Caner Aras @caneraras]

Been testing out the new @browsercompany 's @diabrowser for a few weeks now, and honestly—it’s a whole new way to experience the web. Here’s what stands out (and what I’m still figuring out) 🧵👇 1/7

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

Great episode 👏

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Today's episode with @yourgirlhils will blow your mind on so many levels.

Hilary Gridley (@yourgirlhils) holds the distinct honor of being the very first How I AI cross-over guest, is the author of my 6th most popular post of all time (How to become a supermanager with AI), and is the beloved Head of Core Product at @WHOOP.

In our conversation, Hilary shares:
🔸 How to build teams that can “take a punch”
🔸 Why you’re not the protagonist at your company (and why that’s liberating)
🔸 The underestimated potential of AI in accelerating your personal and professional growth
🔸 How to counter people's negative perceptions of you
🔸 How to accelerate AI adoption within your org
🔸 Practical approaches for creating space in your workday for creativity and deep thinking
🔸 How WHOOP uses reward loops to drive real behavior change
🔸 More

Listen now 👇
• YouTube: https://t.co/R1MfC3zkCr
• Spotify: https://t.co/74Lf3ucpoc
• Apple: https://t.co/aBsd9wTtYn

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast:
🏆 @WorkOS — Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://t.co/XH3bKmeEkH
🏆 @withpersona — A global leader in digital identity verification: https://t.co/POZnRxYUk2
🏆 @attio — The powerful, flexible CRM for fast-growing startups:

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

I'm hiring full-stack engineers in Copenhagen to work on an important mission: A better start for every child. Let me know if you're interested or if you'd like to hear more details about the role, team or company.

https://t.co/FwNFgMKbL2

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

How I finally got over the Neovim hump this summer 👨‍💻https://t.co/IBzh43adso

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

Really enjoying HyperUI: https://t.co/HGqYmuPerd. Great building blocks to get you started with building components via TailwindCSS.

[Christian Kjær @codetalkio]

Been hacking away on the side on a little project to streamline building mobile applications using full-stack Rust

Wrote a bit about it here https://t.co/gb5jkfhdLC

#rust #ios #mobile

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

Found thia really great deck on “Coordination headwind”: How the probability of a project success goes down as more people get involved and what to do about it https://t.co/MJm7an006C

[Paul Graham @paulg]

People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason why not to. This time it's AI, last time it was that tech was over because the Internet Bubble burst, the time before that it was that all the programming jobs were going to be outsourced to India.

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

Wrote a little thing about what’s working well in my (growth) engineering team at the moment:
https://t.co/4DPYKMsXLU

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

Even if things are going really well in your team, you owe it to your team to keep on pushing for even better results. Great people get bored if the feedback you give is always “you’re doing great, just keep it up”. Great people thrive when you challange them to raise the bar.

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

Building a side project super quick&dirt, not sweating the details (only way to finish a side project taking care of a newborn 😅). Very impressed by how quickly you can build nowadays with tools like Copilot+Supabase+NextJS, going from nothing to usable in prod in hours 🤯

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

@lennysan Looking forward to this one!

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

LIVE WITH IT FOR A WHILE

In the course of building products, you'll likely experience moments when you're unsure of a certain screen, flow, condition, label, idea, whatever.

Maybe this button doesn't feel right. Or the name of this feature feels unresolved. Or some color is jarring, but kind of interesting nonetheless. Or the way something gets set up seems a bit kludgy at the moment. Maybe this stuff is alright, maybe it's not, but it feels unsettled.

I like these moments. It's practice. It's a chance to sit with them, to let them be, to work on other things while they marinate in the back of your mind. They aren't blockers, they aren't deal breakers — they're just things that may or may not work out.

Sometimes time makes them work. Or reveals that they certainly don't. Sometimes they weren't that important anyway, and it's just a matter of getting used to them. Sometimes they're novel and unusual, which can be jarring to the uninitiated, but endearing to the experienced. Sometimes!

So just let them be. Come back around to them later if they continue to bug you. It's perfectly OK to leave things unresolved, and let the resolution force itself on you eventually. If you forget about them, they didn't matter anyway. If you can't forget, maybe they do matter more than you realized.

Projects unfold. Live with it for a while. The answers will reveal themselves when they're ready.

[Bjartur Sigurbergsson @_bjartur]

I like how eloquently @bchesky describes why managers should be technical and deeply involved in the details. And why/how being deeply involved in the details is not necessarily micromanaging.

Another great episode from @lennysan 👏

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

I'm excited to bring you a very special episode with @bchesky, co-founder and CEO of @Airbnb.

Brian is one of the most inspiring, driven, and first-principled thinkers on product, growth, and leadership.

In our conversation, Brian shares:
→ A deep dive into how Airbnb does product management
→ The importance of founders staying very close to the details
→ Why Airbnb moved away from traditional growth channels and what they are doing instead
→ Advice for founders on how to lead
→ Tips for preventing burnout, and personal growth
→ Why he still has a lot to prove
→ Much more