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Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good transitions make an essay feel well-structured, and complaints about lack of structure often come from clumsy or abrupt transitions.

  Their words

  if you have good enough transitions, an essay will feel as if it has a good structure. And vice versa: when readers complain about lack of structure, the reason is often simply that they're bothered by clumsy or abrupt transitions.

  @paulg on Xx.com

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

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  Adding a config option so nobody breaks compounds into permutations no test suite can cover, because it is infinitely harder to evolve software that has users.

  Their words

  If you count all the permutations, you can write all the tests you want. It is impossible to cover all of these and not break things from time to time. It is infinitely harder to evolve software that has users.

  Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com

Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.

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  Almost every recent AI breakthrough has been in code and mathematics, the two domains with highly structured languages and huge specialised training sets.

  Their words

  But if you zoom out, it becomes clear that almost every “breakthrough” since last summer has concerned the narrow domains of computer code and math, which are defined by highly structured languages and come accompanied by massive amounts of specialized training data.

  On AI Coding and Its Discontentscalnewport.com

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  Ireland's colonial wars helped set the template Britain later applied elsewhere in its empire

  Their words

  The brutal war and its aftermath set some of the parameters for what Britain did later in other parts of the world.

  John Crowley has diedprogrammablemutter.com

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.

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  Building on a model is unlike any previous software engineering, because the thing you are building on cannot be designed up front.

  Their words

  I I think this is sort of the crazy thing about building on models. It's just so different than all the engineering that I've ever done. Like in the past when you built on systems, you built these like big beautiful systems and you really think about the system design up front. You have like a big suite of unit tests. You think about everything and you know, like a re-architecture is a big project.

  Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code's Promptyoutube.com

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

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  Every abstraction in agentic programming — RAG, memory, agentic history, structured output — is just a different way of passing tokens into a model, and understanding that beats learning any of them.

  Their words

  And at the end of the day, they're all like different ways to pass tokens into a model and ask it to produce usually some structured output. And understanding that is a lot more powerful than trying to learn memory and trying to pick some agent framework off the shelf and some memory framework off the shelf.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.

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  Card payments cost two to three percent because of how the industry is structured, not because moving money has to cost that much.

  Their words

  the whole industry is is kind of stuck in this world where they make a lot of money because it is this way. But there's zero reason why it should cost 2 or 3%. Just zero.

  youtube.com

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

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  Termius

  Their words

  this just works so well, I'm so fast, and each of my sites is just an open tab in Termius, I've never worked so structured and clean!

  levels.io

Co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, which he started in 2011 while studying product design at Stanford.

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  Large, structured organizations become risk-averse because everyone inside them is optimizing for the next promotion.

  Their words

  as soon as you have an organization that's very large and very structured like that, uh people become very focused on getting a promotion, right? Getting, you know, into the next step of the hierarchy. And that means that all of a sudden, uh they become a lot more risk-averse.

  youtube.com

Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.

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  The world is shaped by how consistently incompetent governance is, and competent governance would remake it

  Their words

  As an econ professor who specialized in governance, I can assure you that the world is greatly structured by the fact that we typically have pretty incompetent governance.

  My Best Idea: Decision Marketsovercomingbias.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  Structured concurrency makes it easier to write correct, safe concurrent code.

  Their words

  writing programs in this style makes it much easier to write correct and safe concurrent code

  From error-handling to structured concurrencyblog.nelhage.com

Researcher on developer productivity; co-wrote Accelerate and the DORA research, and created the SPACE framework.

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  The processes organisations build to make work uniform are usually the same processes that slow the work down.

  Their words

  Or like all of the the things that we have structured process around to try to make things more uniform are often the things that slow us down.

  youtube.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

From one piece Simon Willison: Engineering practices that make coding agents work - The Pragmatic Summit 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  A language-agnostic conformance suite is the most powerful thing you can hand a coding agent, because the whole instruction becomes: write code until these tests pass.

  Their words

  And what you can do if you've got one of these conformance suites is you can give it to a a good agent and say, "Write code until this test suite passes." And it kind of will.

  youtube.com

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  A passing test suite is not evidence that the software works, so an agent must also be made to start the thing and exercise it the way a person would.

  Their words

  just cuz the test suite passes doesn't mean that the web server will boot. You know, there's there's always a chance that when you actually try in the real world, something's not going to work.

  youtube.com

Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

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  A society structured to resist being catalogued and taxed by a central authority is for the same reason resistant to being reconstructed by archaeologists.

  Their words

  And what makes a society illegible to the tax collector also makes it illegible to the traditional archaeologist.

  Back To The Gardenadjacentpossible.substack.com

Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

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  Most current software and ways of solving problems are structured the wrong way for the agent era.

  Their words

  Most software is the wrong shape now. Most of the ways we try to solve problems are the wrong shape.

  Eight more months of agentscrawshaw.io

Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.

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  Price is not the number on the page; the structure and the positioning are as much a part of pricing as the number is.

  Their words

  the the largest point is pricing is not just the number on the page. It's positioning. It's how their budgets work. It's how it's structured.

  youtube.com

Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

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  Multiple Choice

  Their words

  Two other formally odd books I love: Alejandro Zambra's Multiple Choice (trans. by Megan McDowell), structured as a standardized test with e.g. chapters of fill-in-the-blank questions

  countercraft.substack.com

Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.

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  Setapp

  Their words

  I also subscribe to the vetted suite of tools at Setapp. They rarely disappoint.

  seths.blog

Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Braintrust

  Their words

  The panel had a generally positive view of Braintrust, highlighting its clean UI and structured approach to evaluations. The tool’s emphasis on human-in-the-loop workflows was a significant strength.

  hamel.dev

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

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  A product leader's position at the intersection of every function in the C-suite comes at the cost of belonging to any one group.

  Their words

  Product's unique identity in the C-suite-at the intersection of everything-often comes at the expense of belonging to anything.

  Product Leadership is Lonelybringthedonuts.com

Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.

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  The post-Cold War order, like the Versailles order before it, was badly structured at its inception and carried the seeds of its own destruction

  Their words

  Both systems were badly structured at their very inception (Versailles and the end of the Cold War). Both contained within themselves the seeds of destruction.

  Devant la guerrebranko2f7.substack.com

Author of The Simple Path to Wealth and of the jlcollinsnh.com stock series on index-fund investing.

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  F.I.R.E for dummies

  Their words

  I stand in awe of what author Jackie Cummings Koski has done here. This is a comprehensive overview of what FIRE is and how it is done, fashioned in the famous "for dummies" template. I wouldn't have known how to even begin to pull this together, let alone gotten it over the finish line in such fine form.

  jlcollinsnh.com

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Life is the process by which information structures matter over time and space, and any individual organism is only one instance of a lineage.

  Their words

  And so for me, I think life is the process of how information structures matter over time and space, and an example of life is what emerges on a planet and yields an open-ended cascade of generation of structure and increasing complexity. And this is the thing that life is. And any individual is just a particular instance of these lineages that are structured across time.

  youtube.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  China’s World View

  Their words

  Senior academic advisor to the Chinese Communist Party feels most political tensions come from a misunderstanding of China’s world view, hence the subtitle “demystifying to prevent global conflict”, and his intrinsic desire to explain. I love its insights and historical context, especially around “Respect-centered diplomacy” and how the CCP is structured.

  sive.rs

Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.

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  Universities would be better run by business leaders than by academics the faculty approves of.

  Their words

  I would argue having a business leader run these institutions and then having a board that has, itself, diverse viewpoints, and by the way, permanently structured to have diverse viewpoints is a much better way to run a university than picking an academic that the faculty supports.

  youtube.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

• Our readingkorrents.com

  As models get better at following instructions, techniques like finetuning and constrained sampling for structured outputs will become less necessary

  Their words

  I suspect that in the future, it'll be easier to get models to output exactly what we need with minimal prompting, and these techniques will become less important.

  huyenchip.com

Brazilian-American staff software engineer working on platforms, AI and developer productivity. Writes about engineering and his setup at ivansantos.me.

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  Affinity Suite

  Their words

  Affinity Suite is my go to for all my design needs. I use Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo.

  ivansantos.me

Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

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  Template Metaprogramming with C++

  Their words

  I spent the last few weeks reading Template Metaprogramming with C++ by Marius Băncilă. It is currently 50$ on Amazon. Though, technically, the book is about advanced 'template' techniques, it is much more broad and practical. It is one of the 'good programming books'. If you are an experienced C++ programmer, you should give it a peek

  lemire.me

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

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  Brilliant

  Their words

  I know a few of the people there, and I can vouch for the fact that they are extremely thoughtful about what makes for good learning. It shows in the product. Rather than putting lectures and videos front and center, problems and puzzles take precedence, all presented in a structured progression.

  3blue1brown.com

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Notion

  Their words

  In 2019, I fell in love with Notion, which you can think of an all-in-one company/personal wiki + full MS Office-like suite.

  rauchg.com

Physician and author on addiction, stress and childhood development. Wrote In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal, and developed the Compassionate Inquiry approach taught to therapists.

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  Childhood trauma is the template for every addiction, including the socially rewarded ones.

  TraumaAddiction

  Their words

  Childhood trauma is the template for addiction-any addiction. All addictions are attempts to escape the deep pain of the hurt child, attempts temporarily soothing but ultimately futile.

  drgabormate.com