Hey, Luca here! Welcome to a new edition of the 💡 Monday Ideas 💡 — ideas and readings to start the week on the right foot.
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Back to this week’s ideas!
🎲 Consider the onboarding roulette
At Graphite, every day a random employee gets their account deleted.
So the next time they open the product, they go through the full onboarding flow again: link repos, tune settings, the whole thing. Greg Foster, Graphite’s CTO, calls it the onboarding roulette: basically everyone feels onboarding roughly once a month.
They do this because onboarding is often a massive product blind spot. You test it once, maybe two years ago, and then never again, while new users keep hitting it every day.
Instead, when the team has to onboard regularly, rough edges show up fast, and get easily polished.
Greg said it got love and hate when he first introduced it, but now it’s mostly love, and the whole onboarding now only takes about three minutes.
Of course, your mileage may vary: you probably should not delete accounts if you are building a hospital system! But the principle holds: whatever your users do frequently, your team should do frequently too.
Maybe that is:
Signing up with a fresh account once a quarter, or
Going through your own support flow when something breaks, or
Using your mobile app on a slow connection
The point is to design a process so the team feels the same friction users feel, regularly.
I wrote more about this in the full piece 👇
💡 Make everyone share an AI surprise
When I spoke with Lara Hogan a couple of months ago, she introduced me to what she calls AI “Aha” meetings.
Every week, or every other week, the whole team shares something they learned about AI. A win, a failure, a surprise, or just something weird. And everybody has to share, managers included: nobody gets to skip.
In spirit, this is similar to a postmortem, just lighter and more often. People share knowledge, figure out patterns, and learn what works and doesn’t work.
Frequency matters because what someone figures out this week about an AI tool can become stale next week. If the team does not have a tight loop, people keep working from last month’s outdated instincts.
I loved this idea and we have even implemented our own version in the Refactoring Community, called the AI Club.
You can find the full conversation with Lara here 👇
📚 Weekly Readings
Finally, here are the best articles I have read this week:
🥇 Fences, not Sandboxes
13 min • by Steve Yegge
Steve spent ten weeks running ~50 agents on Fable-class models to ship his game, and... they grew a legal system! This is a very interesting write-up, as always with everything Steve writes.
🥈 Stealing Blame
3 min • by Aviv Ben-Yosef
Do you steal blame? When a project blows up, the easy move is to explain why it wasn’t your fault. Great leaders, instead, look for their share of blame. That buys you the truth: people talk more when they know someone has their back. Great short piece by Aviv.
🥉 PostgreSQL for Everything.
7 min • by Raphael Bauer
Gentle reminder that we don’t need fancy tech for most stuff. Postgres can do an awful lot these days, and most people are not aware of it.
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See you next week!
Luca
The post on Fences, not Sandboxes is the most excited I've been for AI in use in a long time. It is making me rethink how I approach using agents and I'm not using anywhere near as much, but the principles and concepts are foundational, loved it.