Will Larson

*Good 😅

Could point! This probably does exist somehow already

Yeah, so you can imagine another stage in this process of summarizing all rfcs to extract problems, but I’m more specifically looking for a pattern we could scale across many functions, eg compliance feedback, security feedback, etc

Any good patterns for loading a Notion page as modifiable prompt to respond to other Notion pages and Slack messages? Eg as a simple example you could imagine I want to write architecture guidelines and then use that to comment on RFCs.

Is this just Zapier?

I love your post!

Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pus…

New post up, with a bunch of thoughts on what drives me personally, and my own 40-year career (h/t @lethain.com).

I have a pretty unusual life story. But one of the reasons I love the tech industry so much is how common unusual stories like mine have historically been.

charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...

Will Larson — Executive Runtime Podcast I'm thrilled to welcome Will Larson, Chief Technology Officer at Carta and a thought leader whose work has shaped how many of us think about engineering leadership. Will is the author of three influen...

Did my first podcast in some time as I start ramping up a bit around getting started as new CTO at Imprint and also getting close to releasing next book!

Podcast up at www.executiveruntime.show/episodes/04-...

I think programming languages are already pretty exhaustively represented in the training sets, although it certainly varies language by language, and providing more detailed in-context learning is usually preferable in my experience.

AI Companion / Generating Systems Models Crafting Engineering Strategy has a chapter on systems modeling along with a number of examples. Those examples focus on using the lethain/systems python library to generate models using a Jupyter not...

Have six (draft, unedited) chapters of my upcoming book exploring this idea in a bit more detail!

craftingengstrategy.com/aic/generate...

What is the competitive advantage of authors in the age of LLMs? Over the past 19 months, I’ve written Crafting Engineering Strategy, a book on creating engineering strategy. I’ve also been working increasingly with large language models at work. Unsurprisingly, th...

Full piece at lethain.com/competitive-... going into the concept a bit more deeply.

Over the last year, as I've spent more time working with LLMs to power product features, I've also been thinking about how LLMs impact me as a long-form author. Of the ideas I've had, I'm particularly interested in the idea of building, and selling, books as "datapacks" for LLMs.

Part of this project that I'm excited about is also releasing an LLM-optimized version of the book designed to be throw into an Claude/ChatGPT project as in-context learning, which I'm working with O'Reilly to distribute. Not available yet, but you ca see use examples on website!

Crafting Engineering Strategy

You can already read the full, unedited version of the book online at craftingengstrategy.com (most of those have also come out on my blog over the past 18 months as I wrote)

Still only part way through the editing process, but excited to announce Crafting Engineering Strategy, my upcoming book with O'Reilly on engineering strategy coming later this year (sometime Q4).

My desk setup in 2025. Since 2020, I’ve been working on my desk setup, and I think I finally have it mostly pulled together at this point. I don’t really think my desk setup is very novel, and I’m sure there are better ways...

My bi-decade update on my desk setup 😂 Finally found a dock that lets me swap from windows desktop with dedicated GPU to OSX laptop with a single thunderbolt cable!

lethain.com/desk-setup-2...

This is a fascinating thread. And it has lots of my favorite thing: details.

I could give a shit about people who pounce online, flaming on and on about how wrong I am.

I love it when people reply with details about their very different experience.

The details give it heft. I can learn from them.

Coordination between company facilities teams and building’s janitor teams on how to clean rooms

Hah, I've heard of a few companies that did something similar! I don't think the _intent_ is wrong, but I do think it might be a lot more direct to educate the folks not sharing the space effectively.

Looking for startup to angel invest in that solves problem of chairs being routinely positioned to block video cameras in office meeting rooms.

(I've tried petitioning to remove chairs from rooms, but this innovation has met substantial resistance, so we need to innovate here.)

I respect you for that, but cannot join you lol

Each time I open LinkedIn I pray I don’t somehow accidentally click on the brain teaser game and become shamed forever off the internet

This time experimenting with MCP server for generating and running systems models ( github.com/lethain/syst... ). I think it's pretty wild how well this works, especially the tool to inject domain-specific language usage documentation into the context window.

Yeah… this is what I believe but if you told me I was wrong I wouldn’t argue too much 😂

Good question. I’m not sure! I think my mail is in a good spot at this point after doing the cleanup.

The bulk unsubscribe is a really nice feature imo, and if anything brought me to buy something like this it might be that.

(Or I've created a complex, provably false, mythology to explain why it seemed to only work that one time and not the other five times I tried it.)

Maybe the biggest non-documented learning is that you _can_ do things like "in:inbox before:2025/1/1" and then "select all" and "archive" in GMail, but as best I can tell from repeated attempts it only seems to actually work if you leave the window open. even though the messaging doesn't imply that

How to filter out old email from inbox Every few years I take a pass at reducing the chaos in my personal inboxes. There are simply too many emails to deal with, and that generally leads to me increasingly failing to follow up on important...

Got to zero inbox on my personal email address(es) for the first time in a decade or so. This was mostly (1) declaring bankrupt on anything older than 6 months, (2) unsubscribing/filtering spammy stuff, and (3) setting up a transient tag for emails I want to *briefly* see lethain.com/filter-old-g...

*image descriptions* could be better, not images

Another writing workflow tool I've found useful is using LLM API to describe images. Here's is an example of script that replaces empty image descriptions with reasonably good ones. To extent the images could be better, it's b/c my prompt needs some work
gist.github.com/lethain/9c5e...

GitHub - lethain/library-mcp: MCP server for operating on Markdown knowledge bases MCP server for operating on Markdown knowledge bases - lethain/library-mcp

Threw together an MCP for navigating Markdown knowledge bases (e.g. recursive folders with markdown files with markdown headers). Very basic, and very vibe-coded, but works well and interesting learning experience

github.com/lethain/libr...