Vishal Mishra

🚨 A Russian attack knocked out power across much of Dnipro and the surrounding region, with no estimate for when electricity will be restored. Local authorities report water outages, a stopped Dnipro metro with passengers evacuated, and emergency power limits in neighboring towns of Pavlohrad and Synelnykove.

I get that business insurance is similar Nobel level type of pursuit as ground breaking physics and the Manhattan project. Hopefully the blast radius will be contained. I don’t think the disagreement is whether hard problems require intensity. The disagreement is whether intensity has to become a permanent operating model, and whether working seven days a week is the thing that compounds. My argument is that for most startups, the real compounding advantage is not raw hours. It is clearer thinking, better judgment, learning, and a team that can sustain high-quality work for a long time. You can always spend a lot of time working, but the PMF might never arrive. There are moments where extraordinary effort is necessary. Launches, incidents, existential deadlines, customer commitments. Those moments matter, and great teams rise to them. But if the company requires heroics every day of the eek, that usually points to a system problem. It means the operating model depends on burning reserve capacity instead of building it. Company that is constantly on fire is company that is not operating well. Whenever you put something out there, people will argue and people can argue the way I run Linear. The reason I comment on these things to offer some counter point. There is a growing cliché in startup culture where founders and startups feel the need to perform intensity publicly. How hard they work, how little they sleep, how many tokens they spend, how busy they are, how much personal sacrifice they make. You almost never see this from the most successful companies or people. Even if they work that way, they usually don’t make it the story, because they have more important things to talk about, like the product, the customers, the insight, the strategy, the quality of the work. That’s my issue with the narrative and why I think startups shouldn't blindly follow it. Not that is bad to work hard but grindmaxxing narrative can become the greater goal and become counterproductive. The performative intensity becomes the thing, and loosing sight of what actually matters. Lets check back in 7 years.

🚨Claude is telling users to go to sleep mid-session, and nobody, including Anthropic, seems to fully understand why it keeps doing it.

Frontier LLMs are converging on efficient, adaptive reasoning. Opus 4.7 lets the model decide how deeply to reason. GPT-5.5 achieves strong results with fewer reasoning tokens. We study a related but more structural question: what 𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 should we adapt? Last year in SiRA (upper figure), we showed that simulative reasoning (System II), which uses a 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹 to evaluate consequences of actions, yields up to 124% improvement over reactive baselines (System I), and that strong reasoning models (o1, o3-mini) fail as planners without this structure. In our new paper SR²AM (lower figure), we add a learned 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗶𝗴𝘂𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿 (System III) that self-regulates when to simulate, how far ahead, and when to skip planning entirely. Efficient reasoning is not just shorter reasoning: it is better allocation of simulation.

I use plan mode btw, and you should too. It is extraordinarily effective at helping you bring clarity, and in most harnesses it also helps improve the active context window. Can you ship lines of programming that compile without it? Yes. Except your job is not just shipping "code that compiles".