Steve Yegge is one of the sharpest minds in technology writing. And has been for twenty years. The Platforms Rant from 2011 is still cited constantly.

His latest piece is exceptional. The Anthropic Hive Mind is based on conversations with roughly 40 people at Anthropic, and it introduces something he calls the campfire model:

There is no waterfall. There is no spec. There is a prototype that simply evolves, via group sculpting, into the final product.

A living prototype - the “campfire” - sits at the center. The team gathers around it like people around a campfire. They shape it together. No silos or 18-month roadmap. Just the thing itself, being worked on by the people who are building it, in real time.

The documentation can still exist, and will still exist, but it’s now a byproduct of the work, not the work. The work is the agreement reached around the campfire. The alignment. We’ve spent decades in the greater PM/Dev/UX world confusing the documentation of work with the work itself.

Bias for action - the sequel

Action produces information. Paul Graham

The more you work in a campfire model, the more you realize how much of what we used to do was just waiting. The normal PM-UX-Dev was “punctuated” - you always had to stop and let some team catch up.

“We need to give the XYZ team a few days to update the artifact.”

Then you wait. Then you reconvene. Then you wait again.

Every pause is a gap where information dies. In the worst of cases, it’s where bad behavior festers.

Action produces information. And the campfire model is pure action. Paul Graham has it exactly right.

Cadence is king

Everyone has been a talking about cadence for a long time. The simple version:

• If you ship once a year, ship twice.
• Ship twice a year? Ship quarterly.
• Quarterly? Monthly.
• Monthly? Weekly.
• Weekly? Daily.

You get the idea.

This was all seen as a CI/CD problem but even in orgs that solve the code delivery problem, the barrier just shifted. In so many cases its not the code that is the problem - it’s the handoffs. AI has laid this all bare.

The answer is not a “daily standup” or “agile ceremony” to resolve process issues - it is a daily campfire to make the actual decisions. As a team.

You don’t need the long wait times because the teams don’t need to catch up. They are already “there.”

It makes sense in so many ways. Sports teams practice daily. Not because they’re behind but because that’s the expected cadence of competitive performance. Daily reps. Daily decisions. Daily feedback. No coach says “we’ll practice quarterly and review our strategy in Q3.” That would be insane. And yet, we thought this was normal, because it was better than it was in the on-prem era.

But now? All the administrivia has, or will be soon, automated away. It’s here. I don’t see going back.

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

We’re starting to see what “transformation” actually looks like in the age of AI. Not a two-year initiative with a steering committee and a change management consultant. The transformation is happening every single day or it isn’t happening at all.

(spoiler alert - the cottage industry of “transformation consultants” is in for a very rude awakening - and it can’t come to soon)

I can’t escape the idea that the secret to success - at a commercial software company anyway - is the willingness of your executive team to engage, every day, on the #1 priority. Such that it crowds ALL THE OTHER PRIORITIES out of everyone’s calendar.

I see a lot of teams that find this distasteful, that somehow this is micro-management. They harbor the (frankly: delusional) idea they can occasionally talk about a topic, among many, and the teams will internalize the priority and take action.

“Oh I told everyone that last quarter.”

In today’s WFH world, the vacuum is filled with THE DAILY CALENDAR. 30 minute slots that blot out everything.

And then these same execs wonder why nothing is moving very fast. Things aren’t getting accomplished. Or worse, the team is working on stuff that doesn’t seem all that valuable in hindsight.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this more clearly articulated than in Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. It’s an old book at this point (2002), but it’s more relevant than ever. I looked at the checklist and thought - damn, that’s it. That’s exactly it.

It’s a brave new week folks.

J.