Kevin Urie

I believe the old models of leadership are dead. The future isn’t top-down or bottom-up. The future of leadership is about leading with purpose while helping employees discover and achieve theirs. Full post → alwaysdistracted.net/empowered-lead…

This is key when creating things with AI. Just because you dreamed up the idea is one thing. But what is more important is that when AI is done helping you make it, that the magical experience is still there

AI is making CEOs delusional

@WesleyLHuff Great work. Not done yet but I feel like the host thinks only the women saw the resurrected Jesus.

Make sure to check out to today’s DOAC: The truth about Christianity: the case for Jesus. youtu.be/nrwNSSyKuD4?si…

@GridRival why are standings not showing for F1 yet?

As expected, @mattmcilwain nails it with geekwire.com/2026/opinion-t… We are in a battle between narratives and reality. Unfortunately, while narratives can make you feel good in the near term, reality is what gets you in the medium and long term.

the stages of using OpenClaw: 1. install it confidently 2. gateway won't start 3. use claude, chatgpt and call your tech friend for help 4. it works 5. feel like a genius 6. it breaks 7. repeat 2-6 8. a magical kingdom of unlimited potential so early.

@trouble_man90 He is not a small guy. Someone his size should be able to put up that amount. He is probably on T as well.

Lifting fake weights is insane. He should resign immediately. I’m not joking.

@JacksonW29657 @mdancho84 Not in skills. Maybe agent, memory, identity or even would be better in soul

@mdancho84 Where should this file live?

Becoming a 10X engineer ain't what it used to be. It's literally a SKILLS.md file. Want help?

@morganlinton Isn't this an agents file not a skills file if you follow standard setup structure?

This Skills .md file is really good.

Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics. “Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….” The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.

@aviel @aviel when are you running for Governor so I can vote for you?

Look, I hate to come across as an alarmist but we have finally crossed the chasm and from my vantage point are experiencing a classic "slowly and then all at once" situation. Especially in Seattle. Treat this more as a wakeup call than anything else. Here are the facts. 1. In Seattle there are A LOT less tech jobs than there were even just a few years ago. geekwire.com/2026/tech-boom… 2. Your city, state, AND STARTUPS are NOT coming to the rescue. geekwire.com/2026/washingto… 3. LLMs have irreversibly changed the way that we do just about everything in tech. Even in the past month. If you aren't IN THE WEEDs on a daily basis you have no idea what you are even talking about. When 80% of LLM skeptics on LinkedIn have "Open to Work" with "Software Architect" or some similar inflated title on their bio it's more than just a passing "trend". I talk to a lot of people every week. And I mean A LOT. Over the past few weeks the gravity of financial realities has started to set in. Unless you have S-tier social skills, you aren't going to get that salary again with your current skillset. So no, you can't actually afford your mortgage. Oh, and you also probably needed to realize this 12 months ago because you've already irreversibly dipped into your savings utilizing hope as a strategy. Oh and to add insult to injury, prices of everything are going up at the same time: x.com/stevemur/statu… I do not have advice for you if you're in this spot, you're in deep shit and I'm fighting on too many fronts at this point. But if you aren't there yet, my advice is to reset your expectations. You are not mid or late-career, you are just getting started. If you can stomach that I have some REALLY good news for you. The future looks awesome and you're going to do something great.

It's good to finally see Seattle's tech community engaging with WA's legislature on the disastrous, anti-business policies they continue to propose, but unfortunately the hour is late and advocacy is probably too little to make a difference. When the illegal and unconstitutional capital gains tax was passed, I warned that if the WA Supreme Court upheld it (despite almost a century of precedent showing it was illegal) it would open the floodgates to every extremist tax proposal you could imagine. And here we are today with the highest estate tax in the country, a proposal for an unprecedented wealth tax (which has never existed before in the US), a proposal for the highest marginal tax rate in the country, and a repeal of the QSBS, which provides an incentive for entrepreneurs to start businesses. Washington's legislature has lost the plot; they have no idea the long term harm they're doing to our economy. The incentive to move to WA, which previously was a powerful draw for engineers, entrepreneurs and small business owners in places like California and New York, is completely gone. Instead we now have a powerful incentive to leave the state, and people are leaving in droves. Perhaps this will turn around once it becomes clear that the consequences of these polices will be a broken economy, but that will take time. Bad policies are like bad diets. They don't kill you immediately, but over the long term they will.

@aviel Thanks for all the work on this!

Today was a long but satisfying day in Olympia fighting against SB 6229 and HB 2292 (killing QSBS in Washington State). Here's your update: 1. Hanlon's Razor is very real. You truly should "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Today I was in the presence of true masters at its application. 2. We testified twice and spoke in a private session. Okay, we may have actually accidentally broken into that private session. Story for another time. 3. We left with mixed messages about the future of these bills, but overall I feel like we have a good chance of defeating them before they reach the floor (we'll know more in the next week or so). We've done all that we can for now. That in itself feels good. 4. Talking with bill supporters (and even authors) outside of a committee chamber is a wildly different experience. 5. Organization matters. Across these two bills you all helped muster 1,541 "Con" sign-ins against just 12 "Pro" in only 48 hours. 6. We came prepared with our narratives and outnumbered our opposition in testifying. That mattered too. 7. Even if we win this battle, the war is far from over, and we'll certainly be back in Olympia next year. Supporters of entrepreneurship and even capitalism are in short supply in our legislature. 8. This remains the most biblically punishing dry January of all time.

This is the kind of annoying bogus crap we are subjected to. Note the ever-changing size of the refrigerator and the changing size of the entry hole in the tree stump. Other anomalies abound. What a crock.

@chamath Graphene could do it. They are getting close graphene-info.com/adisyn-s-2d-ge…

As we predicted in our annual predictions episode to start the year. Unless someone shows up with super conductivity or carbon nanotubes, copper is the only game in town and AI is a huge demand driver for a very under-resourced material.

🚨 RAG is broken and nobody's talking about it. Stanford just exposed the fatal flaw killing every "AI that reads your docs" product. It's called "Semantic Collapse", and it happens the moment your knowledge base hits critical mass. Here's the brutal math (and why your RAG system is already dying):

The company hired me to lead their "Agile Transformation." I don't know what Agile means. Nobody does. That's why it works. I make $425,000 a year. To move sticky notes. From left to right. On a board. The board is digital now. The sticky notes cost $80,000 in Jira licenses. Progress. Day one, I said "we need to break down silos." Everyone nodded. Silos are bad. I don't know why. But destroying them is a career. My career. I introduced "squads." Squads are teams. But disrupted. We disrupted the teams into teams. Different names. Same people. Same problems. But Agile problems now. Agile problems are strategic. A senior engineer asked what we're actually changing. I said, "The mindset." He asked what that means. I said, "It's a journey." He asked where we're going. I said, "Toward agility." He asked what agility means. I pointed at the sticky notes. They were moving left to right. That's velocity. We have velocity now. The VP of Engineering said two-week sprints don't fit their work. I said, "That's waterfall thinking." Waterfall is bad. Like silos. I don't know what waterfall is. But I know it's bad. She stopped talking. Waterfall accusations end conversations. We had a retrospective. In the retro, we discussed what went wrong. Everything went wrong. We put it on sticky notes. Then we moved the sticky notes. Into a column called "Parking Lot." The Parking Lot is where problems go to die. It's full. We don't look at it. That's agile. Velocity is up 40%. I defined velocity. I also defined the points. I also defined the stories. We're crushing it. At the things I made up. To measure. Ourselves. The CEO asked for ROI. I showed a chart. The chart went up. Charts should go up. This one did. I didn't label the Y-axis. Nobody asked. Leadership is confidence. We do standups now. Every day. We stand. For 45 minutes. Standing is agile. Sitting is waterfall. My legs hurt. But we're transforming. The transformation is now "Phase 3." Phase 1 was assessment. Phase 2 was implementation. Phase 3 is "continuous improvement." Continuous means forever. Forever means job security. I'm very secure. My contract was extended. Three more years. For "cultural impact." The culture is confused. But impacted. Agile transformation isn't about being agile. It's about transforming. Continuously. Toward more transformation. The destination is the journey. The journey is billable.

@elonmusk I’d love to pick your brain regarding that Creator you mentioned to Katie Miller. I think that would be a really cool conversation.