Fresh Reads

I drew this week’s cartoon thinking about the promise and pitfalls of “vibe coding.” Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI and Tesla AI alum, famously coined the term last year, defining it as “a new kind of coding … where you fully give in to the vibes … and forget that the code even…

I drew this week’s cartoon thinking about this strange period of figuring out how to market to the agents that (I almost wrote “who”) are increasingly shopping on customers’ behalf. Morgan Stanley estimates that AI shopping agents could account for 10% to 20% of US e-commerce by…

I drew this week’s cartoon thinking about two common innovation pitfalls: feature creep and over-serving the market. A company starts by meeting a customer need. Then it adds features to chase more profitable customers upmarket. Eventually it outstrips what the average customer…

I drew this week’s cartoon inspired by the explosion in AI agents at work and home, and the simultaneous reluctance to let them run. Even as AI agents are starting to hit a tipping point (such as Meta Muse outpacing even the meteoric adoption curve of ChatGPT), there’s a trust…

As an HBS student, I was once assigned to be the handler of founding Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale for the afternoon at a school tech conference. Jim was particularly well-known for his “Barksdaleisms” — his colorful proverbs on how to run a business. One of the Barksdaleisms that…

I’ve been researching an upcoming international trip and gave an email address at one point. I was overwhelmed by the aggressive marketing tactics that came next: a string of offers all designed to rush me through the classic marketing funnel stages as quickly as possible. They…

When chasing metrics that reward any type of AI adoption, it’s easy to miss the workslop tax that is being paid underneath the surface. Last year, BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab introduced the phenomenon of workslop: “Workslop is AI-generated content that looks…

I’ve always liked this colorful expression to describe the critical, anxious inner monologue that can drive our thinking. For anyone doing creative work, the committee is a barrier. It can stymie whatever creative ideas we’re working on. It’s hard to fully mute the committee,…

I drew this cartoon thinking about how much panic and FOMO has been setting the pace and tenor of AI adoption. No one wants to be left behind. And that’s led to some of the most disjointed decisions we’ve seen, like banking on business growth by laying off staff and assuming AI…

This cartoon was partly inspired by the whiplash approach to AI writing at LinkedIn. A few years ago, they indiscriminately pushed AI tools, offering to draft a full post after typing just 30 words. Surprise, surprise, this resulted in a lot of AI slop on the platform. A recent…