The world of digital product development has changed forever with the advent of AI models like Opus (that was the first to make me realize this). In fact, many other industries have also changed, but I’m going to stick with what I know.

And ever since I started to realize that code will be written by agents that instruct I immediately got a sense that we (the industry) are making age-old mistakes that we and other industries have made, fixed and now comes back to.

We are focusing a lot on the things that rubs me the wrong way; output, efficiency, velocity and productivity. None of those are bad per se but without knowing the goal, something about the value, stating effects impact etc… They become productivity theater

I realized that I hadn’t thought this through properly and decided to write a few post on it. This is...

Over the years I have grown tired of the tightness in how we talk about our jobs, achievements and careers in general at LinkedIn. I poked a bit of fun to it by writing a different type of profile section.

Being a Swede I find it really embarrassing toothing my own horn, so I made up a story about two friends that talks about me instead. And then another story where I was at trial before a judge. And then one where my grand grand grand children talked about me after the AI lords had taken over.

Now that last one, feels a bit dated so I decided to change it to a one where two sport commentator reads out my achievements and jobs.

All of these are handcrafted, non-AI-generated, text. Like we did back in the days.

Some serious reflection

I am amazingly...

I have been thinking a lot about faster feedback my entire life. In short, this is one of the drivers behind just about anything related to agile software development, product-led development.

Changing our ways of working to enable faster flow is the guiding star for continuous improvement in Lean, the grandmother of agile principles. Over the years we, the software development community, have implemented all kinds of changes to get feedback faster in software development. Off the top of my head — sprints, standups, continuous integration, pair programming, TDD and TCR are all examples of practices that give us feedback faster and faster.

Interesting enough — we seem to have forgotten most of this, so far, in the AI code generation revolution and just been focused on creating a lot of code.

But don’t worry — what is good for a human is good for the AI too, as it...

I have been using an agentic workflow for most of my work these last couple of months. Especially, but not exclusively when it comes to coding. Being all about the effectiveness in software development I have also read, viewed and listened A LOT to what is going on in the larger AI world.

There are 4 trends that worry me. I don’t think there’s value in following these trends, and I think that humans will suffer in the short and long run. Finally I think we are, once again, mixing up effectiveness with efficiency, usefulness with busyness or valuable work with productivity.

The trends are:

• hailing context switching as Good stuff (tm)
• we’re only doing high-level thinking - no easy tasks left
• pressure to produce faster
• typing is not, and has never been, the constraint

Paradigm shift. Pretty cool to be part of another, huh? But also; scary, lots of big unknowns and the rate of change is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.

Yes - I’m talking about AI. But this post will be about some ideas how to navigate this change, trying to calm ourselves a bit and, quite frankly, give some comfort. Hopefully.

Someone asked me a question just as I left the office this Friday. The question was really good and the person showed genuine worry. I’m sure that person was not the only one. At least one more share the feelings. Me.

I wanted to share my response, a bit embroidered, here. The question was basically this, but better formulated:

Marcus, how do you stay positive in the light of all potential downsides of AI?

Now that we are using agents to help us with a lot of daily tasks I realize how much information I have put in speaker notes. I have books worth of information in there, due to my bad memory. I knew it would pay off, someday.

And they are really tricky to share with in an AI chat, like (we’re not using Chat GPT anymore, since this morning - right?) … well you choose. I’m going with Claude.

Uploading some of my presentations to an agent means 50+ Mb file, when I’m really just interested in the text in my speaker notes.

Over the years I have been going back and forth between different presenting softwares and hence I have a bit of a problem getting hold of the speaker notes.

But I’ve solved this now. Let me share it with you. And then let me share how I...

I asked a few people in the Umain office that are relatively new to programming how they learn in the age of AI. And they graciously shared. And I learned A LOT from that.

It’s a VERY different world now, picking up programming when AI has “always” been around. You have to actively disregard help from the tools, to learn. And actively go into learning mode to actually learn.

Since they shared with me it’s not more than right that I do the same. Sorry, this will be long - I’m old.

This is a post that could end up causing me problems—or at least being flagged as “not safe for work”—but here we go:

I've started going naked to meetings!

To clarify a bit, I’ve started to go device naked to meetings. In other words - I try, hard, to not bring any of my devices to meetings. If possible. It is hard work being device naked, I can tell you.

Any other interpretation would render disgust and probably me without a job. The social code in Sweden doesn’t really allow for your dirty thoughts, dear reader.

What I’m writing here is purely for me and I’m only going to relate my own reasons and experiences but maybe you find some value in this post.

One of Kent Beck’s many great things to consider is this little mind-bender of a quote

for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change

The quote is on X but I first read it in his great little book Tidy First?. Yes, the question mark should be in there. Read the book for more.

Ok. This quote forces you to think for awhile, but is very good practical advise for any software developer I wanted to relate a story from last week where I used it.

Re-posted from Umain.

As I entered the office I found a seat next to a nice coworker in the quiet corner. Perfect!

Only thing… that screen didn’t have a USB-C cable. No worries I’ll run down to the IT department and nick one.

Only thing… once I got back up I realized that the screen didn’t even have a power cable. Back down to IT, but this time I checked and yes - there were missing extension cords too. So I asked for that.

Once back at my desk I now had to unplug (and UNTANGLE) the cords, so that I could plug in the other 3 desks, interrupting my coworkers flow 2 times. And then connect my own desk to power.

Now I could attach the power cord. And then the USB-C. And then connect my computer so that I could … what was I doing now again.