Hey Reader,

It’s been a while since I’ve issued a newsletter, but I’m hoping to get back on track. There are just so many interesting things happening in the world of IT that I want to share with you all. But I’ve decided to change my approach to writing this newsletter a little bit.

In the past, my main goal was to come up with some idea or some thought and basically write a post. This put a lot of pressure on me and I never wanted to force myself into writing a newsletter when I had nothing to share. So instead, what I’m going to do going forward is to share some articles, videos and posts that resonated with me. And tie it back to some thoughts I’ve been having over the past couple of days.

Hope you’ll enjoy it but if you think it’s too much don’t feel bad about unsubscribing you can always come back by signing up on my page.

AGENTS.md files

Last week, social media was full of discussion about AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files. The headlines told you to delete those files because they hurt the performance of your AI agent. This is actually not true. The research these headlines point to tells a slightly different story. I made a video on exactly this topic, which you can watch here.

The TL;DR of the whole discussion is that when you let your agent create your agents MD file, your performance might slightly decrease. But if you actually take time and effort to create those files yourself, your performance may increase. Some social media headlines fail to mention this, but Matt Pocock does not fall into that trap and has some really good tips on how to structure your AGENTS.md file.

More great content on the topic of these files was made by Dex Horthy. His deep dive into the structure of these files and how agents use them is a must read.

Layoffs in tech

Last week, the CEO of Block, Jack Dorsey, announced a massive layoff at his company. 4 000 people have lost their jobs including Debbie O’Brien who had been laid off from Microsoft just a few months ago. This came as a shock. I personally thought Debbie was a great fit for Block, and especially the team she joined.

She shared her story as a video, and I recommend you watch it. It’s personal, shows the real story of how the layoff happened and the impact it had on her and her family. The jaw-dropping moment for me personally was when I learned that although many employees get 20 weeks of severance, Debbie does not fall into that group, because she’d only been at the company for three weeks.

The reasoning behind the layoff as described by Dorsey is the rise of “intelligence tools”, which makes it sound like AI is coming for our jobs. Right now, it is hard to really understand what is happening, people are putting a lot of different explanations out there. A prominent one seems to be that rather than the rise of AI, this is more of a readjustment after COVID-era over-hiring. Reid Hoffman wrote an article on this just a few days before the layoff, and Dorsey himself seems to be suggesting there’s a grain of truth to that, but of course, it’s hard to pin everything on a single explanation.

Theo did a deep dive in his video, and I especially liked his analysis on where the current bottlenecks in software development are. I was in particular surprised to see him talk about how important QA, peer reviews and specifications are.

Nobody’s sure about what the future in tech holds

All this gives us some hints on the future, but as always, we might be surprised at how the future shapes up in a couple of months. The only thing that seems to be certain is that things are changing. I loved this short video giving an explanation on how changes in technology affect different careers. I’m still not sure what exactly it might mean for tech, but I guess it might be sensible to ask if AI is taking away the easy part, or the hard part.

Geoffrey Huntley writes in his new blog, that software development now costs less than what a minimum-wage worker earns. That feels almost scary when you think about it. He lays out a theory on where things could go next. His post reminded me of a well-known quote: “AI will not take your job, but a developer that knows AI probably will”. It seems to me that a similar thing can be said about companies: “AI will not drown your company but another company that is AI-first, probably will”. To me, it seems that we’re seeing the dawn of many AI companies, followed by the transformation of existing companies into AI ones. That’s what Jack Dorsey says about the layoffs, that’s what many seem to be saying as well.

Obviously, things are messy at this point, so let me know what are your thoughts on what is happening.

See you in the next one!