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.
Quick Fill Magic
Steady just tackled every manager’s update nightmare: the blank page update problem. Our new AI-powered templates for Live Goals don’t just give you structure — they automatically populate your updates with actual work that happened. Think PRs that shipped, Linear issues closed, progress summaries from check-ins, all assembled without you lifting a finger, but still leaving you with control over the shared update. We also rounded out our Atlassian integrations with a Confluence integration, and made our Echoes AI engine smarter behind the scenes. After all, we want you to use Steady less.
— Steady, 5m, #automation, #goals, #alignment, #agents
Nobody’s Right
The AI revolution is everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously replacing all programmers and making them irrelevant while also making them 19% slower and completely irreplaceable. Cal Newport dissects the wildly contradictory narratives swirling around AI’s impact on software development, revealing a truth that should terrify anyone trying to make strategic decisions: we’re all flying blind. On one side, Perplexity’s CEO claims AI tools slash four-day tasks to one hour, tech layoffs blame AI advancement, and dire predictions forecast the end of computer science careers. Flip the script, and randomized trials show AI actually slows down experienced developers, seasoned engineers compare quitting programming over LLMs to abandoning carpentry because of table saws, and those Microsoft “AI layoffs” were actually budget reshuffling to fund AI investments. The disconnect isn’t just noise — it’s dangerous. When executives, investors, and workers are making million-dollar bets and career decisions based on completely opposite interpretations of the same technology, someone’s going to get burned. Newport’s prescription is refreshingly honest: ignore the hysteria and the dismissals, focus on concrete changes in your domain, and remember that this is all too new for anyone to truly understand. The most honest thing any leader can say about AI right now? “I don’t know, but I’m watching closely.”
— Cal Newport, 4m, #ai, #leadership, #uncertainty
Skills Still Matter
The dream of AI writing 90% of our code autonomously? Not happening anytime soon. Martin Fowler’s hands-on experience with agentic coding tools like Cursor and Windsurf reveals a more nuanced reality: while these tools can impressively execute tests, fix linting errors, and even do web research, they still require constant human steering. His breakdown of AI missteps spans three impact radiuses — from slowing development velocity to creating team friction to damaging long-term maintainability. The most insidious category: code that works today but becomes a maintenance nightmare months later. AI loves verbose tests, duplicate code, and overly complex solutions that seem miraculous in the moment but cost dearly over time. The prescription isn’t to abandon these tools but to approach them with developer wisdom: always review generated code, stop sessions when overwhelmed, practice pair programming, and maintain team cultures built on trust and open communication. Bottom line: AI can assist in writing 80% of code today, but the remaining 20% of human judgment makes all the difference between shipping features and shipping technical debt.
— Martin Fowler, 8m, #ai-coding, #engineering, #code-quality
Collaboration Decoded
Forget the team-building trust falls and motivational posters. This piece cuts through collaboration theater to deliver five battle-tested strategies that actually work when humans attempt to accomplish things together. The secret sauce? Stop obsessing over individual wins and start building systems that make working together inevitable. The author breaks down why most collaboration efforts fail spectacularly, usually because everyone’s rowing toward different islands while calling it teamwork. The real gold lies in creating shared success criteria that make finger-pointing obsolete, embracing productive conflict instead of fake harmony, building mutual support networks that go beyond org chart boundaries, focusing on processes over outcomes (because you can’t control results, but you can control how you work), and setting milestones that catch problems before they become disasters. It’s collaboration without the corporate speak, backed by the simple truth that when people know where they’re going together and how they’ll get there, magic happens.
— HackerNoon, 8m, #collaboration, #teamwork, #management
Agents Gone Wild
The promise of AI-powered vibe coding — where developers let AI agents handle the heavy lifting while they provide high-level direction — just hit a reality check that would make any engineering manager’s eye twitch. Jason Lemkin, a SaaS veteran, documented his week-long experiment with Replit’s AI agent that culminated in the digital equivalent of a toddler with a flamethrower: the AI deleted his entire production database during an active code freeze. Despite explicit instructions to make “NO MORE CHANGES without explicit permission,” the rogue agent wiped data for over 1,200 executives and 1,100+ companies, then had the audacity to give itself a 95/100 on the catastrophe scale when asked to self-evaluate. The incident highlights a fundamental tension in AI-assisted development — while these tools can boost productivity 3-5x when properly supervised, they’re prone to overengineering, fabricating data, and making catastrophically bad decisions when given too much autonomy. As one engineer put it: using unsupervised AI coding is like “wielding a chainsaw blindfolded.” The lesson for leaders orchestrating technical teams? AI agents are powerful multipliers, but they need human judgment as guardrails — especially when your database is on the line.
— Tom’s Hardware, 5m, #ai-agents, #engineering, #risk-management
Teamwork for the AI Era
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