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

[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!🤠

[NO CONTEXT HUMANS @HumansNoContext]

The only disappointing part is that the video ended

[Aida Baradari @aidaxbaradari]

Today, we're introducing Spectre I, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings.

We live in a world of always-on listening devices.

Smart devices and AI dominate our world in business and private conversations.

With Deveillance, you will @be_inaudible.

[𝗱𝗮𝗻𝗻𝘆🫧💚 @beyoncegarden]

the fact that WE ALL know exactly what she’s talking😭

[Pat Ryan 🇺🇸 @PatRyanUC]

$38,300,000,000 of your tax dollars.

Not for healthcare. Not for education. Not for small businesses.

But for mass-detention camps.

It’s flat out UNAMERICAN.

Nobody can sit on the sidelines — it will take all of us fighting back together to stop this.

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

"Conway struck [an] urgent tone: 'We are facing a president who does not care about the rule of law …. He has to go. We cannot last three more years of this. It’s either him or us. It’s America or Trump.”

[Jmail @jmailarchive]

We built Jikipedia, a new wiki that compiles Jmail data into exhaustive reports on key figures in the Epstein scandal.

It lists all recorded visits to Epstein's estates, each person's possible knowledge of Epstein's crimes and laws that they may have violated.

Here is Epstein's executive assistant, who sent >100k emails to him and was shielded from prison via a 2007 non-prosecution deal.

[John Pavlovitz @johnpavlovitz]

Dear @AGPamBondi,

As the father of a daughter, I want you to know that I fully detest what you are doing to so many other people’s children right now.

I abhor your callous disregard for the daughters who stood courageously before you today, whose eyes you did not have the dignity to look into; women whose black, cavernous hell you know full well, because you’ve pored over it countless times in words, photos, and videos that are still being concealed.

It sickens me to my core to know that thousands of survivors, girls and young women not unlike my daughter, have experienced unspeakable horrors and are finding in you, not a fierce and willing advocate, not a steadfast warrior who will deliver them justice, but an unsuspecting, shame-throwing avatar of the men who brutalized them.

https://t.co/sKn8QLI1CU

[Ted Lieu @tedlieu]

Dear @AGPamBondi: You did the one thing your king ordered you not to do: you made Trump look guilty.

You also lied under oath.

And you surveilled the search history of Congress Members.

We are impeaching you when we flip the House. Unless you resign first.

Good evening.