Michael Novati: Too many people are trying to become first principles thinkers […] — I’m not even sure it wants more of them. What scales is the other kind: the exceptional pattern matchers, the 10X people you’ve never heard of, happy under the radar, making things actually run.

AI Erased the Hardest Part of Being Me

I could always see the pattern. The tax was making everyone else see it too.

michaelnovati.substack.com

I wrote my takeaways from LeadDev #LDX3 in this post. * Gains from AI are real but uneven across companies * Existing bottlenecks in the SDLC become blockers in AI-enabled orgs * Human relationships are still very important to build large successful products

LeadDev LDX3 London 2026 Summary

What 25 talks and panels at LDX3 London 2026 said about engineering teams in the AI era.

aymeric.fyi

#LDX3 The shadow culture: Why engineering principles fail under load by Manogna Machiraju We all want to build things fast with the right level of quality. The reality: the code is archaic, pipelines are broken, security is an afterthought. Engineering is always catching up.

#LDX3 What makes an effective EM in the AI era? Panel: Vernon Richards, Priscilla Nagashima, Alicia Collymore, Scott Carey

#LDX3 How will we deal with the new drudgery of AI-generated code? Panel: Lawrence Jones, Maude Lemaire, Randy Shoup, Birgitta Böckeler

#LDX3 AI in the trenches: Real-world wins without breaking things by Yiğit Darçın Deja Vu vs. Vuja De - the feeling that you have never seen it before. MIT study: the "GenAI Divide" - 95% of AI pilots fail to generate ROI, while a successful 5% utilize a "Vuja de" approach to rethink workflows.

#LDX3 AI killed the coding interviews. Here’s what Meta built instead by Danit Nativ Navon What broke? * Candidates used AI tools during interviews * Evaluations and ladders didn’t evolve * Leaders had no idea how to lead in this new context

#LDX3 Technology advances; history repeats itself by Zoe Cunningham A talk emphasizing the need to keep focusing on humans when everything is changing 🥰 The rate of change is increasing. The current message around the tech industry is impacting managers drastically: less managers, more IC work.

#LDX3 How to grow your engineers into great leaders? by Charles Duncan Jr. Your best engineer may not be your best managerial candidate The IC and manager jobs are different, require different skillset

#LDX3 Engineering at scale: Why developer experience is your competitive advantage by Dr Nicole Forsgren Teams "move" at 10x speed but the system moves at 1x The speed/friction mismatch * 15 minute builds * Manual approvals * Unclear deployment criteria * No documentation of decisions

#LDX3 What will AI-accelerated engineering teams actually look like? Panel with Luke Marsden, Hannah Foxwell, Yenny Cheung, Liz Fong-Jones What practices that predate AI help us move faster now? Documentation, comments, tests, small PRs Spec driven dev in all parts of SDLC: from PRD to tests

#LDX3 Building resilient engineering teams when failure is the default by King-Immanuel Edoh In Nigeria, infrastructure is highly unreliable, starting with the power grid. This forces good engineering practices to be the default Fantastic and lively talk by King-Immanuel.

#LDX3 What does a CTO even do? by Dee Kitchen 1. Do we have the right people? 2. Do we have the right technology? 3. Do we have the right product vision? 4. Do we have the right balance between innovation and liability 5. Do we have the right enablement and sales motion?

#LDX3 Up and down the management track: Equalising your leadership style across the pressure of scale by Karen Lee Lessons from Karen who had an went up and down the management track, starting as engineering, growing to EM, MoM and Director, back down to MoM, EM and back up, twice.

#LDX3 Moving Accessibility from debt to done at giffgaff by Abi Harrison-Nye Accessibility represents an 8T$ opportunity globally, that’s the buying power of people with any disability. Making the product right, accessible, from the start, does not cost more or add time to a project.

#LDX3 The mechanics of scaling: Why delivery slows as you grow and what do to about it by Maryia Tarpachova As the company grows, features keep being added to create more growth, and pace starts to slow down A deep dive revealed specific teams were impact more than others, mostly core teams

#LDX3 Quantifying tech debt to modernize critical systems by Ejber Ozkan Tech debt negatively impacts productivity Image from Tushar Sharma in Four Strategies for Managing Technical Debt Tech debt is net asset to build features for the business and becomes a liability when it reaches a threshold

#LDX3 30 to 70 PRs a day: How we managed to not wreck our systems by @lizthegrey.com Honeycomb followed the example set by Intercom to 2x R&D productivity rather than try to 10x (linked article) Honeycomb mandated AI usage from Aug 2025 and only saw marginal changes until Opus 4.6 in Feb 2026

2× – nine months later: We did it

You can too.

ideas.fin.ai

I’m coming from Tokyo to attend LeadDev LDX3 in London. (1/2) I’m particularly interested in how organizations are transitioning into AI-native organization, as we are in the middle of that process at Mercari. Let’s meet to discuss these topics or if you want to learn about Japan’s tech scene.

I tried Claude Design to design a new feature in my app. It speeds up UI prototyping over vibe coding prototypes. The prototypes are interactive and it’s possible to run them side-by-side. The hand-off to Claude Code is janky but it’s quite new so it’ll improve. Check the post for details.

Hands-on With Claude Design

Anthropic just launched Claude Design, a new research-preview product for generating interactive prototypes, slide decks, and more. I took it for a spin by designing a new analytics screen for my habi...

aymeric.fyi

Oh, what happened to Google’s AI overview?

Has Google killed the cheap Gemini models? From Gemini 1.5 Flash to Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, the cost increased between 5x and 20x depending on the language used, English or Japanese.

Has Google Killed the Cheap Gemini Models?

From Gemini 1.5 Flash to Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, Google has increased the pricing by an order of magnitude, somewhere between 5x and 20x depending on the use case. This post retraces the pricing histor...

aymeric.fyi

1/2 In the current times of AI, I really like this advice from Charity Majors from the article below: The best advice I can give anyone is: know your nature, and lean against it.

My (hypothetical) SRECon26 keynote

One year ago, Fred Hebert and I delivered the closing keynote at SRECon25. Looking back on it now, I can hardly connect with how I felt then. Here's what I'd say one year later.

charitydotwtf.substack.com

I released my first mobile app on iOS and Android. There is such a contrast between how fast building with AI is, and how slow the mobile app release process is. I wrote about the whole experience in this post.

Building OnTrack Mobile Apps With AI: Coding Fast, Releasing Slow

In this post, I share my experience building a cross-platform habit tracker mobile app using AI coding tools, highlighting the stark contrast between lightning-fast development and the surprisingly sl...

aymeric.fyi

Google is hot right now, back to back days announcing big things 😳 Sunday: Universal Commerce Protocol Monday: Apple picked Gemini for Siri

A very easy to understand review of the paper Too Big to Think: Capacity, Memorization, and Generalization in Pre-Trained Transformers,". Large models simply memorize the training data. Smaller models learn the rule because they don't have enough "brain space" to memorize every individual answer.

Why I care more about your SLM than your LLM

A review of the paper Too Big to Think: Capacity, Memorization, and Generalization in Pre-Trained Transformers," (Barron & White, 2025)

statisticianinstilettos.com

Ben Thompson argues that while AI is obviously in a bubble, it will create long term benefits in the form of investments in chip fabs in the U.S. and power plants. This is similar to how we got dark fiber and train tracks as infrastructure out of the internet and railway bubbles.

The Benefits of Bubbles

We are in an AI Bubble: the big question is if this bubble will be worth it for the physical infrastructure and coordinated innovation that result?

stratechery.com

Quick intro to Claude Skills Simplicity is the point. The most significant limitation of MCP is token usage Almost everything an MCP can do, can also be handled by a CLI tool instead. LLMs know how to call cli-tool --help, which means you don’t have to spend many tokens describing how to use them

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · 10mo ago

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/...

What happens to a driving Waymo when AWS us-east-1 goes down? 😅 Is everything processed locally? It’s an Alphabet company, so if something is remote, I’d expect it to be on GCP or Google internal platforms, but with external dependencies, isn’t every product 6 degrees of separation from us-east-1?

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

anildash.com