The manager’s path in the age of AI

The manager’s path in the age of AI
17 minutes by Camille Fournier

AI tools are changing how managers work, but Camille argues that predictions about the death of management are overblown. While AI improves individual productivity and offers some visibility into team work, it misses key signals like body language and tone, and can quietly push managers toward shallow decision-making. It also creates new friction, from political turf wars over cheap AI-generated code to eroding the small daily interactions that build trust. The answer is to spend more time talking to people, not less.

Turn messy speech into finished text with one API key
sponsored by AssemblyAI

Most dictation breaks on the words that matter: names, versions, IDs. A cleanup pass formats that text but can't correct it, so accuracy has to come from the model doing the listening. AssemblyAI's Sync API runs Universal-3.5 Pro (~134ms, $0.45/hr), and its LLM Gateway handles the rewrite, turning one recording into a clean message, a task list, or a structured note depending on the prompt.

Cross-team collaboration
6 minutes by Kore Nordmann

Measuring each team's output separately rewards teams for protecting their own numbers instead of helping others. The people who naturally connect teams and carry context across them quietly disappear, and the product stops cohering. Kore suggests giving teams real slack so they have capacity to help, and openly reward cross-team work. When you keep hearing "we can't deliver because of another team," the metric is the problem.

How to prepare for AI-driven code modernization projects
8 minutes by Jonah Ezekiel, Lexie Tonelli

AI tools can speed up code modernization from years to months, but organizations must prepare carefully. Jonah and Lexie outline six steps: define the target, set clear quality checks, agree on review and release rules, prepare infrastructure and teams, build and test the AI workflow, and then scale it. Strong testing, clear responsibilities, and early stakeholder agreement help ensure safe, reliable changes in critical systems.

Emotional diversification
13 minutes by Devin Martin

Chasing success often means pouring everything into work, leaving the rest of life to shrink. This creates fragility, where one bad meeting or setback can trigger panic because there is nothing else holding you up. The fix is "emotional diversification," spreading your time and identity across relationships, hobbies, creativity, and rest, just like spreading financial investments reduces risk. A full life is also what makes you a better leader and thinker.

The missing instructor
9 minutes by Mike Fisher

Personalized, rep-based feedback beats generic training by a wide margin, but most managers never get it because observers don't scale. AI changes that. Feed a transcript and a clear rubric into a model, ask the right questions, and you get a cheap after-action review that catches the gap between what you know and what you actually did. The main risks are sycophantic responses, consent around recordings, and mistaking this for coaching, since the evidence supports a reviewer, not a conversation partner.

industry

• Nvidia, Oracle, CoreWeave and other AI stocks sink on OpenAI revenue report
• Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk
• ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
• Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation
• Automatic Transmission — a data-privacy study of connected vehicles

security

• The dependency you didn’t choose
• Meta’s Muse is an adorable privacy and security dumpster fire
• OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• How strategy stopped intimidating me