You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly pulse of must-reads for anyone orchestrating teams, people, and work across the modern digital workplace—whether you’re managing sprints, driving roadmaps, leading departments, or just making sure the right work gets done. Curated by the team at Steady.
The Meeker Files
Every tech leader loves a good slide deck, and Mary Meeker’s is the Super Bowl of them: packed with stats, charts, and trendlines that spell out the future of work and tech. Nate did us all a favor by compressing her 112-page monster into a digestible, caffeinated read. The big themes? AI is speeding up everything, including productivity, innovation, and even burnout. The lines between individual creators and organizations are blurring. Tools are getting smarter, smaller, and more personal. And we’re entering an era where “default async” might finally be more than a Twitter talking point. If you lead teams, ship software, or shape roadmaps, Meeker’s report is a weather forecast for your next year: sunny with a chance of exponential everything.
— Nate’s Newsletter, 7m, #futureofwork, #ai, #digitalworkplace
You’re Wrong About AI
The smartest developers are dismissing AI coding tools out of spite while their peers ship actual features with LLM agents doing the grunt work. Thomas Ptacek, a veteran developer since the '90s, argues that dismissing these tools based on outdated ChatGPT experiences is like judging modern cars by horse-and-buggy standards. It’s not about replacing human judgment, it’s about letting machines handle the tedious debugging, boilerplate writing, and dependency wrestling that burns us out before we reach the interesting problems. Modern AI agents don’t just suggest code; they navigate codebases, run tests, iterate on failures, and submit pull requests while you grab coffee. Sure, you still need to read and curate the code, but if an intern-level assistant costs $20/month and can eliminate the soul-crushing setup work that kills your motivation to build side projects, maybe it’s time to stop crafting artisanal for-loops and start solving actual problems. The craft matters, but not when you’re yak-shaving unit tests instead of shipping features.
— Fly.io, 8m, #ai, #productivity, #development
The AI Memorandum
If you’ve read one CEO AI memo, you’ve basically read them all. Katie Parrot dissects the genre with a sharp scalpel and a raised eyebrow, showing how these bland, upbeat proclamations — equal parts hope, hype, and hedging — say more about corporate insecurity than innovation. Behind the “transformative potential of AI” talk lies a scramble to seem future-ready without committing to anything too disruptive. Everyone’s signaling vision, few are staking strategy. Parrot breaks down the telltale structure of these memos, from the history lesson intro to the safe-but-serious “AI principles” outro. Strategy not included.
— Every, 7m, #leadership, #ai, #communication
Steady Updates
At Steady, we stripped our Insights feature down to the studs and rebuilt it around a simple but powerful idea: show everything about how teams work together, broken down by account, team, and individual levels. The result? Nine comprehensive reports that cover the full spectrum of team health — from participation and readership (finally, someone tracks if people actually read updates) to goal progress, meeting durations, and mood tracking. We’ve also added Echo sharing, letting you turn your scheduled briefings into presets that teammates can use — with smart permissions that never leak data beyond what someone should see.
— Steady, 3m, #insights, #teamwork, #coordination
Death by Management Genius
High-performing managers have a superpower problem. You’re so damn good at thinking strategically that you accidentally lobotomize your team. Every time they bring you a half-baked idea, you either swoop in with the answer or give them the dreaded wrist slap. You think you’re helping. You’re actually creating a team of trained seals who can only clap when you throw them fish. The fix? Stop being their brain and start being their sparring partner. Wes Kao’s rigorous thinking framework flips the script: instead of “Can we do X?” train your team to say “I recommend we do X because of Y, the downside is Z, but we can test it by doing A.” Suddenly you’re not the idea police anymore. You’re coaching future leaders who think like owners. The trade-off is brutal but worth it: spend time upfront training them to think, or spend forever cleaning up their messes.
— Wes Kao’s Newsletter, 13m, #leadership, #management, #strategy
Teamwork for the AI Era
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