Jeff Costa

Senior PM

[Jeff Costa @cosjef]

"The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences." When you get to it, it burns into your mind.

[blue @bluewmist]

I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

[Maurizio @themgmtconsult]

Been a management consultant for 20 years.

Made Partner in my 30s.
Led teams of 100+ people.
Run 9-figure client portfolios.
Lived and worked in 4 continents.

Typically, corporate IT investment would follow a common script.

Capital spent on software means a shrinking payroll.

As boards map out their strategies for the coming quarters, they are operating under the comfortable assumption that this way of thinking still holds true for AI.

But I think a fiscal reckoning is brewing there, because within the next few quarters, the current prevailing narrative of AI as a headcount killer (which we all know is vastly exaggerated) will give way to a far more punishing reality.

Instead of a clean capital-for-labor swap, executives are about to watch their IT infrastructure costs and their personnel expenses balloon simultaneously 🚀🚀🚀

It may not be fun.

First, this whole idea that generative AI can operate autonomously will shatter as early deployments attempt to scale.

Because LLMs remain inherently prone to hallucination and error, companies cannot simply fire the analysts; they will be forced to retain them (or hire new talent) to serve as high-vigilance editors.

Furthermore, because AI makes it effortless to generate code, reports, marketing collateral, etc etc organizations will soon find themselves drowning in internal output. Managing, auditing, and securing this massive influx of AI-generated material will require an unprecedented wave of human oversight....

This will ultimately EXPAND corporate bureaucracy rather than trimming it (remember the 'Scaled Agile' saga??).

Even in scenarios where entry-level automation does succeed, the math of headcount reduction will fail to balance out on the ledger.

In the coming quarters, the wage differential of the AI era will trigger *severe* skill inflation.

Replacing 5 mid/entry-level programmers does not result in a net savings of 5 salaries. Instead, it requires hiring a premium-tier AI architect whose single salary frequently eclipses the combined wages of the workers they replaced (plus tokens cost).

Companies will trade high-volume/low-cost labor for scarce/ultra-premium talent, driving TCO UPWARD despite a leaner organizational chart on paper.

Jevons' Paradox again...

AI slashes the time and cost required to draft a legal brief, design a graphic, build a software feature, and therefore executive appetite for those outputs will skyrocket.

Management will demand 10x the volume of data analysis or continuous product iterations. Because the corporate demand for output will scale far faster than the technology's efficiency gains, departments will find themselves forced to expand their human teams just to handle the sheer velocity of these new AI-driven initiatives.

Until AI achieves absolute, unmonitored autonomy (if ever), it will function not as a replacement for human labor, but as a hyper-amplifier of it.

If ungoverned, the corporate balance sheets will show that the AI boom made running the business vastly more expensive.

[William Shatner @WilliamShatner]

I see more UFO/UAP material has come out. 👽🛸

[Today Years Old @todayyearsold]

They already had these. It was called the 90s

[Sidu Ponnappa @ponnappa]

ok so the only actionable career advice i can think of rn is

a) move asap to a job that pays for your tokens
b) ideally also encourages you to figure out how to use them well

[Jean-Michel Lemieux @jmwind]

Joined a new AI-native company this week and it’s kind of wild how different it feels already.

The laptop arrived, I logged in, and an agent basically took over from there. It set up my dev env, pulled repos, fixed dependency issues, got permissions approved, pointed me at the backlog, linked the architecture docs, and surfaced the Slack debates I actually needed to read before touching production.

When I needed context on something, I asked the agent and it found the exact thread from months ago explaining why a decision was made, who owned it, the related Linear issues, and the PRs connected to it.

I’ve only been here 3 days but it honestly feels like I’ve worked here for a year because the usual friction and scavenger hunt for context just isn’t there anymore.

We should probably stop calling this “onboarding” and rename it to “mounting” because this feels a lot more like mounting a distributed filesystem called “institutional memory” than slowly getting drip-fed context over 6 months.

[JustAnotherPM | Sid @JustAnotherPM]

Does this happen to you as well?

You're in a meeting, and you spend 30 minutes re-debating decisions that were already made?

The reason: nobody documented the "why"

Here is the fix:

1. 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗮 /𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀/ 𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿 in your project. Every significant call gets a one-page doc: what you decided, why, what you considered, who was in the room.

2. 𝗨𝘀𝗲 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝘁. After any meeting, paste the notes. Run: "Write a decision doc from these notes. Include the rejected alternatives and the reasoning." Takes 90 seconds.

3. L𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗥 𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁. When someone asks "why did we do X," the answer is a link. Not a 25-minute meeting.

The 30-minute re-debate tax is a process bug. Claude Code fixes it in 90 seconds.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Idea: An anonymous “vote to end meeting” button on Teams where if 50% of people press it, the meeting ends immediately.

[Holodeck Four @holodeckfour]

Yall are gonna love this 😅

[Tuomas Artman @artman]

Today is a hard day. I shared this note with the @linear team today: We’ve made the difficult decision to increase our workforce. This is not a cost-cutting exercise or a reflection of anyone’s performance. We’re simply reimagining every role for the agentic AI era. We’re hiring. We’re sorry about that.

[ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ 🛡️ @DanielMiessler]

One of the biggest AI things happening in 2026 is the changing of organizations.

The middle layers are going away. It’s about to get a lot harder to pretend you provide value when you don’t.

Not settled on the model, but I think every org will have 3 main roles:

1. Idea people come up with the thing
2. Technical SMEs build and maintain the thing
3. Sales and marketing sell the thing

Top employees will have lots of all three and will be world-class in at least one.

What massively goes away are managers and facilitators that aren’t creators, SMEs, or sellers. Basically anyone who’s not directly shipping in one or more of the three categories.

Very hard to predict, obviously, but I think the order in which these then also get eaten by AI are probably:

1. SMEs without creation or selling
2. Idea people without SME knowledge
3. Sellers without SME knowledge

Selling might be the most durable skill in a world full of nearly free ideas and expertise.

[Graham Helton (too much for zblock) @GrahamHelton3]

I have a SWE friend who worked at a company like this. He was reviewing a dashboard a finance person made. They thought it had real data and trends but it was actually just stub data.

This data was presented to execs as real numbers. They didnt know.

[Jeff Costa @cosjef]

Hey @GoogleDevs — our OAuth app verification for @GetPayout is stuck. Dashboard shows "pending developer action" but we've never received the Trust & Safety email despite multiple attempts. Emailed google-cloud-compliance@ with no response. Any way to get a human to look at this?

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

The last thing you want to hear the CEO of a financial-services firm say is "Non-technical teams are now shipping production code."

[Andrew Yeung @andruyeung]

Stripe just created a role that didn't exist 12 months ago (and they're paying multiple six figures for it)

It's called the Forward Deployed AI Accelerator.

They are hiring AI-native individuals to work directly with their marketing teams to fundamentally change how they work.

Each person will be assigned to a cohort of 20 marketers. Their job is to build custom AI tools and agents and coach each marketer until they are self-sufficient.

Basically, work with marketers until they automate their jobs.

Stripe's marketing org is betting that AI should not be an occasional tool but the default mode for all work.

But they also understand that most employees won't upskill themselves. They'll need someone who is embedded within their teams to build alongside them.

If you are AI-pilled, this is probably the role for you.

And this also gives a clear picture of where every organization within a company is heading.

[Captain Insight @CaptainInsightX]

One guy. One Navy ship. One file. 1 trillion databases.
He built it alone in 2000. And gave it away forever. 🤯

Meet D. Richard Hipp 🇺🇸

> American developer. Born 1961 in North Carolina.
> In 2000, working as a contractor on a US Navy destroyer.
> Got frustrated with bulky databases that needed servers and setup.
> Built SQLite in his spare time ~ a single-file database engine.
> No server. No installation. No configuration. Just one file.
> 25 years later, every iPhone, Android, Mac, and Windows PC runs SQLite.
> Powers Chrome, Firefox, Safari, WhatsApp, iMessage, Skype.
> Runs inside Tesla cars and commercial airplanes. 🚀
> Over 1 trillion SQLite databases active worldwide today.
> Put the entire codebase in the public domain. Zero royalties forever.
> Trillion-dollar companies use his code. He's never charged a cent.
> Still maintains it full-time with a tiny team of 3.
> Pledged free support and updates until at least 2050.
> No VC money. No acquisitions. No spotlight. Just code.

Every app on your phone runs his invisible masterpiece.
Most engineers build for fame. He built for forever.

Database GOAT. 🐐

[TLM13 @accuratetlm13]

Ok but what if @FisherPrice designed @awscloud

[Arun @hiarun02]

Claude Code 4.7 is insane.

i know literally NOTHING about coding. ZERO. and i just built 3 fully functioning web apps in 30 minutes.

http://localhost:3000/
http://localhost:8000/
http://localhost:5000/

check it out.