Week 27 · 2025-06-30 → 2025-07-06 · 13 newsletters

Speed, Slop, And Process

ai-and-craft · process-as-brand · holiday-week-grace-notes

The week of July 4. Fifteen emails across seven days, most of them short. No dominant news story, no breaking macro thread. Two real through-lines emerged from the inbox: a cluster of writers wrestling with what AI is doing to software craft, and a smaller cluster arguing that how a studio works is the actual brand. Everything else was holiday-week grace notes, which is the right energy for a short week.

AI and Craft: Slop, Speed, and the Poaching Wars

The week's strongest cluster was four writers circling the same question from different angles: what does serious work look like when AI can produce a passable version of it in thirty seconds?

The slop problem hit the moderators first. Jacob Voytko at Client/Server opened the week with the news that /r/golang had expanded its AI policy to cover linked projects, not just posts. The new rule does not ban AI-generated code, but it does ban posting it for "review or feedback" if the human input is minimal. The examples Voytko catalogs are damning in a specific way: a "production ready" high-speed logger that could not be benchmarked because it had a memory leak, a 7000-line message queue ostensibly written in a single commit, a monitoring tool with astroturf comments. The throughline is not that the code is bad. It is that the code is so easy to produce that posting it for human review wastes the reviewer's time. That is a different objection than the usual one, and it is the more interesting one.

The other end of the spectrum is the AI-native engineer. Addy Osmani at Elevate made the optimistic case: an AI-native engineer treats the model as a junior pair-programmer available 24/7, asks of every task whether AI could do it faster or differently, and uses the freed time for higher-level problem solving. The framing is fine but the unspoken tension with Voytko's piece is loud. The /r/golang moderators are dealing with exactly the population Osmani is describing, except those engineers are skipping the "higher-level problem solving" step and going straight to publication. The AI-native ideal and the AI-slop reality are not opposites. They are the same workflow at different skill levels.

The bridge between the two is Carly Ayres on speed. Her Good Graf piece "Taste at speed" pushed back on the increasingly fashionable position that slowness is the only honest response to AI. Ayres surfaces an exchange between Marc Mueller (one half of Danger Testing, who proposed a "speed propaganda account" for shipping AI work in thirty-minute bursts) and Nan Yu (Head of Product at Linear, who works in fine-grained systems). Yu offered the useful distinction: there are two kinds of speed, the speed at which someone gets good, and the speed at which someone ships. The pottery class analogy at the top of the piece is the old one, but Ayres lands the right modern application: quality emerges through repetition, and AI compresses the cost of each rep. The slop posts on /r/golang are people doing one rep and stopping. The AI-native engineer Osmani describes is someone doing thirty reps and learning.

Meanwhile the labor market priced the tension. Voytko's second piece of the week, on Meta's OpenAI raid, covered the Zuckerberg superintelligence team announcement and the $100M-per-year offers Sam Altman flagged on his brother's podcast. Mark Chen's "someone has broken into our home and stolen something" line is the quote everyone used, but Voytko's better move is the comparison to the late-2010s self-driving talent war. The Chauffeur engineers at Google demanded startup-style compensation, got it, and the industry spent the next decade discovering that the problem was harder than the talent premium implied. That is the right historical analogy to carry into the current poaching cycle.

The take: the four pieces together describe a profession sorting itself in real time. The /r/golang policy and the AI-native engineer essay are the same story told from opposite ends. The Meta poaching spree is the financial markets pricing the disagreement. The work that survives this sort will not be the work that is slowest or the work that is fastest, but the work where the human is doing thirty reps and learning, in Ayres's frame. The rest is going to get moderated.

Process Is Brand: Two Studios Building From The Inside

A smaller but cohesive cluster came from two writers arguing the same point: how you work is what you sell.

Christopher Dowd at AI Residency ran "Process is brand," a piece anchored by his college coach's "how you do anything is how you do everything" maxim and four case studies of organizations where the process is the brand: MSCHF (the viral art collective behind Big Red Boots and Tax Heaven 3000), a dev platform, a restaurant, and a global macro hedge fund. The MSCHF detail is the one to keep: brainstorm twice a week for one hour, top ideas get written up, the senior team filters for goals and feasibility ("will we get sued?"), and surviving ideas sit in an idea pool untouched for three months. Ideas that fail the test of time get removed. That is a real process, not a vibe.

Carly Ayres's second piece of the week, on Design Business Company, made the same argument from the agency side. DBCo, founded by Judson Collier, Stewart Scott-Curran, and Jordan Egstad (all formerly in-house at Instrument and Loom), is selling not a brand but a "brand data graph": Construct, their core tool, connects identity, UI, copy, and code so changing a variable updates everything from decks to specs. The old agency model ("build the brand system, hand it off, walk away") optimized for the launch moment. DBCo is optimizing for the eighteen months after, when the team has grown and the system needs to move.

The take: the two pieces land on the same point from different industries. The brand is no longer the deck handed over at the end of the engagement. The brand is the operating system the team uses every day, and the studios that ship that operating system are the ones that survive. Dowd and Ayres are running the same argument because the argument is correct.

Holiday-Week Grace Notes

The rest of the week was the right kind of light reading for a short week. Ben Kassoy at a strawberry spinning like a dreidel opened with a scholarship-sponsorship pitch for his Future Castles creative writing workshop, naming a former coworker who had recently funded a scholarship for a laid-off student. Maggie at more info than you needed launched her Substack with the format announcement (art-trade analysis at the start of each calendar month, astrology at the start of each astrological month) and the only acknowledged opening of the week ("I didn't want to start a Substack, but it sort of seems inevitable if you're a writer"). Julie Zhuo at The Looking Glass ran "Unsent Letter #11," another in her series of private-form pieces.

JJ Chou's #100, 手機改變了生活 reflected on how phones have changed family breakfast at a Hong Kong dim sum spot, replacing paper queue numbers and handwritten orders with a single sequential list. Piera Luisa Gelardi at Noomalooma ran a summer play-supplies gift guide, organized into Picnic Pick Me Ups, Plein Air Play Station, Sandy Shenanigans, and Movement and Mayhem, with a respectable share of AAPI-women-owned and LGBTQIA-women-owned business callouts. Aditya Bhargava at Ducktyped ran a working Terraform walkthrough for AWS networking, the kind of post that earns its slot in any week.

The longer pieces in this bucket: Sean Ellis at Growth with Sean Ellis on the energy Brazilian audiences bring to growth talks. Investing Insights at Investment Books on Long Term Capital Management as a parable about A+ intelligence in one field versus B+ intelligence in several, the Buffett line ("to make money they didn't have and didn't need, they risked what they did have and did need") doing the heavy lifting. Zach Everson at 1100 Pennsylvania closed the week with a holiday-short edition on Trump Media beta-testing an international rollout of Truth+ as the administration slashes Voice of America, plus the New Jersey liquor-permit ruling for Trump's golf clubs.

The take: the grace notes earned their slot this week because the rest of the inbox was sparse. In a denser week, most of these would have been cut. In this one, Bhargava's Terraform post and Everson's dispatch from 1100 Pennsylvania were the two pieces in the bucket worth saving.

Three Takeaways from the Week

The AI-and-craft conversation has moved past "can it do the work" and into "what counts as the work now." The /r/golang policy, the AI-native engineer essay, and Carly Ayres on speed are three writers describing the same sorting, and the sort is happening at the moderator level, the individual-engineer level, and the studio level all at once. The honest answer is that the people doing thirty reps and learning are the ones who get to keep calling it craft. Everyone else is going to get filtered.

The process-as-brand argument is correct and the studios that have figured this out are pulling ahead. MSCHF's three-month idea pool and DBCo's Construct tool are different implementations of the same idea: the brand is the operating system, not the artifact. If you are running a brand or design studio in late 2025 and you are still selling decks, the next eighteen months are going to be harder than you think.

If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest Carly Ayres on Taste at Speed for the cleanest frame on what speed means in the AI era, Jacob Voytko on /r/golang drawing a line for the most honest read on what AI slop is actually doing to software communities, and Christopher Dowd on Process Is Brand for the argument every studio operator needs to be running with their team. A short week, three pieces worth keeping.