You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly pulse of must-reads for anyone orchestrating teams, people, and work across the modern digital workplace – whether you’re managing sprints, driving roadmaps, leading departments, or just making sure the right work gets done. Curated by the team at Steady.
You Ship It, You Own It
The real scandal in AI-assisted coding isn’t that engineers are using ChatGPT or Copilot, it’s that too many are treating these tools like a “generate and pray” button, shipping PRs full of code they’ve never actually read. Gregor Ojstersek cuts through the AI panic to name the actual problem: engineers abdicating accountability. When you hit “submit” on a pull request, you’re not sharing what the AI wrote; you’re vouching for code that now has your name on it. The tooling isn’t broken – the ownership model is. The toxic pattern looks like this: spin up an AI agent, let it churn out a solution, glance at the diff, ship it, then act shocked when reviewers find bugs or when production breaks. It’s passing the quality assurance burden downstream while claiming productivity points upstream. The false binary between “vibe coding” (60 PRs a day, zero review) and abandoning AI entirely misses the middle path that actually works: use AI as a co-pilot that accelerates your work, but never as the pilot making final decisions. The best engineers understand every line before it ships, verify behavior matches intent, and confidently say “I own this.” AI amplifies whatever engineering culture you already have: sloppy practices become catastrophically sloppy, rigorous standards become superpowered.
— Engineering Leadership, 6m, #ai, #engineering, #leadership
Fear Is the Map
That knot in your stomach before presenting to the exec team? That’s not a warning to turn back, it’s a compass pointing toward growth. Andy Warfield spent years vomiting before public talks, endured brutal criticism from Plan 9’s architects early in his career, and kept showing up anyway. Not because he conquered fear, but because he learned to read it differently. Leadership development takes guts: you don’t get better by staying in your comfort zone, you get stagnant. The Yerkes-Dodson curve proves it: optimal performance lives in the zone of moderate stress, right before panic sets in but well past the safety of routine. Your job as a leader isn’t to eliminate anxiety; it’s to recognize when discomfort signals you’re pushing into territory where real learning happens. And the shift from individual contributor to manager marks a fundamental transition: you stop managing your own bravery and start creating conditions where others can be brave. When you spot anxiety in your team – the hesitation before they speak up in meetings, the nervousness about owning a new project – that’s not weakness, it’s the exact moment they need support to lean into growth.
— The Kernel, 5m, #leadership, #growth, #management
The Missing Year
Remember when 2025 was supposed to be the year AI agents joined your workforce, booked your travel, filled out forms, and fundamentally changed how companies operate? Sam Altman promised it. Marc Benioff predicted a trillion-dollar “digital labor revolution.” Cal Newport’s postmortem reveals what actually happened: not much. Agents work brilliantly in narrow domains like coding because terminals are text-based – the native language of LLMs. But the moment they leave that comfort zone and try to click a mouse or navigate a dropdown menu, things fall apart. One demo showed ChatGPT Agent stuck for fifteen minutes trying to select a price filter on a real estate site. Another generated a baseball stadium tour with a mysterious stop in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. The problem isn’t just clumsy interfaces; it’s that LLMs fundamentally lack understanding of how the world works. They hallucinate roughly ten percent of the time, and when you’re chaining together eighteen steps to book a hotel, one mistake derails everything. The overpromising matters because leaders bet roadmaps on capabilities that don’t exist yet. Altman recently walked back agent development to refocus on core chatbots. Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI’s co-founder, now admits we overshot: this isn’t the Year of the Agent, it’s the Decade of the Agent. The gap between demo and production remains vast, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time.
— The New Yorker, 9m, #ai, #transformation, #strategy
Say It Out Loud
You think your team knows what good looks like, but they’re guessing based on fragments of feedback, the three things you mentioned in passing last month, and whatever your predecessor valued. Anton Zaides cuts through the telepathy problem with a radical idea: write down your expectations instead of acting surprised when people don’t meet standards you never articulated. His “Manager’s README” makes explicit what most leaders leave implicit: work style, 1:1 norms, sprint expectations, communication preferences, even his core philosophy that career development and shipping quality work are equally important. This isn’t micromanagement documentation; it’s infrastructure that prevents the slow-motion disaster of unclear expectations. The pattern is familiar: an engineer submits work that seems perfectly reasonable to them but misses the mark you never bothered to draw. You’re frustrated they didn’t read your mind. They’re frustrated you’re moving goalposts. Everyone loses. Putting implicit standards in writing feels awkward until you realize how much silent confusion it eliminates. The document evolves (Zaides marks it “WIP” to signal flexibility), but its existence transforms guesswork into shared understanding. Stop expecting your team to infer what excellence means from vague feedback and inconsistent reactions. The worst thing you can do is leave people working hard in the wrong direction because you never told them where you’re headed.
— Manager.dev, 5m, #leadership, #management, #coordination
Echo of the Week
Echoes are AI agents in Steady that automatically gather and deliver work context to teams on a schedule – answering recurring questions about progress, capacity, and coordination so you stop burning hours assembling the same information manually.
Goals at risk gets you early warning when objectives start slipping. Each Monday, this Echo monitors all accessible goals and alerts you when any are marked as at-risk or off-track, including explanations of blocking challenges. It enables managers to intervene before slipping goals become irreversible problems. Because the best time to fix a derailing project is before everyone realizes it’s already off the rails.
Stop Drowning in “Work About Work”
Your team loses 21 hours per person, per week slogging through status meetings and hunting for context across chats, docs, and dashboards.
Steady’s AI agents eliminate this coordination tax by continuously delivering personalized guidance on what’s happening, what’s next, and what needs attention across the whole team.
Join the thousands of teams staying in sync, avoiding burnout, and moving 3X faster with Steady.
Learn more at runsteady.com.
