Weekend Reading List — 14/03/2026
Have a great weekend.
Links
“Tacit Knowledge and the SaaSpocalypse” - Chris Walker. The forward-deployed-engineer phenomenon is really just a cool re-branding of what we’ve always known: being close to customers is the best way to build great software. Building great enterprise products is about understanding (and attempting to codify) the implicit promises, understandings and processes that make up how a complex organisation works. The only way you can really get this context is to get out of the building. As Tyler Cowen says, “context is that which is scarce”. If it was easy to get, everyone would go and get it.
“What’s the point of managers?” - Hilary Gridley. There’s a lot of hype around which jobs we lose to AI first, and it seems there’s a lot of consensus that “management” is in a vulnerable position. The idea being, ditch management and insteaed arm a small team of “Super ICs” with AI and let them cook. But great management (which maybe is the wrong word) was never about doing the work!
“White collar goes blue” - Anu Atluru. Fascinating piece on how what happens to the “laptop class” as AI owns more and more knowledge work. Raises many fascinating questions: what does labor law (and the social contract of work) look like in an AI-dominated knowledge economy? Does white collar work start to look more like blue collar (stricter team hierarchy—apprentice vs artisan)? Does AI break the traditional “flat org” structure in tech?