Eppur si muove

When Free and Abundant comes to your craft ⓧ Context Engineering x F.A. von Hayek ⓧ One more Engineering Revolution

👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡

AI is not coming for your job. It’s more unsettling than that.

AI exposes whether you ever really — really — understood your craft, or just played to its ceremonies. The standup. The code review. The strategy deck. Rituals of competence performed without any underlying understanding. Ceremonies all.

The crafts that survive are built on restlessness, not résumés. Always moving — underneath the ceremony.

“And yet, it moves.”

📚 Reading

When Your Life’s Work Becomes Free and Abundant:

We are in the middle of what may be the largest shift ever in how knowledge work gets done. And the trait that matters most isn’t intelligence, or credentials or years of experience. It’s someone’s relationship with change—not whether they’ve seen change before, but whether they run toward it […] I’ve started to think of it as the difference between your résumé and your restlessness. I’d bet on restlessness every time.

Aditya Agarwal—X | 5 minutes

Context Engineering: Why Hayek’s Knowledge Problem Survives AI

A new kind of knowledge worker: one who has done enough of the underlying work to know what good looks like, and whose value lies in framing the right problems, prioritizing what data needs to be captured, curating and assembling it for AI consumption, and evaluating whether the AI output actually makes sense.

Chris Walker—Out of Sample | 24 minutes

The Structure of Engineering Revolutions:

Human code review–treated as essentially sacred for decades–is simply absent. Deterministic human reasoning about correctness is replaced by brute-force iteration against a test suite. The developer as craftsperson, someone who reasons carefully about architecture and writes clean, expressive code, is replaced by a bash loop. Planning methodologies refined across the entire waterfall-to-agile spectrum are replaced by an agent that grabs the next ticket and goes.

John Allsop—Web Directions | minutes

🎧 Listening

The Biggest Mistake We Made About Intelligence:

We’re going to start to bring our education system back to what it could be because there’s so many good intentions and so much money in it. And all we really need is a little bit more common sense, a little more focus on human abilities and understanding that to your point, technology is a tool. It can make you into a centaur. But if you start out with technology, you’re essentially lobotomizing yourself.

Angus Fletcher—Infinite Loops | 96 minutes

No Moat, Low Margins, No Customer Loyalty:

[Apple’s] the only ones in AI, other than I guess Google, that’s executing a business model in AI that actually works: sell the computers. What a crazy concept. Don’t go off balance sheet for likea bajillion infinity dollars in debt. Do the thing you’re great at. “Why would we buy computers? We should sell the computers.“

Dave Morin, Sam Lessin—More or Less Podcast | 52 minutes

SaaS Apocalypse, AI Agents & What Comes Next:

The whole history of software from 1960 until 2022 was, you would take a filing cabinet and you’d turn it into a database [but] the filing cabinet couldn’t think for itself. And now, this is the cool thing about everything that’s happening in AI land: the filing cabinet can do work. QuickBooks can actually accomplish a task by itself versus just relying on a human to retrieve the file from QuickBooks in the same way that the human in 1500 would retrieve a file from ye olde filing cabinet .

Alex Rampel—a16z Podcast | 54 minutes

💎 Timeless

1️⃣ year ago—Working with LLMs: A Few Lessons

2️⃣ years ago—7 Changes to Knowledge Work

3️⃣ years ago—There Is No A.I.