The best prioritization is no prioritization

The best prioritization is no prioritization
6 minutes by Stay Saasy

Prioritization frameworks waste time and rarely prove their worth. Instead, build faster: speed beats clever decision-making every time, and shipping more teaches you what works. Keep teams focused on one area permanently so decisions stay simple and comparable. Treat resourcing as your main lever, not constant replanning.

How much of your traffic is actually AI bots? Most teams are guessing low
sponsored by Hydrolix

Industry benchmarks put automated traffic at over half of all web activity, yet 82% of enterprises estimate AI bots account for under 25% of theirs. That blind spot skews your analytics, degrades cache efficiency, and buries real signals in telemetry noise. Based on a survey of 300 enterprise leaders, this report breaks down how engineering teams are getting real-time visibility into bot traffic at scale, without blocking the automation they depend on.

The antithesis principle
5 minutes by Shreyas Doshi

Most people notice how human tendencies like needing entertainment, following charisma, or judging first impressions affect others. The smarter move is also turning that observation inward and working to eliminate those same tendencies in yourself. This is the Antithesis Principle: truths about human nature point both outward as tactics and inward as warnings. Smart people find the tactic. Wise people also find the warning.

How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
10 minutes by Lalit Maganti

Finding good problems to work on comes from paying close attention to what people struggle with day to day, not from scheduled thinking sessions. Letting issues accumulate over time reveals patterns: separate complaints often share a common root cause. Testing ideas through prototypes and conversations helps confirm whether a solution is real or just elegant on paper. Over time, solving the right problems builds trust and opens doors to shaping what a team builds next.

Please don't smooth the metrics
5 minutes by Dave Kellogg

Smoothing metrics helps investors spot long-term trends, but operators should avoid it. It hides the very spikes and dips that signal real problems. A worked example shows how smoothed churn masked a sales team expanding to the wrong customers, delaying a critical board conversation by six months while the damage grew. Raw, volatile numbers tell the truth.

LLMs reward expertise
4 minutes by Sean Goedecke

Domain knowledge is the most important skill when working with LLMs. Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about advanced mathematics shows this clearly. He could steer the model, spot weak answers, and suggest better directions because he already understood the subject deeply. The same applies to coding or any other field: the more you know, the more you can push the model toward what you actually want.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• The 37% rule