👥 Teams & Ways of Working

Measuring effectiveness, small teams, SDLC, process.

BlogLimestone Digital

AI Velocity Pods: One Engineer Plus Agents vs. a Traditional Squad

Limestone Digital's description of its "AI Velocity Pod" model for PE-backed portfolio companies: one dedicated senior engineer paired with AI agents, backed by a lean, shared support team, running inside the client's existing codebase and standups.

• A pod is roughly 1.5 FTE total — one full-time forward-deployed engineer plus pooled AI-productivity, PM/BA, CSM, and AI-QA support — billed as one monthly price rather than time-and-materials.
• Progress is tracked with an in-house "Dev Intelligence Platform" against each client's own baseline (cycle time, PR velocity, change-fail rate, MTTR, AI-assist hours) rather than industry benchmarks.
• Case studies claim 42% faster delivery, 85% fewer incidents, and 35% faster cycles with 40% higher predictability — though these are self-reported, baseline-relative figures, not third-party verified.

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👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Radar • 29th Aug 2026

BlogScott M. Graffius

Meta's CTO Called Their AI Reorg 'Atrocious' — Lessons for Human-AI Teams

A case study of Meta's "Project OT" AI-native restructuring — which cut roughly 8,000 jobs aiming for smaller, AI-leveraged teams — arguing it stumbled on people and team dynamics rather than technology.

• Employee morale dropped from 74% to 55% favorable, major technical incidents rose 40%, and firefighting time was up 70% — even as AI-assisted code changes rose 220% while user-facing features grew only 36%.
• Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth admitted the company did an "atrocious" job explaining the Applied AI vision and support during the transition; a planned second restructuring wave was cancelled.
• Draws five lessons on "exotic team dynamics": smaller teams need new roles and workflows (not just fewer people), accountability blurs between humans and AI, trust needs to be architected in, activity isn't productivity, and org charts lag how human-AI teams actually work.

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👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Radar • 29th Aug 2026

BlogThe Skip • Nikhyl Singhal

Inside PM at Stripe: What Comes After 'Become a Builder'

An interview with Stripe's Kevin Yien on how product management changes once a team can fire off dozens of agents at once — the job moves from building prototypes to setting direction.

• Building is table stakes now that agents handle the coding; the PM's edge moves to strategic direction-setting and longer-term business trajectory calls.
• Success needs two distinct kinds of writing: persuading stakeholders of a point of view, and writing precise enough for agents to execute against.
• The advantage goes to generalists with real domain expertise (sales, engineering, design, support) that agents can't replicate, paired with a willingness to work outside a narrow job spec.

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👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Radar • 24th Jul 2026

BlogMatt Pocock

Tracer bullets: a fix for AI's bloated first drafts

A case for using "tracer bullets" — small, end-to-end vertical slices, a technique from The Pragmatic Programmer — to stop AI coding agents from producing bloated, half-finished features.

• Left unguided, an agent tends to build out whole horizontal layers — endpoints, middleware, auth — before anything is tested, producing huge reviews and rework.
• The fix is prompting the agent to ship one thin, working slice end to end, test it, gather feedback, then expand — rather than building in the dark.
• Demonstrated by deliberately narrowing an agent's scope to a single backend endpoint wired to one UI location before letting it fan out further.

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🤖 Building with Agents👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Tom Harper • 23rd Jul 2026

BlogPydantic • Laura Summers

The Human-in-the-Loop Is Tired

An essay arguing that LLM-assisted coding boosts output while quietly eroding developer satisfaction, as the job shifts from writing code to endlessly supervising and reviewing it.

• The old reward loop (solve a problem, watch it compile) is gone; developers now mostly review machine-generated code, which is less satisfying even when it's faster.
• Running several AI sessions at once tempts an endless "one more iteration," stretching work hours without a matching gain in satisfaction.
• Draws a parallel to the responsive-design shift: the skill isn't disappearing, it's moving toward architectural judgment and taste for quality-gating higher volumes of output.

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👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Adam Tomat • 16th Jul 2026

BlogPrateek Solanki

Artifacts Without Inhabitants

An essay (published in two versions, one human-directed and one AI-generated) arguing that AI code generation is outrunning developers' ability to actually understand what's been built.

• Unlike a compiler translating logic you've already worked out, AI "expands" a vague prompt into thousands of undirected decisions — a genuinely different kind of abstraction, not just a faster one.
• Skipping the struggle of building erodes the "sensemaking history" that normally makes a system comprehensible, leaving working code that nobody really inhabits.
• Cites research showing people's trust in AI tools rises even as their own sense of professional competence and authorship falls.

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👥 Teams & Ways of Working🤖 Building with Agents

added by Adam Tomat • 15th Jul 2026

BlogMC Dean

A Constellation of Emerging Design Roles

An argument that traditional design job titles aren't disappearing so much as fragmenting into AI-era specializations, using "adaptive radiation" as the framing for how designers can branch into new roles.

• Hybrid titles — Design Engineer, AI Experience Designer, Computational Designer — are showing up on job boards, signalling that orgs now expect AI fluency as a baseline design skill.
• Reinvention isn't required: existing strengths (systems thinking, craft, research, taste) each point toward a specific emerging niche that needs just one added capability.
• Real working knowledge of how AI behaves matters more across every niche than prompting tricks or templates.

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🎨 Design & UX👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Adam Tomat • 12th Jul 2026

BlogCreative Boom • Tom May

The State of the Creative Industry 2026

A survey of 882 creatives worldwide on money, burnout, and AI, finding widespread AI adoption but little enthusiasm for it.

• 69% report burnout in the past year (77% among mid-career creatives), while nearly half of self-employed creatives earn under £30,000.
• 86% use AI tools professionally, but only 10% think AI is having a positive effect on the industry — adoption driven by necessity, not belief.
• What people say would actually improve their working lives is networking and community (57.5%) and mentorship (53%) — new tools trail at 31%.

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Community vibe Resonated — the burnout and money findings tracked with people's own experience, with a hopeful note that shared pressure might end up pulling the industry closer together.

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👥 Teams & Ways of Working🎨 Design & UX

added by Adam Tomat • 2nd Jul 2026

BlogUX Collective • Kike Peña

You're Missing the Point: This Is Your Real Value in Tech Companies

A Chief Design Officer's argument that professional value in tech now comes from applying judgment and strategy on top of AI tools, not from choosing between automation and human skill.

• Real value is the ability to apply criteria, knowledge, and vision to a problem — the tools are secondary to that judgment.
• Companies that lean on AI output without human judgment end up with generic, indistinguishable products.
• Using the technology well requires understanding its benefits and limits first, rather than chasing hype trend by trend.

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👥 Teams & Ways of Working🎨 Design & UX

added by Adam Tomat • 2nd Jul 2026

BlogMiguel Carranza

AI shouldn't shrink headcount. It should shrink teams

AI lets orgs run smaller teams per initiative rather than cutting headcount.

• AI lowers the cost of writing and reviewing code.
• RevenueCat's "Office of the CTO" small-team model, generalised org-wide.
• The tradeoff is fragility — it needs strong individual contributors.

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👥 Teams & Ways of Working💸 Cost & Pricing

added by Adam Tomat • 1st Jul 2026

BlogAbly • Amber Dawson

Is AI making your teams better, or just busier?

Argues AI usage metrics don't capture whether teams actually get better, and proposes outcome-based KPIs.

• 88% use AI but only 39% report EBIT impact — usage ≠ value.
• Two KPIs: new outcomes unlocked, and how embedded AI is in the workflow.
• Needs structural support (scorecards, skill repos), not just tool access.

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👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Adam Tomat • 1st Jul 2026

ToolTessl

Tessl — agent enablement platform

A platform to build, test, distribute, and govern AI agent "skills" at team / enterprise scale.

• Security scanning, policy, and audit before a skill deploys.
• A shared, versioned skill registry.
• Tracks real activation / usage plus evals.

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Community vibe Curiosity outweighed scepticism — the eval registry drew genuine praise, though the group flagged token cost as the thing to check before running it regularly.

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🛠️ Tools & Apps🧩 Skills & Plugins👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Tom Harper • 23rd Jun 2026

BlogAddy Osmani

The New Software Lifecycle

Reframes the SDLC: agents are mostly harness, and verification moves to the centre.

• Agents are roughly 10% model, 90% harness.
• Static vs dynamic context load is a key design tradeoff.
• The vibe-coding → engineering spectrum is defined by depth of verification.

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Community vibe General agreement that fixing the harness beats waiting on a better model, backed by real benchmark gains people had seen elsewhere. One caveat surfaced though: constantly updating guardrails after every dumb agent mistake adds its own mental overhead, and can end up stalling other work while you build better QA tooling first.

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🤖 Building with Agents✅ Testing & Quality👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Adam Tomat • 23rd Jun 2026

BlogUX Collective • Patrick Neeman

The T-shaped UX Professional is Giving Way to the Polymath Architect

AI is dissolving the classic "T-shaped" specialist model in UX toward generalist "polymath architects".

• AI removes the cost penalty of working outside your specialty.
• 91% of designers now use AI weekly.
• The scarce skill becomes directing AI and catching plausible-but-wrong output.

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🎨 Design & UX👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Adam Tomat • 23rd Jun 2026

BlogAddy Osmani

Cognitive Surrender

Distinguishes healthy cognitive offloading from "surrender" — accepting AI output without judgement.

• Research cited: 73% accepted incorrect AI answers, with inflated confidence.
• Code that "looks correct" hides comprehension debt.
• Calibration habits: form your expectation first, treat AI code like a junior's, add friction.

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Community vibe Struck a chord — one reply admitted their own thinking has felt foggier since going all-in on AI, echoing the post's warning about quietly letting AI output become your output unchecked.

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🤖 Building with Agents👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Adam Tomat • 18th Jun 2026

VideoAI Native DevCon

AI Native DevCon London 2026 (playlist)

The full talk playlist from AI Native DevCon London 2026 (1–2 June, The Brewery, London).

• Guy Podjarny — "Skills are the New Code": agent instructions/context are becoming a software unit needing intent, review, testing and versioning.
• Birgitta Böckeler — "State of Play: AI Coding Assistants": field data on which adoption patterns work vs. create tech debt.
• Patrick Debois — "The Rise of Agent Enablement": frames agent enablement as a new org function alongside DevOps/Platform Engineering.

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🤖 Building with Agents🧩 Skills & Plugins👥 Teams & Ways of Working

added by Tom Harper • 17th Jun 2026