Is there one link, story or idea that stopped you this week… and made you think, “someone else needs to see this”?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Just Evil Enough, Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I made a simple pact years ago. Once a week, each of us would share one link with the others… something we genuinely believed the other two had to see. No trend-hunting… no performance. Just six ideas exchanged with intent. What started as a small ritual between curious friends became Six Links That Make You Think.

These are the six links we passed to one another this week… take your time with them…

• Pepsi Once Made A Deal For Warships With The Soviet Union – Daniel Ganninger – Knowledge Stew. “My partner is reading a book on the global extraction economy, a shadowy network of brokers who are seemingly above the law and apparently behind much of what we wrongly call the free market today. She started cackling loudly mid-chapter the other day, and when I asked her what was up, she replied, ‘did you know Pepsi was one of the world’s largest naval powers?’ She’s not prone to exaggeration, so I looked it up, and sure enough, with the ruble in free-fall, PepsiCo owned 17 diesel-powered attack submarines, a frigate, a destroyer, and a cruiser. The ships were quickly scrapped… but wow.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The West Forgot How To Make Things. Now It’s Forgetting How To Code – Denis Stetskov – From The Trenches. “The US forgot how to make a key classified ingredient in its nuclear arsenal, then spent tens of millions having to relearn it. Now, argues Denis Stetskov, an era of AI dependency will lead to a similar loss of knowledge – but this time, it’ll be about software itself. When AI makes things easy, our skills atrophy, and nobody can rebuild the civilization stack on which we all rely.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• From IDEs To AI Agents With Steve Yegge – The Pragmatic Engineer – YouTube. “Steve Yegge is a crusty and famous grandee of the software engineering world, and once wrote a famous article arguing that if you didn’t learn the assemly language, you couldn’t be a great software engineer. After a deep dive, he now believes that if engineers are still writing code they are doing it wrong. It’s hard to overstate how fast things are changing at the edge of software development, where swarms of agents are writing code and shipping product.” (Hugh for Alistair). 
• Breaking: Software Work Still Difficult – The Aboard Podcast. “I’ve been building a new company over the last year or so, and see every day the difference between ‘AI makes software building easy’ (which is true) and ‘building great software with AI is still incredibly difficult’ (also true). One of the best discussions of this fact I’ve heard.” (Hugh for Mitch). 
• Why Creativity Will Matter More Than Code – Kevin Rose And Anish Acharya (A16Z) – Kevin Rose – YouTube. “There is so much texture and nuance in this conversation that you will pull from. It feels like a real a signal for what’s happening right now… a shift from “having ideas” to actually making things in real time (like you are doing). They are right, the cost of building has collapsed… one person can now design, prototype, launch, and even monetize without the old requirements (including a lot of capital to find and build an engineering team). That’s the real story. We’ve moved from a world where you needed funding to prove something… to one where you prove something and then get funding… or skip it entirely. What’s wild is how quickly that proof can translate into value… a product gets traction, a community forms, and suddenly you’re staring at a $50M valuation built on momentum, not just potential. As someone who came up in an era where building meant teams, timelines, and real cost… this feels like a different game entirely. The barrier isn’t capital anymore… it’s taste and the willingness to ship. And that changes who gets to play… and how fast the next generation of companies can come online.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• What Is Authorship When Machines Can Write? – W. Patrick McCray – MIT Press Reader. “This piece is a reminder that the anxiety around machine-written text did not begin with ChatGPT… it has been haunting writers for decades. I didn’t realize (or had forgotten?) the long history of machines trying to imitate language, creativity and authorship. The question is not simply whether AI can write… it clearly can (and it’s better than most people who don’t like to think about writing). The more interesting question is what authorship means when writing becomes cheaper, faster and detached from lived experience. As someone who writes, interviews, reads and thinks a lot about originality, it all makes my head spin. We tend to treat creativity like a sacred human territory… but maybe it has always been more unstable than that (something I have been noodling on for some time). The danger is not that machines produce words… it’s that we start confusing output with authorship, fluency with thought,and volume with meaning. The machine can generate the text… we can’t keep dismissing this. But what do we do with this massive shift?” (Mitch for Hugh).

If one of these sticks with you, pass it on… and let us know what earned your attention this week…

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