You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly pulse of must-reads for anyone orchestrating teams, people, and agents 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.
Unmetered
Revolut cut its AI coding bill by about 90 percent by running an open-weight model on its own GPUs, but the big win came after engineers stopped rationing. David Abitbol, who runs ops and infrastructure there, says the company first rolled out AI coding tools to about 2,000 engineers with strict budgets, because some were spending $1,000 to $10,000 a month with little to show for it. Self-hosting GLM, a Chinese open-weight model, was far cheaper than Claude Code or Codex. Once tokens were effectively unlimited, engineers pointed AI at debugging and Jira and Confluence tickets, not just new code. That’s where the biggest gains came from. “You no longer have to save your tokens for the end of the quarter or the most difficult task.”
— The Register, 4m, #ai, #engineering, #costs
Faster chaos
When a team looks slow, the problem is often the organization around it. In 2017, Jekaterina Jegoscenko took over a development team everyone thought was underperforming. The engineers were good, but the system around them wasn’t. Requests arrived by email, spreadsheet, and hallway conversation, nobody owned priorities, and Scrum meetings happened without anyone remembering why. So she fixed the system. She gave requests one way in, took over prioritization so developers stopped negotiating with five managers, and showed stakeholders working software instead of status reports. Trust came back, and so did the team’s motivation. Nearly a decade later, she sees the same problems in teams that use AI: unclear ownership and conflicting priorities. The difference is speed. Developers once spent days building a request nobody prioritized. An agent does it in minutes. “If we automate execution without improving decision-making, we risk producing the wrong things at a much higher speed,” she writes.
— Jekaterina Jegoscenko, 12m, #management, #process, #ai
Tweak paradox
Teams now write code faster than they build trust, and Kent Beck says that gap is where projects fail. Trust comes from slow, mostly invisible work: testing, review, pairing, and shared understanding. AI sped up the visible part, the code, and teams now give up those practices to move faster alone. Beck’s main point is what he calls the “tweak paradox.” The bigger a change, the less you can trust it, and trust drops much faster than size grows. AI makes it easy to produce big changes. Trust demands small, verified steps. He also warns against the pull toward everyone working alone with their own agent: “it is a huge mistake.” His answer is to slow down in the right places, because that’s how you go faster.
— Kent Beck, 3m, #engineering, #ai, #teams
The decisions are the job
When agents write the code, an engineering leader’s value is in the decisions around it. LeadDev’s Lucy Adams asked three engineering leaders which skills matter most now. “AI dramatically reduces the cost of producing an answer, but it hasn’t reduced the cost of making the wrong decisions in production,” says Sreenivasa Reddy of BNSF Railway. Checking what AI produces is real work that rarely shows up in metrics. Juniors are losing the grunt work they used to learn from, so Stanford’s Matt Vassar says to let them write the tests an agent has to pass. Former Yahoo manager Tiffany Jachja fights the urge to jump in and fix things by asking what she’s taking from someone else. When nobody knows what the team looks like in five years, Reddy says to share what you know, what you don’t, and what would change the plan. “Clarity is not the same thing as certainty.”
— LeadDev, 4m, #leadership, #management, #ai
Floppy disks
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has made the floppy disk his symbol for everything wrong with American air traffic control. Now he’s announced that the FAA is retiring them. A new digital dashboard puts weather alerts, equipment outages, and airspace changes on one screen. “Good news America: floppy disks are out, 21st century tech is in,” he said. The dashboard reaches 435 facilities by the end of 2028, under a contract that dates to 2020. But Andrew Hawkins says the technology is the easy part: the system is still short thousands of certified controllers, and the ones it has are burning out. People are the hard part.
— The Verge, 4m, #systems, #people, #modernization
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.
Cross-team highlights. Product needs to know what engineering shipped. Marketing needs to know what product is planning. The usual options are sitting in another team’s meetings or decoding updates written for specialists. This Echo sends a plain-language summary of any team’s last 30 days, organized into five themes, once a month. Product managers can explain what shipped without reading commit messages, marketing gets the story behind a release without the sprint notes, and team leads see a dependency on another team before it turns into a wait.
The human-agent teamwork OS
Teams rely on two coordination loops to function: a big-picture loop connecting plans to progress, and a ground-level loop keeping teammates in sync.
Running those loops was already a marathon of meetings, chat threads, dashboards, and manual toil. Pile on flatter orgs, exponential output, and AI agents shipping 24/7 — the old way can’t keep up.
Steady removes the coordination bottleneck by running both loops for you. Working in the background, Steady distills updates and activity into targeted context for everyone on the team — human and agent alike. Full visibility, tight alignment, zero overhead.
The outcome: high-performing teams that deliver the right work, not just more of it.
Learn more at runsteady.com.