Phil's library of resources

Advice

Great AI & ML fundamentals (49)

• anthropic.com - Tracing the thoughts of a large language model
• arxiv.org -
• bearblog.dev - Shape Rotation 101 An Intro to Einsum and Jax Transformers
• bpe.xyz - phenomenological-convergence
• byhand.ai - Matmul Flow ~ New Visualization Tool
• dwarkesh.com - Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute
• dwarkesh.com - Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
• evjang.com - As Rocks May Think
• github.io - A Dive into LLM Quantization
• github.io - How to Calculate LLM Model Parameter Size - Dense Model
• github.io - Performance Hints
• github.io - The Differences between Deep Research, Deep Research, and Deep Research
• github.io - The Importance of Diversity
• github.io - Transformers Laid Out
• horace.io - Making Deep Learning go Brrrr From First Principles
• How to Calculate LLM Model Parameter Size - MoE Model
• huggingface.co - Tensor Parallelism (TP) in Transformers 5 Minutes to Understand
• huggingface.co - The Smol Training Playbook The Secrets to Building World-Class LLMs - a Hugging Face Space by HuggingFaceTB
• interconnects.ai - 2025 Open Models Year in Review
• interconnects.ai - Opus 4.6, Codex 5.3, and the post-benchmark era
• interconnects.ai - What comes next with open models
• languagemodels.co - The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1
• latent.space - Experts Have World Models. LLMs Have Word Models.
• latent.space - How to Kill the Code Review
• latent.space - RLHF 201 - with Nathan Lambert of AI2 and Interconnects
• lenovo.com - Lenovo LLM Sizing Guide
• maartengrootendorst.com - A Visual Guide to LLM Agents
• maartengrootendorst.com - A Visual Guide to Mixture of Experts (MoE)
• maartengrootendorst.com - A Visual Guide to Quantization
• medium.com - Sparse Attention
• minimaxir.com - The Best Way to Use Text Embeddings Portably is With Parquet and Polars
• neutree.ai - Understanding LLM Inference Engines Inside Nano-vLLM (Part 1) - Neutree Blog
• nickyoder.com - Beyond Orthogonality How Language Models Pack Billions of Concepts into 12,000 Dimensions
• On the Biology of a Large Language Model
• quantamagazine.org - When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field An Oral History
• Reverse-mode automatic differentiation: a tutorial - Rufflewind's Scratchpad
• Synthetic Pretraining | Vintage Data
• The Next 1000x Cost Saving of LLM
• theverge.com - Is language the same as intelligence The AI industry desperately needs it to be
• Transformers the Google scientists who pioneered an AI revolution
• transistor.fm - Transcript 12 Director of Microsoft Research talks AI for Science - Chris Bishop - Chris Bishop
• turingpost.com - 🎙️Inside a Chinese AI Lab How MiniMax Builds Open Models
• Understand Autograd - A Bottom-up Tutorial
• Understanding LLM System with 3-layer Abstraction
• understandingai.org - The many masks LLMs wear
• vintagedata.org - Synthetic Pretraining Vintage Data 1
• vintagedata.org - Training as we know it will end Vintage Data
• What's the deal with mid-training? | Vintage Data
• You could have designed state of the art Positional Encoding

Great AI engineering (68)

• ably.com - How we built an AI-first culture at Ably
• ably.com - Realtime steering interrupt, barge-in, redirect, and guide the AI
• ably.com - What we learned from leaders building agentic AI at scale
• ably.com - Why orchestrators become a bottleneck in multi-agent AI
• Actual LLM agents are coming | Vintage Data
• addyosmani.com - Comprehension Debt - the hidden cost of AI generated code.
• AI Product Manager Playbook
• anthropic.com - Building Effective AI Agents
• anthropic.com - How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
• anthropic.com - Introducing Anthropic Interviewer
• appliedaiformops.com - Atlas Building an Autonomous Agent That Remembers
• appliedaiformops.com - What Building A Persistent AI Agent Taught Me About LLM Behavior
• auth0.com - Why Can't I Just Use an API. Because Your AI Agent Needs MCP
• bassimeledath.com - The 8 Levels of Agentic Engineering — Bassim Eledath
• bearblog.dev - How prompt caching works - Paged Attention and Automatic Prefix Caching plus practical tips
• bearblog.dev - My Experience With Claude Code After 2 Weeks of Adventures
• beehiiv.com - Vibe prototyping isn't solving problems. It's creating new ones.
• bicameral-ai.com - Why "just prompt better" doesn't work
• bytebytego.com - How Yelp Built “Yelp Assistant”
• chrlschn.dev - MCP is Dead; Long Live MCP!
• Claude Code & Codex Mobile & Web Client
• claudecodecamp.com - I'm Building Agents That Run While I Sleep
• cra.mr - Optimizing Content for Agents
• crawshaw.io - crawshaw - 2026-02-08
• cyber-omelette.com - The Abstraction Rises - The Cyber Omelette
• ddmckinnon.com - My 🌶 take on vibe coding for PMs
• Eval-driven development: Build better AI faster
• github.com - addyosmanigemini-cli-tips Gemini CLI Tips and Tricks
• github.com - andrej-karpathy-skillsCLAUDE.md at main · forrestchangandrej-karpathy-skills
• github.com - Verified Spec-Driven Development
• github.io - MCP is dead. Long live the CLI
• github.io - microgpt
• gravitee.io - Lessons Learned From Exposing Real APIs Through MCP
• How Cursor (AI IDE) Works
• hvpandya.com - Expose Your Design System to LLMs
• Implementing Distributed Tracing and Token Analytics in MCP Agents using OTel
• interconnected.org - Context plumbing
• langchain.dev - How to think about agent frameworks
• langchain.dev - MCP Flash in the Pan or Future Standard?
• latent.space - Why Anthropic Thinks AI Should Have Its Own Computer — Felix Rieseberg of Claude Cowork & Claude Code Desktop
• mckaywrigley.com - My Thoughts on Claude Opus 4.5
• medium.com - Agents vs. Workflows The Framework Founders Actually Need
• mikegchambers.com - Software 3.1 - AI Functions
• mmc.vc - Agentic Enablers The invisible hands shaping the agent economy
• OAuth's Role in MCP Security
• obsidian.md - Spec-driven development doesn't work if you're too confused to write the spec - deontologician - Obsidian Publish
• philschmid.de - Why (Senior) Engineers Struggle to Build AI Agents
• poehnelt.com - You Need to Rewrite Your CLI for AI Agents
• research.google - Towards a science of scaling agent systems When and why agent systems work
• semianalysis.com - Claude Code is the Inflection Point
• simonwillison.net - A quote from Will Larson
• simonwillison.net - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog
• simonwillison.net - AI should help us produce better code - Agentic Engineering Patterns
• simonwillison.net - Redgreen TDD - Agentic Engineering Patterns
• So you wanna build a local RAG?
• stavros.io - How I write software with LLMs - Stavros' Stuff
• substack.com - How to write a good spec for AI agents
• substack.com - My LLM coding workflow going into 2026
• The Levels of Agentic Coding
• tomjohnell.com - LLMs can be absolutely exhausting
• untangle.work - AI is great at writing code. It's terrible at making decisions.
• Viable Systems: How To Build a Fully Autonomous Agent
• Vibe coding - a tool for alignment
• x.com - Agent Harness is the Real Product
• x.com - How to stop your autoresearch loop from cheating
• x.com - Lessons from Building Claude Code How We Use Skills
• x.com - Thread by @deedydas
• x.com - Thread by @mattshumer_

Great AI strategy (49)

• A Realistic AI Timeline | Vintage Data
• a16z.news - Leaders, gainers and unexpected winners in the Enterprise AI arms race
• AGI is not a milestone
• AI as Normal Technology
• aienablementinsider.com - AI Consulting Firms Breaking the $4M Revenue Ceiling Barrier
• AINews Softbank, NVIDIA and US Govt take 2%, 5% and 10% of Intel, will develop Intel x86 RTX SOCs for consumer & datacenters
• Claude Report - State of Enterprise LLM Customization, Fine-Tuning, and Serving
• danielmiessler.com - The Great Transition
• Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
• darioamodei.com - Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology
• derekthompson.org - How to Sound Like an Expert in Any AI Bubble Debate
• higashi.blog - AI should only run as fast as we can catch up · Higashi.blog
• hvpandya.com - Large Companies Can't Operate at the Frontier
• jonready.com - Everyone in Seattle Hates AI — Jonathon Ready
• learningbyshipping.com - 238. Death of Software. Nah.
• lesswrong.com - Broad Timelines — LessWrong
• lmorchard.com - Grief and the AI Split
• lmorchard.com - Grief and the AI Split 1
• lucijagregov.com - The Future of AI
• medium.com - The Anthropic Hive Mind
• Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R&D
• My AI Adoption Journey
• notboring.co - World Models Computing the Uncomputable
• OCTO Idea Hubs
• On (Not) Feeling the AGI
• oneusefulthing.org - Management as AI superpower
• oneusefulthing.org - The Shape of AI Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients
• openrouter.ai - State of AI
• piie.com - Research on AI and the labor market is still in the first inning
• platformonomics.com - How will Oracle pay for its hyperscaler dreams?
• Product Market Fit Collapse from AI
• promp.td - It’s Always the Process, Stupid!
• Sam Schillace's Sunday Letters
• siddhantkhare.com - AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
• stratechery.com - An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About Accelerated Computing
• stratechery.com - Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
• substack.com - 3 Years of ChatGPT
• substack.com - A Lean Approach to AI Case to Withstand Existing Gaps in AI Adoption Strategies
• substack.com - Claude Opus 4.6 System Card Part 1 Mundane Alignment + MW
• substack.com - Clouded Judgement 1.23.26 - The Year of Multi-Modal
• substack.com - GPU Obsolescence is Complicated
• taranis.ie - LLMs are a failure. A new AI winter is coming.
• The Middle Innings of AI
• The Model is the Product | Vintage Data
• thealgorithmicbridge.com - How to Survive the AI Age A Concrete Guide
• thealgorithmicbridge.com - You Spent Your Whole Life Getting Good at the Wrong Thing
• TSMC Risk
• wreflection.com - AI's Dial-Up Era
• wreflection.com - Wrapping My Head Around AI Wrappers

Great communication (9)

• 5 steps to writing well
• Email like a boss
• Good product stories
• Managing up to executives
• operatorshandbook.com - Nailing the basics How to communicate effectively
• Rules for presentations
• substack.com - How to craft a political message
• Surround sound communication
• Tips for writing a great paper

Great decision making (16)

• 100 Mental Models to Make Intelligent Decisions
• 7 critical questions to ask
• 8 Steps to Solve a Problem
• Better Business Decision Making
• Brainwriting - a better way for a group to generate more ideas
• Connecting from values to a task
• donellameadows.org - Leverage Points Places to Intervene in a System
• Goals before principles before philosophy
• Good strategy understands affect, not just cognition - Vaughn Tan
• HBR - Preparing for Decision-Making Meetings
• Ideaflow
• Strategy is not the same as planning - Vaughn Tan
• Tasks - what they are, and how to break them down
• The Chilcot Checklist
• Understand, Identify, Execute
• What risks are worth taking - use Heilmeier's Catechism

Great effectiveness (21)

• Achieving More with Less Stress The Power of Intentional Planning
• benkuhn.net - No one can teach you to have conviction
• carlini.com - How to win a best paper award (or, an opinionated take on how to do important research)
• Creativity and Innovation
• hbr.org - The Making of a Corporate Athlete
• information-superhighway.net - On The Need For Understanding
• justinmath.com - Advice on Upskilling
• justoffbyone.com - The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
• Make sure people don't spend their efforts being helpless in new and inventive ways!
• On being wrong
• sharif.io - Willingness to look stupid is a genuine moat in creative work
• Slow Productivity
• substack.com - Revisiting Clarity of Thought
• substack.com - Want a better 2026. Set annual goals
• substack.com - What I learnt from 6 months of writing a newsletter
• swyx.io - How to Create Luck
• swyx.io - How to Thought Lead (2026)
• swyx.io - Learn In Public
• todoist.com - The Ivy Lee Method Focus Better with This 100-Year-Old Strategy
• vangemert.dev - "Nothing" is the secret to structuring your work
• What Makes Some People More Productive Than Others

Great goal setting and performance measurement (5)

• Goal setting for performance
• Guide to Microsoft level bands
• Microsoft's Approach to Performance & Development & Rewards
• S.M.A.R.T. system for setting goals and coaching your team to solve problems
• Setting metrics

Great leadership (52)

• 4 types of employee complaining - and how to respond
• another.rodeo - Feedback doesn't scale
• Ask for no, don’t ask for yes – Dan Moore!
• cate.blog - Getting More Strategic
• daeus.blog - Game Theory Patterns at Work
• Developing a team
• grahamyooll.com - Try to Take My Position The Best Promotion Advice I Ever Got - AGY
• hvpandya.com - Exec Presentations
• hvpandya.com - Leadership in Large Organizations
• hvpandya.com - Leverage in Large Organizations
• hvpandya.com - Systems, Stables and Stars
• kindel.com - Leading by Fitness Functions tig.log
• kindel.com - The Secret to Giving Feedback Without Triggering Defensiveness tig.log
• Leadership, 2 words at a time
• lemire.me - Why speed matters
• Microsoft Code Book - Mission, Culture, Principles
• mironov.com - What We Need in a VP of Product Management
• mironov.com - What’s A Vice President of Product Management
• Notes from MSFT OCTO Culture Conversation
• operatorshandbook.com - Nailing the basics How to collaborate cross-functionally
• operatorshandbook.com - Nailing the basics How to deliver high-quality work products
• operatorshandbook.com - Nailing the basics How to manage your bandwidth & prioritization
• Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners
• Questions for an effective 1-on-1
• randsinrepose.com - Become the Consequence
• randsinrepose.com - The Loop
• Seagull management
• staysaasy.com - How to Be a Senior Leader
• staysaasy.com - The Precise Language Of Good Management
• staysaasy.com - The Two Jobs of a CPO
• Stop Answering the Wrong Question Unlock Your True Work Happiness tig.log
• substack.com - 14 More lessons from 14 years at Google
• substack.com - 21 Lessons from 14 Years at Google
• substack.com - 21 Lessons from 14 Years at Google 1
• substack.com - Five personal productivity hacks from an Amazon Senior Manager
• substack.com - Handling Pressure Is a Skill Three Lessons from The Art of Learning
• substack.com - The Senior Manager’s Guide to AI From Hype to Real Impact
• substack.com - The Senior Manager’s Guide to AI From Hype to Real Impact - Part 2
• substack.com - The Senior Manager’s Guide to AI From Hype to Real Impact - Part 3
• surfingcomplexity.blog - Because coordination is expensive
• svpg.com - The VP Product Role
• The 5Ps Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor tig.log
• The Brad Smith rule about making mistakes
• The Mentor Manifesto
• The role of a manager at Microsoft
• Tips for hiring
• Tony Benn's 5 questions about democracy
• verticalized.co - Why and How to Build a Research Org
• When to escalate and what to do before you escalate
• Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?
• You need a high degree of confidence in low ego
• yusufaytas.com - Capacity Is the Roadmap

Great product making (51)

• 5 steps for product-led growth
• A Taxonomy of Tech Debt
• AI Product Building
• blackboxofpm.com - 7 Heuristics for being a Product Director
• blackboxofpm.com - Deadlines
• blackboxofpm.com - Product Management Mental Models for Everyone
• blackboxofpm.com - Ruthless Prioritization
• blackboxofpm.com - The Black Box of Product Management
• blackboxofpm.com - The First Principles of Product Management
• Brainstorm Questions Not Ideas
• Characteristics of an effective product team member
• chrbutler.com - What AI is Really For - Christopher Butler
• Complexity Has to Live Somewhere
• creatoreconomy.so - So What's Going to Happen to Product Management Anyway?
• ddmckinnon.com - Product Management at Meta vs. Google or My Take on How to Evaluate your {Google,Meta} Offer
• eleganthack.com - UX Is Your Moat (And You’re Ignoring It)
• Elon Musk's 5 product development guidelines
• Engineering vs. policy tensions (DALL·E and DSB)
• excel.holdings - Systems of Action and the Dominos Pizza Tracker Product Model
• Great Partnership Principles
• How to Run an Innovation Pipeline
• hvpandya.com - 16 Pieces of Design Wisdom
• hvpandya.com - My Framework for Delight
• IP Strategy
• itamargilad.com - 5 Ways Product Discovery Breaks Down (part 1)
• jeffgothelf.com - Storytelling An AI era survival skill for product managers
• jrothman.com - How Good is Your Backlog. How to Shape the Work for Product Success, Part 2
• jrothman.com - How Good is Your Backlog. Start with Ready Criteria, Part 1
• lukew.com - LukeW Agent Orchestration UI
• lukew.com - LukeW AI Enables As-Needed Software Features
• lukew.com - LukeW Durable Patterns in AI Product Design
• lukew.com - LukeW Finding the Role of Humans in AI Products
• lukew.com - LukeW More on Context Management in AI Products
• lukew.com - LukeW Showing the Work of Agents in UI
• medium.com - My preferred product management techniques and frameworks (for the internal platform product…
• medium.com - What Excellent Growth Teams See That Others Miss
• Notes on experimentation from the 2024 Microsoft Partner Forum
• openai.com - What makes a great ChatGPT app
• posthog.com - 8 learnings from 1 year of agents – PostHog AI - PostHog
• posthog.com - The hidden danger of shipping fast
• posthog.com - Why we killed our AI product assistant
• posthog.com - WTF does a product manager do (and why engineers should care)
• Product-Driven AI Research
• proofofconcept.pub - How Product Discovery changes with AI
• Showcases and Essentials
• Software safety vs. software security
• The Pocket Guide of Essential YC Advice
• The Startup Laws of Physics
• The tension between flexibility and protection
• Three Rules for Making a Company Truly Great
• Untitled

Great project management (11)

• 100 rules for NASA project management
• Canonical Everything
• How to run a season-based project
• How to run major projects
• NASA technology readiness levels (TRL)
• People and Process
• Systems thinking and decision making in organizations
• Taiichi Ohno's Principles for Waste
• Tasks - what they are, and how to break them down
• The 4 cores of clarity
• The difference between Simple, Complicated and Complex tasks

Great software engineering (18)

• apenwarr.ca - Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
• aresluna.org - Unsung heroes Flickr’s URLs scheme – Unsung
• benedict.dev - Closing the Software Loop
• cendyne.dev - A Vibe Coded SaaS Killed My Team
• heise.de - The Real Bottleneck Why Faster Coding Doesn't Speed Up Projects
• How I've run major projects
• How to organize a software architecture proposal document
• How To Write a Working Backwards Doc tig.log
• justinjackson.ca - Will Claude Code ruin our team
• mendral.com - What CI Actually Looks Like at a 100-Person Team
• oxide.computer - 576 - Using LLMs at Oxide RFD Oxide
• quint-lang.org - Reliable Software in the LLM Era
• seangoedecke.com - How I ship projects at big tech companies
• sinclairtarget.com - Negative Externalities of Gen-AI within Software Teams
• StartupCTOHandbook
• strongdm.ai - StrongDM Software Factory
• substack.com - When building becomes cheaper than specifying, everything changes
• understandlegacycode.com - Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase - Change Messy Software Without Breaking It

Great startups (26)

• 12gramsofcarbon.com - Tech Things SaaS is Dead, Long Live SaaS
• asmartbear.com - Creating space
• asmartbear.com - Profitable on day one!
• asmartbear.com - Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor
• asmartbear.com - The "Convergent" theory of finding truth in darkness
• asmartbear.com - The roadmap to ProductMarket Fit (PMF)… maybe
• bramjetten.dev - The One-Person Framework in practice
• fredkozlowski.com - Running a Business Means Contact With Reality
• hbr.org - Increasing Returns and the New World of Business
• linkedin.com - The Five Companies You Can Build in 2026 LinkedIn
• lukew.com - LukeW Small Teams Win, Again
• martinalderson.com - Has the cost of building software just dropped 90 percent
• medium.com - Welcome to the Wasteland A Thousand Gas Towns
• quarter--mile.com - Startup Equity 101 — Quarter Mile
• saastr.com - Our 20+ AI Agents and Their Moats Real But Weak
• substack.com - Enterprise SaaS Truisms, Revisited
• substack.com - How I Bankrupted Two Companies
• substack.com - One simple habit that will save your business
• substack.com - SaaS, widely misunderstood ($CSU.TO, $TOI.V, $ADBE, $UBER, $CRM)
• substack.com - Should Your Developer Company Go Open-Source
• substack.com - Venture Capital Doesn't Exist
• tanayj.com - Moats in the Age of AI
• thebootstrappedfounder.com - Future of Software Building on Human-Generated Data
• thestartupmanifesto.com - THE Startup Manifesto
• wquist.com - What TAM should actually tell you
• x.com - The Collapse Of Terminal Value - What Happens If AI Makes Every Moat Temporary

Great technical tips (21)

• A Visual Guide to Quantization
• Algorithms we develop software by
• BrianDouglas.ie - Sensible SQLite defaults
• Critical batch size in ML training
• Developer Philosophy
• fsck.com - Superpowers 5
• github.io - Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse
• Making Deep Learning go Brrrr From First Principles
• minimaxir.com - Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation
• Multi-armed bandits 20 lines of code that will beat AB testing every time
• noelberry.ca - Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
• Programming languages for startups
• Rules of Machine Learning from Google for Developers
• Simple, effective load balancing
• Technical strategy needs to be moored to business strategy
• The CRDT Dictionary: A Field Guide to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types - Ian Duncan
• The Twelve-Factor App
• The Unwritten Laws of Engineering at Stedi
• tiangolo.com - Concurrency and async await - FastAPI
• unc.edu - <h1>Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming<h1>
• variantsystems.io - Process-Based Concurrency Why BEAM and OTP Keep Being Right

Long reads for learning (18)

• albartlett.org - English transcript of Arithmetic, Population and Energy - a talk by Al Bartlett on the impossibility of exponential growth on a finite planet
• andyljones.com - Horses
• asimov.press - A Visual Guide to DNA Sequencing
• citriniresearch.com - THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS
• damninteresting.com - Dead Reckoning
• danluu.com - What to learn
• discovery.org - Metcalf’s Law and Legacy
• gfrm.in - Why We Stopped Using the Mathematics That Works
• nateliason.com - De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness
• Nine-Things-I-Learned-in-Ninety-Years
• On the Rationality of Deterring ASI — LessWrong
• scottsmitelli.com - You don't have to if you don't want to.
• substack.com - Revisiting Minsky’s Society of Mind in 2025
• The psychology of leakers
• thecreativeindependent.com - Multi-disciplinary artist Jack Rusher on the need to sustain your creative drive in the face of technological change – The Creative Independent
• thefuriousopposites.com - Grace Hopper's Revenge
• worksinprogress.co - How the world's first electric grid was built - Works in Progress Magazine
• writingsbyraykurzweil.com - the Law of Accelerating Returns. « the Kurzweil Library

Your best self (9)

• 103 bits of advice from Kevin Kelly
• 35 Simple Health Tips Experts Swear By
• 40 questions to ask yourself every year
• 6 life lessons from Marcus Aurelius
• Happiness
• How to learn
• substack.com - You Have More Time Than You Think — Here’s How I Found Mine
• swinburne.edu.au - How to unshrink clothes
• The Well-Lived Life