Ben Kuhn
Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.
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Where they publish
benkuhn.netBlog His essays on attention, engineering and management.
Recent
- You should try contra dancing 24 Apr 2026
- Impact, agency, and taste 19 Apr 2025
- Advice for time management as a manager 1 Apr 2025
Show 7 more
- How I've run major projects 16 Mar 2025
- Categories of leadership on technical teams 21 Jul 2024
- Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly 13 Jul 2024
- How I build and run behavioral interviews 25 Feb 2024
- Some mistakes I made as a new manager 23 Apr 2023
- Leaving Wave, joining Anthropic 1 Feb 2023
- Why and how to write things on the Internet 29 Dec 2022
Link verified 4 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
@benkuhnx.com His X account.
Recent
- New post! "You should try contra dancing" I took a break from managementposting to pitch you all on my favorite niche activity: 25 Apr 2026
- One thing I love about Anthropic is that our hiring process often includes a disclaimer that we will absolutely do something that zeros our equity if we think… 28 Feb 2026
- Do I know anyone who works at @Etsy and could escalate a ticket? They arbitrarily decided they were 100% sure my (passkey 2fa'd) email was hacked and banned me… 14 Oct 2025
Show 17 more
- You know your AI lab is run by physicists when they plot revenue on a log scale 21 Jun 2025
- New post! "Impact, agency, and taste" (link below): 19 Apr 2025
- New post! "Advice for time management as a manager" (link ⬇️): 2 Apr 2025
- New post! "Categories of leadership on technical teams:" https://t.co/qea715y2LA A writeup of a framework I reference a lot when talking about how to structure… 22 Jul 2024
- New post! "Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly": https://t.co/rlQBvWkQ2d Something I've been thinking about a lot given how fast Anthropic's been gr… 13 Jul 2024
- "Mechanistic interpretability never does anything useful" they said "It'll never beat a standard baseline" they said "Talk to me when you ship something" they… 23 May 2024
- Talent density at Anthropic continues to increase :) 16 May 2024
- A bit surprised by how little I've heard about GCP literally fat-finger *deleting a customer account.* Seems like their business was only saved by cross-cloud… 12 May 2024
- Milan is really great! If you're the w̶r̶o̶n̶g̶ other kind of engineer, you should think about working with him :) 10 May 2024
- I really liked this writeup. I think it does a good job of capturing by far my favorite thing about Claude 3: 6 Mar 2024
- Wrote a post on how I build and run behavioral interviews! I used to think that "tell me about a time when..." questions were all bullshit—people answered ever… 26 Feb 2024
- Related: I’m hiring for a new team that I’m really excited about, to build infrastructure and tools for our RL research. I’m hiring for both a manager and engi… 12 Feb 2024
- I’m going to start managing some research teams at Anthropic! (Specifically RL.) I want to learn more about how to support research groups specifically—Twitter… 12 Feb 2024
- New post! "Some mistakes I made as a new manager": https://t.co/bpwSbDWJqY (Specifically, ones I've also noticed are an attractor for other folks.) If you're a… 23 Apr 2023
- I've been reflecting recently on Wave's growth spurt in 2019-21. Most teams grew 2-4x a year for multiple years, and culture and effectiveness stayed remarkabl… 4 Mar 2023
- A lot of talk about managing focuses on "decisionmaking": how to run decision meetings, who gets to sign off on what, how they flow up + down the hierarchy...… 28 Feb 2023
- One thing I love about both Wave (past job) and Anthropic (current) is how much everyone who works here cares about the mission. I think it's easy to underrate… 26 Feb 2023
Link verified 4 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Recommends rcmnd
What they recommendrcmnd 8 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
nativefier Uses
For the rest (e.g., oddly, most Google web apps), I use a command-line tool called nativefier to turn them into desktop apps.
benkuhn.net 2020-08-01
Slack Disliked
A special dishonorable mention goes to Slack, which can easily suck away a quarter of your time without you noticing. If you use Slack and you haven’t disabled the “unread messages” badge, stop reading this post and do it now.
benkuhn.net 2020-08-01
Kindle4RSS Uses
I do most of my Internet reading on my Kindle via Kindle4RSS.
benkuhn.net 2020-08-01
Show 5 more
Witch Uses
Witch can display separate app windows separately, only display windows from the current workspace, and supports text search on window titles so that you can search directly for the window you want without having to skip over.
benkuhn.net 2020-08-01
uBlock Origin Loved
I block distracting parts of websites with uBlock Origin’s amazing “element blocker,” which lets you select and remove any part of the page. As a fan of minimalism in web design, I really enjoy being able to adversarially enforce it on any rogue webpage.
benkuhn.net 2020-08-01
Focus Recommends
For websites that are habit-forming but still feel useful on net, like Twitter or Hacker News, Focus lets me restrict my usage to certain times of day. It’s the only website blocker I’ve used that lets me fully automate blocking things in the exact way I want.
benkuhn.net 2020-08-01
Complice Loved
(Complice is my favorite app for making lists of what I want to do today.) This helps me recover quickly from unintentionally going down rabbit holes.
benkuhn.net 2020-08-01
Cree 100W-equivalent 5000K LED bulbs Uses
Update 2020-11-16: For my home, I ended up switching from the corncob bulb to three 7-way splitters and 21 100W equivalent 5000K Cree bulbs from Home Depot. I found the Cree bulbs on sale so they were about the same price, the light was more diffused and they have a higher color-rendering index.
benkuhn.net 2019-11-01
What others say about Cree 100W-equivalent 5000K LED bulbs →
Latest
Full feed →Everything, newest firstFeed Posts and recommendations from the cards above, in one stream.
Filter & sortAll sources · condensed
- New post! "You should try contra dancing" I took a break from managementposting to pitch you all on my favorite niche activity: 25 Apr
- You should try contra dancing 24 Apr
- One thing I love about Anthropic is that our hiring process often includes a disclaimer that we will absolutely do something that zeros our equity if we think… 28 Feb Quoting@AnthropicAIA statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
- Do I know anyone who works at @Etsy and could escalate a ticket? They arbitrarily decided they were 100% sure my (passkey 2fa'd) email was hacked and banned me… 14 Oct 2025
- You know your AI lab is run by physicists when they plot revenue on a log scale 21 Jun 2025
- New post! "Impact, agency, and taste" (link below): 19 Apr 2025
Show 27 more
- Impact, agency, and taste 19 Apr 2025
- New post! "Advice for time management as a manager" (link ⬇️): 2 Apr 2025
- Advice for time management as a manager 1 Apr 2025
- How I've run major projects 16 Mar 2025
- New post! "Categories of leadership on technical teams:" https://t.co/qea715y2LA A writeup of a framework I reference a lot when talking about how to structure… 22 Jul 2024
- Categories of leadership on technical teams 21 Jul 2024
- New post! "Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly": https://t.co/rlQBvWkQ2d Something I've been thinking about a lot given how fast Anthropic's been gr… 13 Jul 2024
- Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly 13 Jul 2024
- "Mechanistic interpretability never does anything useful" they said "It'll never beat a standard baseline" they said "Talk to me when you ship something" they… 23 May 2024 Quoting@AnthropicAIThis week, we showed how altering internal "features" in our AI, Claude, could change its behavior. We found a feature that can make Claude…
- Talent density at Anthropic continues to increase :) 16 May 2024 Quoting@mikeykI'm thrilled to announce that I've joined @AnthropicAI as their Chief Product Officer! The team at Anthropic is exceptional, and I felt at…
- A bit surprised by how little I've heard about GCP literally fat-finger *deleting a customer account.* Seems like their business was only saved by cross-cloud… 12 May 2024
- Milan is really great! If you're the w̶r̶o̶n̶g̶ other kind of engineer, you should think about working with him :) 10 May 2024
- I really liked this writeup. I think it does a good job of capturing by far my favorite thing about Claude 3: 6 Mar 2024 Quoting@itsurboyevanClaude 3 is a marvel. It is the most human-feeling, creative, and naturalistic AI that I have ever interacted with. @AnthropicAI crushed it…
- Wrote a post on how I build and run behavioral interviews! I used to think that "tell me about a time when..." questions were all bullshit—people answered ever… 26 Feb 2024
- How I build and run behavioral interviews 25 Feb 2024
- Related: I’m hiring for a new team that I’m really excited about, to build infrastructure and tools for our RL research. I’m hiring for both a manager and engi… 12 Feb 2024 Quoting@benkuhnI’m going to start managing some research teams at Anthropic! (Specifically RL.) I want to learn more about how to support research groups…
- Some mistakes I made as a new manager 23 Apr 2023
- Leaving Wave, joining Anthropic 1 Feb 2023
- Why and how to write things on the Internet 29 Dec 2022
- Complice 1 Aug 2020 Loved
- Focus 1 Aug 2020 Recommends
- uBlock Origin 1 Aug 2020 Loved
- Witch 1 Aug 2020 Uses
- Kindle4RSS 1 Aug 2020 Uses
- Slack 1 Aug 2020 Disliked
- nativefier 1 Aug 2020 Uses
- Cree 100W-equivalent 5000K LED bulbs 1 Nov 2019 Uses