sheng

[DHH @dhh]

You can’t outwork the whole world. There’s always going to be someone somewhere willing to work as hard as you. Someone just as hungry. Or hungrier.

Assuming you can work harder and longer than someone else is giving yourself too much credit for your effort and not enough for theirs. Putting in 1,001 hours to someone else’s 1,000 isn’t going to tip the scale in your favor.

What’s worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great “work ethic” because they’re always around, always available, always working. That’s a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who’s overworked.

A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.

So how do people get ahead if it’s not about outworking everyone else?

People make it because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many other reasons.

So get the outwork myth out of your head. Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours. Neither is going to get you ahead or help you find calm.

[The Outwork Myth — It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work, 2018]

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.

And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.

Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.

This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.

I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.

Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.

With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.

My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.

There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.

Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.

I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.

Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

[sheng @opticgap]

@itsnotchester @thingstaketime_ Great stuff !

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

The new AI web design giveaway is tasteless use of serif fonts plus italics. I mean, there's about 1000 other giveaways cause its all so very ugly, but that's the initial slap in your face giveaway.

[Simon Last @simonlast]

1/ Some things I've learned recently running coding agents on large-scale projects. Most of this contradicts advice from 6 months ago!

[Pedro Duarte @peduarte]

you have to be delusional to think you can vibe‑code a better raycast

even if you copied all our patterns and designs (were used to it by now), it still wouldn’t be a good product

and even if it somehow ends up a mediocre product that works, you’d have to be even more delusional to trust a vibe‑coded app with access to your tools and your entire system.

it’s the age of trustworthiness

[Vivian Balakrishnan @VivianBala]

Built a personal AI agent - why I did that and what it means. https://t.co/lo8SLUMD9s

[ruperts.world @rupertmanfredi]

Hey Geoffrey! So, originally, the Notion app felt minimalist and calm, a refreshing counterpoint to bloated apps (Evernote, OneNote, etc). That was good.

However now, the default starting point for the sidebar is to overlap features with different mental models (not just notes – but also meetings, transcripts, agents, marketplace, tasks, etc.) alongside up-selling and promotion. There are also 3 other modal sidebars within this sidebar, which are not shown.

I find that overwhelming. As a user, I can reduce the amount of sections here manually, but that seems backwards – I would rather add things as I start using them incrementally.

I think this is a challenge with any app that attempts to do many things at once within the same space/fabric (as opposed to OS-like platforms which leave it up to developers to extend functionality within isolated windows, and users to pick what they want to install).

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

I analyzed my coding sessions and on the text interactions some words stand out. And well, they also show up on Google Trends as spiking. Oh and so much slop in my Twitter mentions and on GitHub. Thus here are some updated thoughts on all of this. https://t.co/vejDNcpv8g

[Nic Barker @nicbarkeragain]

I've found UI programming to be very deep and interesting if you're doing it all from scratch (API design, layout, rendering, text handling, focus management, animation, input handling etc).
Such a shame we condemned a generation of frontend devs to the browser black box.

[sheng @opticgap]

@abouelatta_ali Nice site! Loading does seem a little slow though

[Kenton Varda @KentonVarda]

TBH I don't agree with your take. I don't think Athropic's desire to control the harness is about keeping resource usage under control. They could accomplish that by just enforcing limits on the actual resource usage (which they already do) -- if some third-party harness is inefficient, users of than harness hit their limits faster.

I think instead that they want to control the harness because if switching LLM providers is too easy, it makes business difficult for the providers. Say GPT 5.5 comes out and it's clearly smarter, faster, and cheaper than Opus 4.7. If everyone can switch providers with two clicks in their harness, many of them will. This would lead to wild revenue and usage swings, which makes capacity planning hard. And perfect competition drives down prices -- in this scenario Opus has to cut its prices to get some users back.

Obviously no business wants to be in that situation!

By controlling the harness, they add some stickiness. If switching LLM providers means switching harnesses, that's a barrier high enough that most people won't bother to do it on a whim. So now Opus 4.7 can weather the storm until 4.8 or whatever comes out and is back on top.

So it makes perfect sense to me as a business decision. It may be user-unfriendly, but tech companies do stuff like this all the time. It's nothing new.

Though I would say, it seems weird to me to do this *on top of* subscriptions. Subscriptions already create a lot of stickiness. If you're subscribed only to Claude, that's a pretty big barrier to trying out GPT quickly -- a bigger barrier than the harness barrier I think. So I question whether controlling the harness is really worth all the effort they are putting into it, but idk, they probably have insights that I don't on this.

Another factor here might actually be safety concerns. As we know, Anthropic leadership is deeply (excessively, IMO) worried about AI safety, and they feel that Anthropic will do a better job of addressing safety than any other company. They may feel that control of the harness is an important tool for that. I could definitely imagine Dario being terrified of OpenClaw from a safety perspective (I sort of am too).

These explanations make much more sense to me than the efficiency issue, which again seems like it could easily be managed in other ways. But of course, these explanations are much harder to just come out and say, without stirring a lot more outrage...

[sheng @opticgap]

@fortelabs @ohamaruri I find the "Hider" plugin by @kepano to be great! I use it to remove basically everything in the UI (including tabs).

[sheng @opticgap]

@burkov @GoogleAI 100% agree on the recitation issues

[sheng @opticgap]

@andrewqu Cool! Are edits handled?

[Mike Bird @Birdyword]

Most importantly to me, HDB resale prices have run *a little* over household income growth over a longer period. But only a little. If the govt can hold resale prices steady-ish (as they have done before) income growth can catch up. I'm not v worried from an affordability POV.

[sheng @opticgap]

@Birdyword Curious to know where are these graphs from?

[sheng @opticgap]

@jakubkrehel @paulfaivret Great animations! Although does this deviate from ‘typical’ behaviour for a sidebar (always able to click between “settings, surfaces, inbox, etc.” at all times)

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Noticing an interesting version of gell-man amnesia where people use AI for their job and see all the various things they have to do in the “last mile”, but then look at someone else’s job and think that AI will eliminate it immediately.

We all have a much deeper appreciation for the nuances and complexities of the work that we do every day. We run into issues about accessing data, we know how much context is needed to get AI models to work the way we need, we have to review the output of the AI to make sure it’s accurate, and then we have to incorporate that work into some broader business process. We see all those steps deeply for the work that we do.

Then, a moment later, we see AI do something in a foreign space and think that it can go automate that entire function. We tend to dramatically underestimate the work that goes into making the AI work just as effectively in those jobs.

This is reason to be skeptical about many of the theories of job loss. It’s coming from the lens of being able to automate individual tasks with AI, without understanding all the work that goes into doing the job fully.

[sheng @opticgap]

Sycophancy in GPT 5.5 is high...