Give me the chills

This is a place to share learnings, from technology to life everything can be interesting.

  • Nobody knows the AI Future

    Nobody knows the AI Future

    Recently the CEO of ClickUp announced a layoff of twenty-two percent, and that was also bundled with a lot of ideas for the future, about restructuring, and about what it means for now.

    Here are my takeaways.

    1 – AI is shifting everything

      Nobody knows what the future will look like. Don’t trust who says otherwise, because we’re still in a moment in time where little do we know how AI will shape the world and how we will adapt to it.

      We’re currently doing our best, as usual, but the world five years from now will probably be quite different from what we have today.

      2 – Tokens are a limiting factor

        Tokens are a limiting factor, and inefficient tokens are a hurdle and a cost.

        This is not fully shared by the CEO. He mostly talked about letting people use unlimited tokens, and I agree with the direction. Token usage can absolutely be a limiting factor.

        Right now you want to leverage as much power as possible that AI can give you, because you can expect some of the services will bump the prices up, and we’re already seeing this.

        3 – Critical thinking matters even more now

          This is my take, but you want to build even more critical thinking as you hand off more work to AI.

          If you didn’t have enough critical thinking before, now is the time.

          If you had it before, be aware that you’re trusting AI more than you would trust a human. You need to address that.

          4 – Bottlenecks will define the future

            Everything that slows AI adoption or AI distribution is currently a bottleneck.

            It’s not about “AI can code.”
            The question is: assume that everything is done by AI, what can’t AI do currently?

            Those are the bottlenecks you need to figure out.

            Again, this is mostly a vision for the future, so it might be wrong.

            5 – Deprecating old systems

              If you want to shift the mindset entirely, adapting might take longer. You want to reinvent because adapting them might require so many different changes and what you want is speed.

            1. Hyperion / Cities of the Plain (Books)

              Hyperion / Cities of the Plain (Books)

              I wanted to share my take on two books I recently finished. Enjoy it!

              Hyperion

              I think I’m one of the few people that didn’t like the Hyperion books at all, and I promise you, I had high expectations.

              I can recognize that they are very well crafted, with a huge amount of information and worldbuilding inside them, they just weren’t interesting to me.

              I’m talking specifically about Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion.

              The main issues I had were:

              • the use of random words and unexplained concepts,
              • the constant recalling of Old Earth culture,
              • and the fact that people accept almost paranormal things as if they were completely normal.

              Together, these things made the books really hard for me to accept as a whole, and because of that I never found them particularly engaging.

              There’s also the fact that the narrator is omniscient, so you constantly get hints that things will happen before they actually do. Considering the structure of the books, I didn’t love that either.

              Random words

              The first issue is that there are lots of random words scattered everywhere. The worldbuilding feels futuristic, but in a way that often felt more akin to medieval fantasy than science fiction to me.

              “Things exist because they exist.” The books assume acceptance instead of building understanding.

              And all the books are permeated by this feeling. It constantly pulled me out of the experience because instead of thinking “this could exist in the future,” I often felt “this is just fantasy with futuristic decoration.”

              Earth Nostalgia

              The second issue was the constant references to Old Earth.

              You’re living hundreds of years after Earth has been destroyed, humanity has spread across worlds, civilizations evolved, and yet people are still deeply attached to Earth culture in a way that felt strange to me.

              Foods, songs, poets, literature, historical references, everything keeps coming back to Earth.

              It also felt odd that everyone seemed to know these references in detail, as if deep historical knowledge was universally shared (I know little about some parts of recent history, let alone some more old stuff).

              It would be like everyone alive today casually understanding medieval history, poetry, and culture at a deep level.

              So even though the books describe this incredible futuristic civilization, culturally it often felt strangely frozen in the past.

              A constructed pilgrimage

              The whole idea of these seven people going on a pilgrimage together felt strange from the beginning.

              Even though the story eventually explains why it’s happening, it still felt like an constructed idea created to tell stories rather than something that emerged naturally from the world itself.

              It’s supernatural and that’s ok

              The last part is that there are many things in these books that feel almost paranormal, and people simply accept them as normal.

              People speaking through dreams. Mysterious forces that are barely explained.

              And that’s fine in itself, lots of books do that, but here it kept happening over and over without enough grounding for me.

              Characters rarely stop to question things in a way that felt believable. They just move one step in front of the other and continue.

              Paul Duré

              The only story I truly appreciated was the one about Paul Duré.

              That one was genuinely fascinating to me. It had mystery, horror, philosophical depth, and emotional weight in a way that the rest of the book never fully reached for me.

              But beyond that, I struggled to connect with the characters or their motivations. Often it felt like people were just moving through the plot because the story needed them to.

              Cities of the Plain

              On the other hand, Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy was absolutely beautiful.

              I think I still liked the first two books in The Border Trilogy a little bit morel All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, because they have that expansiveness of people riding horses for days across immense landscapes.

              You really perceive the scale and loneliness of the journey.

              That feeling is a little more reduced in Cities of the Plain because there’s much more human interaction compared to the first two books.

              But it’s also beautiful in a different way because you finally get to see the two main characters from the previous novels connect together.

              And it’s still heartbreaking. Completely heartbreaking on many levels.

              The final dream

              The thing I liked the most was probably the ending.

              There’s a dream sequence near the end that genuinely feels like a real dream. Not a literary dream, but the kind of mysterious, fragmented, impossible-to-understand dream you occasionally have in real life.

              It has all the strange symbolism, hidden meanings, and emotional logic that dreams carry.

              You feel like there’s meaning inside it, but you can’t completely grasp it and it was incredibly fascinating to read.

              If you haven’t read them, I highly recommend the first two books of The Border Trilogy.

              I think they are fantastic modern westerns and genuinely beautiful to read.

              The pacing and writing style are unlike almost anything else, so you need to accept the rhythm McCarthy writes with. But once you’re deep into it, the experience becomes incredibly powerful.

            2. Accessible Products Benefit Everyone

              Accessible Products Benefit Everyone

              Maybe you never worried too much about building an accessible product. And maybe you thought: “It doesn’t apply to me”.

              Think twice because one thing I learned is that there are three different types of disabilities and everyone, literally everyone, can be or is impacted. And that’s the key because the product that is usable in most scenarios is a competitive advantage.

              Types of disabilities

              Here’s how Microsoft describes the disabilities type in their Inclusive Design Toolkit.

              Here’s the image that started it all for me. This is from the Microsoft Design Toolkit and it defines the three types of disabilities that you can find. Some of them are permanent, these are the ones my mind would go to when thinking about disabilities.

              But then you have the temporary and the situational. So you can quickly realize that if you’re watching a video but didn’t have headphones, and maybe you’re on the tube and it’s not in a noisy environment or didn’t want to wake up somebody, or you’re reading the screen and there’s direct sunlight and the contrast is not there, then it’s hard for you to enjoy a video or read the content of a website. And all those things can be addressed by your product. That is something that you can work on, that you can improve, and it doesn’t take years to get there.

              My situational disability

              The reason I am writing this is because of museum in Italy. There, I started noticing small things that could’ve made the life of people easier.

              For example, the first floor elevators were located at the beginning of the exhibition, while the stairs connected the first and second floors at the end of the first floor exhibition. This meant that if you needed the elevator and completed the first floor exhibition, you would have to backtrack to reach the second floor. Not ideal.

              But the most noticeable issue was on the third floor.

              There, we entered a room with a large ship in the center. On the left side, the path was blocked, and on the right side, stairs led up to the ship. There was no space to walk around the stairs to access the slope, so we would have had to go back through the exhibition to reach it from a different entrance.

              Here’s how the room looked. We entered from the side that had only the stairs.
              Photo of the slope

              If the slope was on both sides, or if there was a shorter way to get to the other side, it would’ve been easier for me to access the ship, but this was not the case.
              I had a stroller and there I was, looking at the stairs and thinking: “I’m lucky that I can lift this stroller, but still, could this be approached differently?”

              Don’t save on accessibility

              Accessibility for web products is even easier than physical products.

              There are so many tools and products that you can use today to improve the accessibility of your website or web tool. many there are m so many free courses that you can take just search online. They’re super easy. More of them than not, they’re very comprehensive. And w

              What you’ll build will be better for every user’s, not just the one with permanent disabilities, but for every user. Think about that when you build something.

              Links

            3. Challenge Complexity

              Challenge Complexity

              Here at Automattic, we’ve been running an internal experiment called Radical Speed Month, a one-month initiative where two-person teams are given broad autonomy to build and ship projects quickly with minimal process overhead.

              In some ways, it reminded me of when someone takes a long vacation. Whenever that happens, everything resets. You need to rebalance responsibilities, workflows, and dependencies that naturally formed around that person for however long they were away.

              This felt similar.

              It also sparked a lot of different ideas and fantastic projects. Some people were truly energized by this work. And honestly, so was I. I was surprised by the amount of enthusiasm and passion this triggered.

              It served as a reminder that this kind of energy is what drives engagement, curiosity, and creativity, and we should strive to keep it alive and nurture it.

              It was also a reminder that we should periodically challenge our assumptions and re-evaluate the systems we’ve built around ourselves.

              As a developer, I’ve always thought that every piece of code added to an application has a butterfly effect. Someone will need to maintain that code for as long as it exists.
              In fact, one thing I always say is that the best code is the code you don’t need to write.

              Sometimes we add code for things we don’t actually need, and that becomes maintenance and operational overhead we carry for years.

              Adding code is easy. Removing code is much harder.
              Removing features can be even harder because users naturally build workflows and habits around them, then over time, we all tend to accumulate complexity.

              For a long time, I thought code was the main surface where complexity gets introduced. But I’m constantly reminded me that complexity exists everywhere.

              Every company has countless touch points where things can become heavier, slower, and more layered than they need to be. And many of those things can become better and leaner.

              That’s why this question is so powerful: If you were starting today, what would you do differently?
              Which of the structures you created are complicit in your results?

              If you temporarily ignored existing boundaries and assumptions, the org charts and the structure, what would you build? Where would you go?

              I don’t know what the future will hold. But I think we’ll need as many good ideas, perspectives, and thoughtful opinions as possible to navigate what comes next.

              Some additional food for thought, related to this

            4. We’re all (eventually) going to die

              We’re all (eventually) going to die

              I’ve heard a lot of stories in my life of people getting cancer. Some close to me, some more far away from me. And it feels as if it’s spreading.

              It’s scary to know that such a dark illness is somewhat common in the circle of the people I know. More common than I would ever have expected.

              It’s surprisingly sad. Because it’s a reminder that our time is limited on this planet and that really we’re all eventually going to die.

              Why is this happening?
              What did we do wrong?
              What are we doing wrong that allows cancer to spread?
              What are we ignoring?

              The reason I started thinking about this is because of one podcast episode from Lenny where they were saying that the concept of “when you lose, you learn something” is actually and we would be better of with “when you succeed, you learn something.”

              The reason behind this is that, when you lose, something was not okay, but you don’t really know what was that, whereas it’s easier when you are successful at something to pinpoint what worked and what didn’t. Therefore you have more information.
              The problem with learning through failure is that we don’t know where we’re failing, which leaves us clueless.

              That’s the way I feel when cancer hits close to home. Clueless. What do we have? What can we do? Where do we go?

              What’s even more heartbreaking is the realization that we’re here for a short amount of time and that whatever you did in life may matter or not. Obvious to some, but yet not something we are reminded daily.

              This crystalizes instantly to people when they realize the shortness of their life.
              Even more so when you’re younger, but equally true when you’re older, you think you’re going to live forever. Even if you don’t think about death, you think about it as if that is not an option, or it’s very distant in the future.
              But, actually, you (we) don’t know.

              That’s the beauty of life. We’re here for some moments to share some stories and pieces of the journey we’re in with other people. And it’s up to us to make sense of it, to have fun and to make it meaningful, to treat each moment as unique and precious.

              So wherever you are, whatever you do, remember you can always start over.
              You can try again.
              You can always try something new.
              You can let it go.
              You’re allowed to cry.
              And, more importantly, remember that love will still be around, no matter what.

            5. The Motion/Movement AI Trap

              The Motion/Movement AI Trap

              I talked about focus before, and one of the things that comes to mind when I think about how we use AI, and the characteristics of AI itself, is the difference between movement and motion. Many of us, if not all, confuse these two things.

              What I mean by that is: sometimes you task AI to do something, and it spins and spins, creates code, creates an application that looks like it’s doing something. But from time to time it might break. It might not achieve what you wanted. It might have bugs.

              Yet Another App

              Maybe, for example, you’re one of the people who started creating your own iOS app. I for sure did. And as we now know, the category of apps that had the most influx of new applications is transcription apps, apps that use an AI model to transcribe what you say, speech to text.

              So maybe you started creating your own app, and that felt like doing something.
              But then you didn’t ship it. You didn’t market it. You just let AI spin and spin.
              You started configuring your OpenClaw setup, and maybe now you have a Telegram bot that does stuff for you, but that stuff might not translate to actual changes in your life.

              You spent time, and that time didn’t result in a change, in a practical improvement.

              Motion That Feels Like Progress

              That is the confusion between motion, this thing that keeps spinning, and real movement.

              It feels like we’re doing something. You get this burst of adrenaline, of interest and enthusiasm, because you’re building something, you’re starting to create something.

              For some people who were not coders, this was a new feeling, because they never went through the whole coding experience. But that did not translate into a meaningful change. At least for some people, it did not.

              Even skilled people get tricked from time to time into thinking that all this delegation, all this work, produces something when it doesn’t.

              6 Questions to Break the Illusion

              One of the things AI does well is spinning the wheel, this process of letting you think that something happens while nothing happens.

              So the more you use AI, the more you should reflect:

              1. Is it helping?
              2. What things are you letting go of while doing so?
              3. What things are you not aware of?
              4. How is it addressing your problems in a meaningful way?
              5. Are you learning more, or are you delegating to something you don’t understand?
              6. Is this movement tangible, or is it not?

              At the end of the day, AI is an incredible new tool that we are pleased to have.
              But as with all tools, and all the time we spend on tooling, what we want in the end is to make a meaningful change, either in the world, in our work, or in our life.

              Is that new tool you’re using achieving that goal, or is it giving you the illusion, the impression that it’s achieving it?

              And if it’s the latter, what should you change?

            6. Don’t Trust the Demos

              Don’t Trust the Demos

              I already talked about mental maps as a way to structurally learn a project.
              What I recently realized is that some things feel like they help you understand a project but they actually don’t help reinforcing the mental map, and one of them can be demos.

              Watching a demo of a product might not give you an actual understanding of what the product is and does. It gives you superficial information that you don’t crystallize into knowledge.

              I think this is fine when you’re judging products from a surface level. But it gets messy fast, especially if you subconsciously imply that watching that demo was enough for you to learn.

              The problem with watching demos

              Let me clear this up with an example. Let’s say you’re developing a new feature, like a way to connect items in a to-do list. The feature is complete and you’re watching whoever created it walk you through it.

              It might be easy to understand when the feature is small, but once features start to become more complex and intertwined with other parts of the product, you’re not getting enough time to properly understand what is going on.
              You end up surfing the information, like skimming titles in an article, but you’re not actually distilling it into knowledge.

              You think you understand the product, but you don’t.

              And that can be a problem because you’re slowly losing touch of what the product is and does. You’re not gaining knowledge of the product as a whole, interconnected entity across your company.

              It’s easy to consider a feature done by watching someone presenting it. But since you’re not understanding the breadth of that feature, you’re not understanding the upsides and the downsides.

              You’re seeing the pitch, and trusting that that is the complete experience customers will have. But a demo is usually done in a short time (5-30 minutes).

              The demo checks a box that you asked for some work and the work is done, but it doesn’t really translate into you understanding how it was done actually and how that will translate into complexity for customers or benefits for customers.
              It’s up to the pitch to show this, but there’s rarely enough time to go that deep.

              Gaps & Benefits

              I think this is relevant because the more you understand the product (and the more you know about your customers) then you can see the gaps more clearly and more easily.

              Whereas if you’re only navigating the product on a surface level, you’re not getting that much information and you’re trusting the demo, but without fully understanding the implications.

              Of course, getting so deep into understanding each feature is not scalable.
              It’s not something that a CEO can do for all the features.
              But you can pick your battles, as well as you can ask other people to pick them, as long as you trust their taste and their knowledge about the product and if they can be honest and candid about the problems of every workflow.

              Going Deeper

              How do you get to truly understand what’s being done and what are the implications for the future for your product? I think there are various ways where you can achieve a better, deeper understanding of a feature.

              Option 1: Ask questions.

              This is the simpler one. Ask lots of questions.

              The demo should not be silent. If it’s silent and you’re not asking questions, it’s likely that you’re abiding by that information, you’re trusting blindly and you’re not questioning the assumptions that have been made to make that feature real.

              You’re assuming that it was perfect. And maybe it is. But what you want is understanding, and to get to that understanding you need to question.
              Asking a lot of questions is a good way to trigger understanding and start distilling some of that knowledge.

              Asking questions alone will help to bridge that gap. Maybe you won’t get that full understanding, but you will understand a couple of things more.

              You also don’t need to be highly technical to ask questions.
              You can start with open-ended questions like: why did we do it this way? What other ways did we evaluate? Those will give you hints on the process that led to the feature you’re seeing.
              You can also ask how much this will cost in the future for us to maintain, what are the downsides, and that will surface other stuff.

              Questions like these will unfold a better view of the implications, pros and cons.

              Option 2: Demo the thing yourself.

              The alternative is to demo it to other people, because that will force you to go through the process of using the product and demoing the product.
              A pre-recorded video from someone else doesn’t work. It won’t work because you’re just learning a script. What you want is to go through the feature yourself.
              That will let you understand what it is doing and how, and what are the complexities of the feature. It will force you to partly be the customer and face their challenges.

              This might also result in a different pitch from the original demo, because you will now be able to see additional strong/weak points.

              Don’t surf information, dive into it

              I’m sure there are alternatives to this approach, but be aware that distilling information requires focus and understanding. And I think those are critical to direct the product as well as to understand the product.

              So pick your battles but go deep. Because surface level won’t get you there.

              One of the things that I’m thinking more and more about lately, in the world of AI, is around focus.

              What a demo gives you is the opportunity to focus on a problem that people have solved for you, and that is a special and unique opportunity not only to surf, but to dive into the product more.

            7. Public Speaking Tips

              Public Speaking Tips

              Over time (by reading and practicing) I’ve accumulated some knowledge on speaking.

              It comes from different books and, in part, from my intuition.
              This is not meant as a guide, it’s the way I approach speaking and it’s the way I learned to do it. These are things I remind myself when I panic, when I fear any stage or a call. They’re the path I try to follow.

              Others might do differently, and that’s ok.
              As with all the tips in the world: Take what you need, leave what you don’t.

              • Being scared and excited at the same time is a good signal that this is challenging you and you love it
              • Always prepare yourself. Learn what you’re going to present.
              • Rehearse at max till the night before and on the day of the presentation let it go.
              • Don’t aim for perfection, aim for your best.
              • Silence is your friend. Breath, take pauses, drink.
              • Bullet points and long paragraphs are boring. If anything, use a big flashy phrase and explain it with your voice.
              • Don’t read what’s on the screen. People can do that by themselves already.
              • If you mess up, be vulnerable. If things don’t go as planned, share it with the audience. More often than not they’ll understand and root for you.
              • Starting again from scratch is often an option, even if you screw it up midway.
              • Engage your audience with questions, but skip the yes/no ones, closed ended questions won’t get you anywhere.
              • This is not an exam. It’s your turn to share your weird vision of the world with other people. Take the leap.
              • Most successful presentations are centered on a personal story. Don’t hide yourself.
              • Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a great book on writing, but it also subtly speaks about what you should share with the world (see previous point).
              • If you rehearse, record yourself. It’ll be painful to watch, but you’ll understand what’s wrong better than someone telling you.
              • Every live demo will fail or have bugs/issues. Plan accordingly.
              • Things obvious to you might not be obvious to others. Don’t discount what you know.

            8. People Choose You, Not the Model

              People Choose You, Not the Model

              How easy it is to determine if an article has been written through an AI?

              I’m used to see the the type of wording that get out gets out from when you pass your content through an AI model, with titles that are clearly structured in a very specific way. It makes it pop when something is written by an AI or not.

              I cannot lie, sometimes this titles are a blocker for me. I have less interest in reading the content even if the original content was interesting. They may want to share a beautiful idea and use AI to leverage its power to amplify the concept, turning it into a longer form, but it won’t captivate me as a reader.

              I think this is perfectly fine (who am I, afterall) , but there is one thing we should personally keep in mind when doing this.

              Who are you talking to?

              AI models, if not trained, write with a very distinctive style, each model will have it’s own flavor.

              The problem is that most of the time what you see out there is people using AI models to extend or rewrite their content entirely.
              That gives you a very precise type of output that doesn’t take into consideration your voice, your style, and the beauty of who you are (which again is perfectly fine, to do).
              But that begs the question: is that type of content talking, speaking to the right people?

              I’m not sure if formatting things through AI this way is effective because it targets a very generic audience. While you might attract a specific kind of reader, you will likely alienate others who are more aware of these scenarios and less susceptible to such titles.

              I believe it is crucial not to skip the editorial process. You must check whether the output is truly reaching the right audience.

              It’s all about the audience

              • Am I writing for the right audience?
              • Is this voice, this tone and style, is it going to be listened or be read by the right audience, the one that I want to reach?
              • Is this talking to them the way I would like to talk to them or not?
              • Did I just skip a step in the process to make producing content faster?

              If you answered yes at least once, then I do think it is valuable to take some time and revisit that output. You should add your personal sauce, your style, and what makes you unique. This can be as easy as changing the titles and sometime will become a more structured editorial review of your content.

              Take a moment to think about your articles. Even if they are AI-generated, take your time to review them as an editor would.
              That human element is what connects you to your specific reader. You are not writing for a generic reader, which is what you often get from a model, but for the reader you want to reach or the one who chose you to begin with.

              At the end of the day, people choose you because you have a specific voice, don’t let them down.

            9. Choosing a service is always about value

              I remember back in the days when I was seriously considering switching off some online services. I had grown less and less interested in being tracked and having my activity aggregated and, potentially, misused. This journey was also part of how I learned about marketing and what opportunities exist in that space.

              One of the things I didn’t like then, and I’m still personally not a big fan of, is the remarketing approach. You know the one: you visit a site, and from that moment on, you’re presented with advertisements about that same site until you either buy something (so the ads stop) or start using ad blockers.

              While I’m actually a believer that good marketing doesn’t necessarily need this aggressive approach, I also realize that sometimes, to make a purchase happen, you need to be pushy with marketing. I don’t agree with those tactics, but that’s not really the point of this discussion.

              Enter AI (yes, I know, it’s everywhere)

              What was interesting to me is that with the advent of AI, I reconciled a lot of things.

              One of the reasons why AI can be so powerful is that the more context it has, the more it can learn, be helpful, and understand how you work and what could work for you. The benefits are absolutely incredible on some levels. That’s why some people suggest doing long-form chatting or talking with AI, when you ask detailed questions with lots of context, the replies you get back are much more relevant.

              This shows up in some amusing contradictions. Yesterday, I saw a LinkedIn post where someone asked: “I need to wash my car, and the car wash is only 50 meters away. How should I get there?”

              One AI said “by walking.” Another said “by car, because you need to wash the car after all.”

              The problem here is obvious: we expect AI to get the answer right, but the right answer is based on context.
              The real question was “how do I go there to wash the car, knowing I’ll need to take the car with me?” but that wasn’t explicitly asked.

              It’s all about assumptions. If you provide all the context, “I need to wash my car AND I need to decide how to get there so I can get it washed”, you’d clearly see how the question was being tricky, and AI would probably give you a proper answer.

              Switching Away was not (only) about tracking

              So what’s the point of all this? It made me re-evaluate many of my concerns about sharing data.

              After thinking a lot about it, I realized that my problem was that I wasn’t getting enough value out of the services. Maybe they weren’t providing enough value for me. All that tracking just to give me ads, to track me more, to sell me more stuff… that kind of intelligence wasn’t giving me what I needed. It wasn’t providing value to me as a customer.

              Nowadays, things are shifting. The value you might get from AI is so vastly different, so powerful, that it might genuinely change some people’s lives.

              I believe that choosing a service or product has always been about the value it provides. There’s always a trade-off: how much am I getting versus what am I paying? Sometimes you’re getting something for free, but you’re paying with your personal information. The famous saying “if the service is free, you are the product” still stands.

              At the same time, it’s a trade-off you might revisit because you’re getting so much value out of it. But until you get there, and the value isn’t that significant, it’s all about understanding: is this giving me enough or not?