Will Larson's Blog

One of my side quests at work is to get a simple feedback loopgoing where we can create knowledge bases that comment on Notion documents.I was curious if I could hook this together following these requirements:

No custom code hostingPrompt is editable within Notion rather than requiring understanding of ZapierShould be be fairly quickly

Ultimately, I was able to get it working.So a quick summary of how it works,some comments on why I don’t particularly like this approach,then some more ...

For managers who have spent a long time reporting to a specific leader or working in an organization with well‑understood goals, it’s easy to develop skill gaps without realizing it. Usually this happens because those skills were not particularly important in the environment you grew up in. You may become extremely confident in your existing skills, enter a new organization that requires a different mix of competencies, and promptly fall on your face.

There are a few common varieties of this, bu...

I’m turning forty in a few weeks, and there’s a listicle archetype along the lines of“Things I’ve learned in the first half of my career as I turn forty and havenow worked roughly twenty years in the technology industry.”How do you write that and make it good?Don’t ask me. I don’t know!

As I considered what I would write to summarize my career learnings so far,I kept thinking about updating my post Advancing the industryfrom a few years ago, where I described using that concept as a north ...

There’s a lot of excitement about what AI (specifically the latest wave of LLM-anchored AI) can do,and how AI-first companies are different from the prior generations of companies.There are a lot of important and real opportunities at hand, but I find that many of these conversationsoccur at such an abstract altitude that they border on meaningless.Sort of like saying that your company could be much better if you merely adopted more software. That’s certainly true,but it’s not a particularl...

Over the past 19 months, I’ve written Crafting Engineering Strategy,a book on creating engineering strategy. I’ve also been working increasingly withlarge language models at work.Unsurprisingly, the intersection of those two ideas is a topic that I’ve been thinkingabout a lot. What, I’ve wondered, is the role of the author, particularly the long-form author,in a world where an increasingly large percentage of writing is intermediated bylarge language models?

One framing I’ve heard somewhat...

Since 2020, I’ve been working on my desk setup, and I think I finallyhave it mostly pulled together at this point. I don’t really thinkmy desk setup is very novel, and I’m sure there are better ways to pullit together, but I will say that it finally works the way I wantsince I added the CalDigit TS5 Plus,which has been a long time coming.

My requirements for my desk are:

Has support for 2-3 Mac laptopsHas support for a Windows gaming desktop with a dedicated GPUHas a dedicated microphone...

Today’s my last day at Carta, where I got the chance to serve as their CTOfor the past two years. I’ve learned so much working there, and I wantedto end my chapter there by collecting my thoughts on what I learned.(I am heading somewhere, and will share news in a week or two afterfirming up the communication plan with my new team there.)

The most important things I learned at Carta were:

Working in the details –if you took a critical lens towards my historical leadership style,I think th...

Back in 2018, I wrote lethain/systemsas a domain-specific language for writing runnable systems models,and introduced it with this blog post modeling a hiring funnel.While it’s far from a perfect system, I’ve gotten a lot of value out of it over the last seven years,because it allows me to maintain systems models in version control.

As I’ve been playing with writing Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers,one I’ve been thinking about frequently is one to help writing systems syntax, and I fina...

At Carta, we recently ran a reading group forFacilitating Software Architectureby Andrew Harmel-Law.We already loosely followed the ideas of anarchitectural advice process (from this 2021 articleby the same Andrew Harmel-Law), but in practice we found that internal tech spec and architecture decision record (ADR) authors tended toexclusively share their documents locally within their team rather than more widely.

As we asked authors why they preferred sharing locally, the most common answe...

A few years ago I wrote about reading a Profit & Loss statement,which is a foundational executive skill. I also subsequently wrote about ways to measure your engineering organization.Despite having written those, I still spend a lot of time wondering about effective ways to representan engineering organization to your board of directors.

Over the past few years, one of the most useful charts I’ve found for explaining an R&D organizationis a scatterplot of R&D spend as a % of margin versus Yo...