Will Larson
@lethain.com
Write at lethain.com. Author of An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, and An Engineering Executive’s Primer. Worked some places.
Wrote up a series of nine short posts on interesting problems we encountered while building an internal agent framework (virtual files, compaction, LLM vs code-driven workflows, etc) lethain.com/agents-series/
Building internal agents
A few weeks ago in Facilitating AI adoption at Imprint, I mentioned our internal agent workflows that we are developing. This is not the core of Imprint–our core is powering co-branded credit card pro...
lethain.com
Digital edition of my fourth book, Crafting Engineering Strategy, is up for purchase! (Print copy should start shipping in next 2-3 weeks.) Tried to apply "Staff Engineer" formula to eng strategy topic, with a lot more editing 😂 www.amazon.com/Crafting-Eng...
Crafting Engineering Strategy: How Thoughtful Decisions Solve Complex Problems
Crafting Engineering Strategy: How Thoughtful Decisions Solve Complex Problems - Kindle edition by Larson, Will. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Crafting Engineering Strategy: How Thoughtful Decisions Solve Complex Problems.
amazon.com
Any good patterns for loading a Notion page as modifiable prompt to respond to other Notion pages and Slack messages? Eg as a simple example you could imagine I want to write architecture guidelines and then use that to comment on RFCs. Is this just Zapier?
New post up, with a bunch of thoughts on what drives me personally, and my own 40-year career (h/t @lethain.com). I have a pretty unusual life story. But one of the reasons I love the tech industry so much is how common unusual stories like mine have historically been. charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...
Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career
I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pus…
charity.wtf
Did my first podcast in some time as I start ramping up a bit around getting started as new CTO at Imprint and also getting close to releasing next book! Podcast up at www.executiveruntime.show/episodes/04-...
Will Larson — Executive Runtime Podcast
I'm thrilled to welcome Will Larson, Chief Technology Officer at Carta and a thought leader whose work has shaped how many of us think about engineering leadership. Will is the author of three influen...
executiveruntime.show
Over the last year, as I've spent more time working with LLMs to power product features, I've also been thinking about how LLMs impact me as a long-form author. Of the ideas I've had, I'm particularly interested in the idea of building, and selling, books as "datapacks" for LLMs.
Still only part way through the editing process, but excited to announce Crafting Engineering Strategy, my upcoming book with O'Reilly on engineering strategy coming later this year (sometime Q4).
My bi-decade update on my desk setup 😂 Finally found a dock that lets me swap from windows desktop with dedicated GPU to OSX laptop with a single thunderbolt cable! lethain.com/desk-setup-2...
My desk setup in 2025.
Since 2020, I’ve been working on my desk setup, and I think I finally have it mostly pulled together at this point. I don’t really think my desk setup is very novel, and I’m sure there are better ways...
lethain.com
This is a fascinating thread. And it has lots of my favorite thing: details. I could give a shit about people who pounce online, flaming on and on about how wrong I am. I love it when people reply with details about their very different experience. The details give it heft. I can learn from them.
Gordon Weakliem@2hardproblems.bsky.social · last yr.Very interesting thread. I feel like I know something about WFH, I've spent 14 of my 32 years as a SWE working from home. The longest single stint was at VRBO (2007-2016), I started there just after the acquisition by HomeAway. VRBO was a full-remote company, they never had an office, just a PO box
Looking for startup to angel invest in that solves problem of chairs being routinely positioned to block video cameras in office meeting rooms. (I've tried petitioning to remove chairs from rooms, but this innovation has met substantial resistance, so we need to innovate here.)
Each time I open LinkedIn I pray I don’t somehow accidentally click on the brain teaser game and become shamed forever off the internet
This time experimenting with MCP server for generating and running systems models ( github.com/lethain/syst... ). I think it's pretty wild how well this works, especially the tool to inject domain-specific language usage documentation into the context window.
Got to zero inbox on my personal email address(es) for the first time in a decade or so. This was mostly (1) declaring bankrupt on anything older than 6 months, (2) unsubscribing/filtering spammy stuff, and (3) setting up a transient tag for emails I want to *briefly* see lethain.com/filter-old-g...
How to filter out old email from inbox
Every few years I take a pass at reducing the chaos in my personal inboxes. There are simply too many emails to deal with, and that generally leads to me increasingly failing to follow up on important...
lethain.com
Another writing workflow tool I've found useful is using LLM API to describe images. Here's is an example of script that replaces empty image descriptions with reasonably good ones. To extent the images could be better, it's b/c my prompt needs some work gist.github.com/lethain/9c5e...
Threw together an MCP for navigating Markdown knowledge bases (e.g. recursive folders with markdown files with markdown headers). Very basic, and very vibe-coded, but works well and interesting learning experience github.com/lethain/libr...
GitHub - lethain/library-mcp: MCP server for operating on Markdown knowledge bases
MCP server for operating on Markdown knowledge bases - lethain/library-mcp
github.com
Love this post from @keavym.bsky.social, really captures the right hand archetype of staff-plus engineer (ty to @kstewart.bsky.social who reminded me of Keavy's post) keavy.com/work/art-of-...
Small weekend project, I finally moved staffeng.com from Gatsby to Hugo. Gatsby is just fairly hard to maintain with so many JS dependencies for something I don't update frequently. Now actually possible to fix issues again 😅
And don't miss my full CTO Craft Con keynote, more conference highlights, book recommendations, and links featuring: @patkua.bsky.social, @sarahedo.bsky.social, @jackdanger.com, @lethain.com & @thiagodefaria.com! www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VXa...
Leadership Keynote – The CTO as a Global Citizen with Erica Stanley
YouTube video by Erica Stanley
youtube.com
Will Larson (@lethain.com) recently wrapped up an *incredible* streak of posts on engineering strategy on his blog, lethain.com. Strategy is hard, much harder than it looks. Especially since, much like design and management, when done well, it looks easy. Easy and obvious.
Irrational Exuberance
lethain.com
This one worked exceptionally well to create an SEO-driving FAQ page for page for new book. Done in a Claude workspace with entire book loaded into project via some light preprocessing plus repomix of all Markdown files.
So... should I make all the systems models look like Figma diagrams or Excalidraw diagrams? And why?
Now working on visual consistency of images for strategy book. One shot prompted a very simple script to build a static HTML page showing every image and descriptions used in the book. This is just a subset of the ~50 images overall, but gives a sense of starting point / problem to be solved.
Still enjoying my very basic, vibe coded typo/grammar fixer for blog posts 😂
The one where everyone’s GitHub actions turned out to be exfiltrating their secrets www.cve.org/CVERecord?id...
cve.org
I'm still working on getting better at writing one-pass scripts using Claude. This one supporting a common blog editing workflow to incorporate grammar, typos, and other fixes (gist is gist.github.com/lethain/ce2a... )
This does not mean that execs should never be im the details!! "Hire great people and get out of their way" is horrendous, disastrous advice! You need to hire great people and create alignment. You have to be in the details together deep enough, LONG enough to do that!
This does not sound like a happy experience, but I actually think this is more or less how things are supposed to work? One of my most-cited bookmarks is this one from kellblog, on how there are really only three management levels: line manager, director, and VP. kellblog.com/2015/03/08/c...
Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performanc...
kellblog.com
arachnocapitalist@arachno.capital · last yr.when I was in middle management, I noticed that line managers were entirely focused vertically (on their teams and roadmaps) and executives were gazing at the sky. middle managers were the only ones looking horizontally at the work being done across the org we got our heads shoved into the sand too
It *does* take time for a team to gel. Yes. If you care about high performing teams, you should carefully weigh the costs of shuffling people around vs the hoped-for gains. According to Tuckman's theory of group development, these stages are called, * forming * storming * norming * performing
Peter Van Dijck@petervandijck.bsky.social · last yr.What’s your take on this: it takes time for a team to gel. So it’s kind of criminal the way companies use often break up teams without a second thought.
Continuing to experiment with how foundational models can help with writing book _without_ using them to actually write anything (which is, ya know, what I want to do as the author). This was feedback on 180 pages, which is pretty good feedback and took <30 seconds to get versus many days.
