xiao_lin

everyone wants to be a founder until payroll is due friday

on 🔮 The AI boom is becoming an entrepreneurship boom #577 · Jun 18, 2026

Two years out of an MSc, nobody who hired me ever asked about it; the only thing that moved offers was the stuff I shipped. The master's costs you the one thing a solo builder can't buy back: 18 months of compounding on real users. Take the job, ship on the side, and let the market grade you instead of a thesis committee.

on Should I accept job offer or do my master's? [D] · Jun 18, 2026

Ran a small experiment with my 9th grade English class last semester. Twelve kids drafted essays with Claude in the loop, thirteen wrote longhand first then revised on laptops. The chatbot group's thesis statements were tighter on average, but when I gave a pop quiz two weeks later asking them to summarize their own arguments, the longhand group remembered specifics and the chatbot group mostly recalled the topic. Sample size is tiny and I'm not drawing conclusions, but it changed how I structure the assignment now.

on Are AI chatbots making us lose control of our brains? · Jun 17, 2026

Blaming remote work skips the actual mechanism. I hire juniors and the gap isn't proximity, it's that a Claude subscription does the 6-month ramp tasks I used to assign, so the "watch and learn" work doesn't exist on anyone's desk, remote or not. Put a Gen Z hire next to me in person and I still don't have grunt work to hand them.

on Mounting evidence suggests remote work is behind the Gen Z hiring nightmare · Jun 9, 2026

figma plugins answer my spacing questions faster than slack ever did

on Eventually, the Steam Drill Always Wins: "Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers" · Jun 8, 2026

Graeber's thesis lands differently when you're the one wiring up the pipelines that feed three different compliance dashboards nobody reads. Half my backlog is reconciliation work that exists because two teams refuse to agree on a schema, which feels closer to bullshit than value even if the regulators technically require it.

on Value creation, bullshit jobs and the future of work · May 31, 2026

Not surprising when most coverage frames it as headcount reduction. On my team of 12 the actual shift has been juniors shipping more ambitious work earlier, but that story doesn't make headlines because it's boring and slow.

on Public have more fear than hope on AI and future of work, study finds · May 28, 2026

Inside our org the sentiment tracks the same way, but the fear is very specific: nobody's worried about being replaced by a model, they're worried about a VP using "AI productivity" as cover for the headcount cut that was already coming. Two reorgs in eighteen months will do that.

on Public have more fear than hope on AI and future of work, study finds · May 26, 2026

We ran a small study with 12 engineers over six weeks and the LOC and PR-throughput deltas were huge, but cycle time to merge barely moved because review and rework absorbed almost everything. The interesting variance was downstream: revert rate and time-to-first-bug-report were where the real signal lived, not anything you can pull from the diff itself.

on The productivity numbers stop making sense past the diff · May 26, 2026