James Lawley

talking tech / making pictures / occasionally music + spurs

[Guinness Chen @guinnesschen]

Bro it’s June 2026. Stop hand editing your prompts. Hold down the dictation button and ramble for 10 minutes. Give the model every fragment, caveat, example, and vibe in your head. It is literally a large language model. If it’s superhuman at anything, it’s reconstructing latent intent from language.

[James Lawley @jameslawley]

@marcelolebre @remote Love to have a nice hot bowl of granola

[James Lawley @jameslawley]

@marcelolebre @remote Siiiick

[James Lawley @jameslawley]

@marcelolebre @remote Spotted in the wild

[James Lawley @jameslawley]

@NotionHQ @Box @ClickHouseDB @mercury @MiroHQ @mixpanel Time to add an option for custom MCPs at an org level 🙏🏼

We can “enable custom MCPs” setting for all individuals, but there should be an option for an Admin to add a connector that the whole org can see (likewise for Notion Agent not just Custom Agents) 🙌🏼

[Marcelo Lebre @marcelolebre]

We shipped @remote MCP this week. I ran it with the team to see what it could actually do. A few things that stuck with me.

Total cost of employment, by country, all in: salary, taxes, fees, FX. Used to be a finance project. Days of work for a number that was already slightly stale by the time it landed. One prompt. Back before my next call.

[James Lawley @jameslawley]

Facts

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Underrated life advice: Make yourself easy to root for. Be kind. Be reliable. Celebrate other people’s wins. Work hard without complaining. Carry good energy into rooms. You'll be shocked by how many doors open for you by making life better for others.

[James Lawley @jameslawley]

@RaminNasibov You’ll like this @twmorgan11

[scott belsky @scottbelsky]

great makers are liable to become managers/leaders. but the legendary leaders figure out how to remain (or once again become) makers.

AI unlocks the era of “leader makers.” Watching teams emerge w/ superior alignment, collapsed talent stacks, and unfathomable potential to build.

[Remote @remote]

Global payroll is one of the hardest problems in business.

We've spent 7 years solving it. Today we open it up, and step into our next chapter as the leading global employment infrastructure.

Any company, any tool, any AI agent can now connect directly to Remote via MCP. No API keys. No custom integrations. Just the infrastructure tens of thousands of companies already run on.

Watch @jobvo explain👇

[James Lawley @jameslawley]

Domain expertise FTW

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

you need to tattoo this Boris Cherny quote into your brain:

"coding is the easy part, it's knowing the domain that's the hard part"

every week a new startup drops a launch video saying they "killed influencer marketing" or something

but they don't get it.

creating the thing is NOT the hard part

it's understanding what thing you have to create, at what moment, and in what way

and that takes years of pattern recognition from actually being in the arena and seeing what works

AI can't shortcut that for you

[James Lawley @jameslawley]

Some fascinating and totally relatable commentary here, I think the psychological impacts of AI will need to be a huge focus for businesses and individuals in days to come.

[Harvard Business Review @HarvardBiz]

AI adoption strategies are overwhelmingly framed around productivity and efficiency. But that lens misses a critical constraint: the psychological cost of working with AI. New research shows that “psychological debt”—a cluster of six negative effects including cognitive offloading, reduced autonomy, diminished competence, weakened social connection, credibility loss, and identity threat—can materially suppress adoption and erode ROI.

In a survey of 1,200 employees across sectors, higher psychological debt was strongly associated with lower AI usage, less sophisticated application, and greater avoidance—even when employees acknowledged AI’s value. Early-career workers were especially affected, suggesting that AI may be undermining skill development at precisely the stage when it matters most. https://t.co/oyU9uRFUJX

[⚭ @lekimgym]

You need to touch saltwater sometimes
not always grass.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Let me explain exactly why Apple still uses drag-to-install in 2026, because the joke here accidentally proves Apple right.

A macOS .app is a single self-contained folder disguised as a file. Every dependency, every framework, every resource lives inside it. Drag it to Applications, it works. Drag it to Trash, it's gone. No registry entries. No leftover DLLs. No uninstaller that misses half the files.

Windows installers scatter fragments across Program Files, AppData, the registry, system32, and a dozen temp directories. Uninstalling a Windows app is an archaeological dig. Five years later you're still finding config files from software you forgot you owned.

Linux is worse. Dependency hell is so common they named it. Entire package managers exist to solve the problem of "I installed something and now nothing else works." Flatpak and Snap were invented specifically to copy what macOS bundles already did natively.

The macOS bundle architecture came from NeXTSTEP in 1989. Steve Jobs brought it to OS X in 2001. The core design hasn't changed because the core design was correct. An app is a folder. Installation is a copy. Removal is a delete. Three operations that map perfectly to how humans already think about files.

The drag-to-install window with the arrow isn't lazy UX. It's the entire thesis of the system made visible. You are literally just moving a folder. There is no "installation" step because there's nothing to install. The app is already complete.

Every other OS eventually tried to get here. Windows got MSIX. Linux got Flatpak. Mobile figured it out from day one because phones shipped after Apple proved the model. The pattern everyone else converged toward is the pattern this tweet is calling outdated.

The funniest part: the app being dragged in that screenshot is Claude. An AI that can write code, analyze documents, and reason about complex systems. And the most advanced step in getting it onto your machine is holding down a mouse button and moving your wrist two inches to the right.

That's not a design failure. That's a 37-year-old architecture so good that the most sophisticated software on earth still ships inside it.

[Tony Fadell @tfadell]

50 years of @Apple

From the early days of the #iPod to bringing the #iPhone into the world, some of the most formative years of my career were spent there. The products and teams stay with you. But more importantly so does how Apple thinks.

A few lessons that have held true for decades:
1) Start with the user, not the tech. The question isn’t “what can we build?” but “what problem actually matters?”
2) Focus is everything. Apple is defined as much by what it says no to as what it builds.
3) End-to-end matters. Hardware, software, services. It all has to work together.
4) Details are the product. What feels small is what users remember.
5) Debate hard. Commit fully.
6) Build for the long term.

We’re in another moment of massive technological change. The fundamentals haven’t changed.

The companies that win build things people actually use and can’t imagine living without.

Congrats to everyone who has been part of Apple’s first 50 years! 🙌

[James Lawley @jameslawley]

@NotionHQ Finally!

[Tony Fadell @tfadell]

One of the hardest parts of management is letting go. Not doing the work yourself. You have to temper your fear that becoming more hands-off will cause the product to suffer or the project to fail. You have to trust your team – give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine.

- #BUILD Chapter 2.1 Just Managing

[Kevin Roose @kevinroose]

We made a blind taste test to see whether NYT readers prefer human writing or AI writing.

86,000 people have taken it so far, and the results are fascinating. Overall, 54% of quiz-takers prefer AI. A real moment!

https://t.co/Gpbr3TAiiI

[James Lawley @jameslawley]

@ivanhzhao @NotionHQ Let’s goooo