Hey there, Luca here! This is our 200th edition of the Monday Ideas! 🎉🎊
To celebrate this milestone I want to experiment with some tweaks. Instead of our classic three ideas, today I am going to post:
🧵 One idea from a recent article I wrote.
🎙️ One idea from a recent podcast interview we did.
📚 A small digest of the best articles I have read this week (in the style of what I have been doing with Hybrid Hacker).
This should turn this Monday email into a weekly brief that gives you some food for thought and also keeps you posted about relevant stuff that is published outside of Refactoring.
I will include a poll at the end where you can rate this edition so I know what you think about it!
Brought to you by Unblocked! 🔳
It’s not a secret that I am a big fan of what the guys at Unblocked are building — to me they are the authority about giving good context to AI agents.
I interviewed their founder last year and we also wrote a full guide together, which is one of our most popular articles ever.
Unblocked gives coding agents the organizational knowledge to generate mergeable code without the back and forth. It pulls context from across your engineering stack, resolves conflicts, and cuts the rework cycle by delivering only what agents need for the task at hand.
1) 🧵 The rise of slave software
There are a lot of situations in which comparing LLMs to people makes for a good analogy. One way LLMs differ from humans, though, is that they’re perfectly fine doing boring, repetitive work. All day, every day.
This changes the scope of human work, but I believe also the scope of software itself.
There is an awful lot of automations and internal tools that are patched together with Zapier, n8n, custom code here and there, that I suspect just aren’t worth building anymore when you can tell an agent “every hour, go here, copy this, and paste it there”.
Granted, deterministic software would be more efficient for some of these tasks, but the cost of building it is dramatically higher than a one-line instruction in a chat. Even in the age of AI-generated software, nothing beats just telling a slave to do the thing.
Also, LLMs can handle ambiguity in a way that regular software can’t (even if written by AI). For a lot of tasks, they can just wing it, and things more or less work.
Example: I wanted to export my ~10,000-note Notion workspace to markdown files for years, but the complexity always stopped me. Earlier this month OpenClaw did it perfectly, writing scripts for API calls but also improvising the tricky parts, figuring things out on the go. Just like I would have done manually, except that would have taken me weeks.
So I believe there’s a growing class of problems for which we won’t write software anymore. We’ll just throw an AI slave at them.
I wrote more about my experience with OpenClaw and personal agents in this recent piece:
2) 🎙️ Be skeptical of polarities
Two weeks ago I interviewed Richard Hughes-Jones, a professional tech coach with 20+ years of experience.
One of the ideas that stuck the most with me is what he called polarity work: helping leaders see that what feels like an either/or choice is actually a both/and situation. A few classic examples:
Empowerment vs directness — leaders may think they can either empower their teams or have strong opinions about what to do. In most situations, you can find ways to do both at once.
Team’s needs vs business’ needs — seeing these two as being at odds is usually a limiting belief that prevents you from finding true good solutions.
You can find the full interview below 👇 and on Youtube and Spotify
3) 📚 Weekly readings
Here are the top three articles I have read:
Finding Comfort in the Uncertainty 🥇
8 min • by Annie Vella
Annie attended the future of software development retreat, hosted by Martin Fowler and Thoughtworks, and reported back on her thoughts, which I really enjoyed. I love the eight themes she extracted and how she framed them.
GNU and the AI Reimplementations 🥈
9 min • by antirez
Antirez implicitly comments on recent controversies about AI reimplementations (1, 2) by looking at examples from the past. I loved the historical perspective and also the new mental model he proposes: what matters now is design, novelty, and craft, not just the code itself.
Prioritize Relatively 🥉
2 min • by Boz
Super short post in Boz’s signature style, about how you should not prioritize things in isolation — but only prioritize them against each other.
And that’s it for today! If you are finding this newsletter valuable, subscribe to the full version!
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See you next week!
Luca