We're killing the DM at @Zapier. Starting with the executive team. We've long held Default to Transparency as a value. That value has largely encouraged communication in public channels. But as the company grew, DMs are a hard habit to resist and break. But every DM is a gap in our Shared Brain. It's context that is lost for humans and AIs. As a result the cost of DMs keeps going up. So earlier this year I posted about our exec transparency leaderboard. The leaderboard has become quite the competition internally… I'm 3rd today. My co-founder @BryanHelmig has held the top spot as long as I can remember… It sets a standard for the rest of the company. In fact, since last year we’ve seen the % of Slack messages in public channels go from 33% to 46%. What the leaderboard measures Transparency is a team sport, and a disinfectant. Every month we track what percentage of our execs' Slack messages happen in public channels versus private DMs. When your CEO debates strategy in a DM, that decision is invisible to every agent and every team that needs to know what was decided and why. The decision happens but the reasoning vanishes. When that conversation happens in a channel, it stays. New hires can search it, agents can read and verify it, etc. Your Shared Brain knows what's true now: ask it a question and the answer reflects the latest reality. Taking It to the Next Level Reducing DMs are one way to increase transparency and open up context for humans and AI, but there are other mechanisms that help too. Three things beyond the leaderboard: 1. Meetings get recorded, transcribed, and become queryable 2. We run a shared skills library. Anyone on the team can encode a workflow they've figured out into a skill and share with the team 3. And we keep score. It's a silly scoreboard, but it subtly drives positive behaviors Raising Your Ambition In order to get the most of AI in your company, the AIs need context. So making your context queryable is one of the most practical moves you can make to improve the effectiveness of your AI agents. P.S. I’m coming for #1, Bryan...

BREAKING: New York bill would ban AI from answering questions related to medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, psychology, social work, engineering, & more.

5.4 sooner than you Think.

So many of my core beliefs about software development are crumbling in front of me in real time

Corporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop You can think of it like how 'computer' used to be a job that humans had. You would go and get a job as a computer where you would do calculations. They had entire skyscrapers full of humans....20, 30 floors of humans...just doing calculations. Now, that entire skyscraper of humans doing calculations can be replaced by a laptop with a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet can do vastly more calculations than an entire building full of human computers So, you think about it: what if only some of the cells in your spreadsheet were calculated by humans? That would be much worse than if all of the cells in your spreadsheet were calculated by the computer. And so, really what will happen is the pure AI, pure robotics corporations or collectives will far outperform any corporations that have humans in the loop. It will happen very quickly

GPT-5.2 evals are finally out for METR and it's state-of-the-art. Here's the linear-scale plot. The 80% success-rate plot (below) is even more stark .

I shipped more code in the last 3 weeks than the decade before. The top AI models / agentic systems right now are an entirely different thing to what people used until the beginning of December.

Very good questions imo experienced devs have a real advantage but only if they rapidly progress through their grief cycle and adapt, now and onwards. Categorically rejecting or ignoring the new layer would be a mistake.

I have similar experiences. You point the thing around and it shoots pellets or sometimes even misfires and then once in a while when you hold it just right a powerful beam of laser erupts and melts your problem.

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

It’s very good. People who aren’t keeping up even over the last 30 days already have a deprecated world view on this topic.