Patrick Evans

People deserve healthy work cultures, and businesses thrive when they build them. Employees should understand what’s expected, why it matters, and that the people around them care whether they do their best.

@GergelyOrosz My team has "pair planning" sessions with the AI to resolve these situations. Two devs, one agentic planning session. the outputs are the spec'ed and groomed tickets in Jira and an agreement about the implementation. Learn together with the AI.

Situation 1: dev A thinks approach X is correct, dev B thinks Y is the right way. They argue and try to convince each other. Situation 2: dev A thinks approach X is correct, tells the LLM to implement it. There is SO MUCH learning in Situation 1, lost when using LLMs....

@garrytan Go to a Chick-fil-A or In-N-Out to see your stewardship model at work. People who care, working hard, and they look happy doing it too. Costco is another example.

I went to BJ's Restaurant last night with my kids. The bathroom was disgusting. The front of house was kind but sloppy and slow. The food upset my stomach and I woke up at 4am this morning because of it. Whoever BJ is, they probably aren't a real person, because everyone acted like nobody's name is on the door. I studied the management history of BJ's. The original founders left after the seventh location. Then it was sold to their accountants. Then it went public. Then the CEO resigned last year after 19 years and was replaced by an interim board member from Darden Restaurants, who was then replaced by a "Chief Concept Officer" promoted to CEO. The CFO also quit. Roaches behind the takeout counter in Coral Springs. Rodent droppings and mold in the ice machine in Pembroke Pines. An "F" retention score on Comparably. Glassdoor reviews that say "management turnover is high... that should say quite a bit about the company culture." Seven layers of management between the person cooking your food and anyone who owns the outcome. General manager reports to area director reports to regional director reports to regional VP reports to SVP of Operations reports to the COO (who started in January) reports to the CEO (who started last year). 218 locations. Founders long gone. Managers rotate every 18 months. The kitchen is run by compliance checklists, not pride. A dirty bathroom is nobody's personal failure because it's nobody's personal restaurant. This is the stewardship crisis in America in one building. In Chinese restaurants, the 老板 (laoban) is there. He tastes the food. He watches the kitchen. His family's reputation is the business. The restaurant is clean not because of health inspectors but because his name is on it. Haidilao built a $30B hot pot chain with less than 10% employee turnover. Servers can give you free dishes without asking a manager. Why? Because they're treated like stewards, not interchangeable parts. The West replaced stewardship with professional management. MBAs who optimize spreadsheets for people they've never met. CEOs who've never touched the product they sell. Politicians who sign the bills and spend the people's money but never checked the money built anything that helped the people they claimed to care about. Founder mode isn't new. It's the oldest idea in Chinese business culture. We just forgot it. The best founders I fund at YC are natural stewards. They own the outcome. They're in the kitchen tasting the food. They care about the bathroom. Most of society's problems are a stewardship crisis. Not a lack of resources or technology or intelligence. A lack of people who give a shit because their name is on it.

@mattpocockuk Like many best practices it’s even better with AI. Deployment is when the code is live, release is when the change is live.

Is anyone doing feature flag development with agents? Not tried it, but in theory feature flagging is an alternative model to PR's to getting work on main. 1. Put it on main, disabled by a flag 2. Deploy with the rest of the system 3. Unflag to selected users early 4. Fix bugs for those users 5. Unflag to more users 6. Repeat until shipped Feels like a perfect strategy to pair with agents

@businessbarista AI-native

I want to start an AI community for executives. This will be a space for people to share killer use cases, agentic workflows/agents, post-AI org structure, AI governance, AI training/enablement, change management, and more. Comment “AI-native” if you want to join.

@GergelyOrosz Microsoft should offer the GitHub CEO job to @mitchellh. He clearly has the passion for it.

People who are sharing their take about reliability at GH: - The COO (owning operations) - The CTO (engineering) - The CPO (product) They are all peers to one another, and a subset of GH staff reports to them. You know who we don't hear from? The CEO. Because there is none.

@waitbutwhy Red button pushers "everyone survives if 100% press red" remind me of Dark Helmet.

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

@paulg Delta could buy a fleet of self driving cars. They are in the transportation business after all.

For years I've been dreaming of a future where I can sit at a desk or lay down in a comfy bed while the car whisks me to my destination. No security lines, no cramped uncomfortable seats, no turbulence, no schlepping through the airport. Will still have to fly to overseas I guess.

Whoah, self-driving cars compete with airlines. I never considered that till now.

@mistressdivy rathergood the Viking kittens, they are your overlords youtu.be/C1SXCo-xSvk?si…

What’s a "lost" website from the early 2000s that you still think about today?

@Jason I'm in

We started an AI founder twitter group... reply with "I'm in" if you're a founder and want to be added

@callmeyebitch @davidasinclair

@davidasinclair Price of a pair of jeans? What kind of jeans bro..

What once took $2B and an army of scientists was just done in a kitchen for the price of a pair of jeans Most people have no idea how fast science is moving

@bryan_johnson Can someone turn this into an annoying YouTube video so that my teenager can get the message?

Two weeks without mobile internet improved mental health more than antidepressants and reversed roughly 10 years of attentional decline. Screen time dropped 49% (314 to 161 min/day).

@vkhosla Should it be illegal to bury this in the terms of service? I think so. What other practices are abhorrent, common, and consent is obtained through a click wrap agreement?

Why isn’t this illegal without an explicit opt in by the user?

Samsung and LG have built massive adtech businesses. How? By watching what you watch. Screenshotting, classifying, and building an index of your preferences and habits. How does that feel?

@neogoose_btw Remember when you were taught global variables are bad? Obviously the next step is to send strings over TCP to mutate shared global state

I never liked databases as an idea. You literally send a string query over TCP to postgres and it returns you data over tcp as strings. There is so much potential to make this whole thing better …. but everyone seems to be just fine with it.

Post a picture YOU took. Just a pic. No description

No feedback. No customers. No sales. No money.

@davidsenra “Invest in the things that are hard to copy“ He captures so many important ideas in that statement. Demand plus scarcity equals value.

Software has no moat: "The big wake-up call was when Facebook carbon copied Snapchat to make Poke. Mark Zuckerberg recorded him saying the word "Poke" as the notification sound. He was so excited about this. And we were like this is a really good lesson for us. It ended up being super helpful to Snapchat. They literally put "Download Poke" at the top of every single Facebook app. And it was just a clone of Snapchat. And then, on Christmas Day, to see Snapchat number one in the App Store in that context — it was huge for us. But that was the first time we realized we're going to have to be really smart about how we build this business and invest in the things that are hard to copy. To be living in my dad's house with three of my buddies from college — and this huge company set their sights on us. It was definitely a formative experience." — @evanspiegel