iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ian Vanagas

Josh Frank @iamjoshfrank.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Good episode! @justinjackson.ca @briancasel.com @jordangal.bsky.social – I read Posthog’s recent post on the “future shape of software” topic and thought it was a nice supplement to today’s episode: newsletter.posthog.com/p/2030-shape... It seems Posthog is really pushing hard on this front.

newsletter.posthog.com

2030-shaped software

The future of software we’re building for at PostHog

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Finding real, quotable examples is key to my blog writing workflow. Because Google and the default web search produce a lot of junk, I use Exa, HackerNews, web search, what I've already written, and internal company docs to do this, and I recently added @semble.so to this stack.

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

This is the best blue sky post, I think about it all the time

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

The document for my latest newsletter is 5,381 words long including: - 963 word outline - 1855 word first draft - 1299 word second draft - 1056 word final post The final word count might not be a lot, but it's the result of a lot of work. Read it here → newsletter.posthog.com/p/the-engine...

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Engineering has escaped the codebase. The tools, mindset, and identity shape every function. Spend time in startup circles and you’ll hear everything from design to support referred to as engineering. I wrote about how this happened and why it matters to you. newsletter.posthog.com/p/the-engine...

newsletter.posthog.com

The engineeringification of everything

Why every role seems like an engineering role now (and what it means for you)

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

After 1 year of building AI agents for @posthog.com, here are the top 8 things our team learned:

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

I recently learned the reason why Charles is so good at his role as “generic executive”: He hops on a lot of quick calls (taking @j406.bsky.social advice to heart). What does he do on those calls? He gets advice. Here are his top 5 pieces of advice for doing this well:

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

After weeks researching how we do pricing at @posthog.com, I published a deep dive with all the non-obvious things I learned. Here are a few of the best ones:

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Being an open-source startup has many benefits, but one that doesn’t get thought of: HIRING. The fact that @posthog.com is open source has been instrumental to our hiring process from the earliest days until now.

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Thanks to LLMs, user attention and understanding has become a bottleneck for building a successful product. If you want to fully leverage the velocity these tools provide, you need to solve it. We detail how in the latest edition of Product for Engineers. newsletter.posthog.com/p/the-hidden...

newsletter.posthog.com

The hidden danger of shipping fast

What to do when product velocity breaks the speed of adoption

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

Wrote up the lessons @posthog.com has learned about building AI-powered features that are actually valuable, from choosing what to build to implementing it correctly to improving it. Check it out: newsletter.posthog.com/p/what-weve-...

newsletter.posthog.com

What we've learned about building AI-powered features

How to choose the right features, implement them the right way, and make them better (for real)

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Ian Vanagas @ianvanagas.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

Who's building the next GitHub? www.ianvanagas.com/notes/disrup...

GitHub is ripe for disruption
GitHub is ubiquitous. It feels like it has always been there and I couldn’t imagine a world without it. You might use different LLMs, IDEs, and programming languages, but everyone uses GitHub.

This isn’t to say a better version couldn’t exist and now seems like the perfect moment to make it happen. Outages seem to happen every week, it is in a decreasingly important spot at Microsoft, and it simply hasn’t really changed (probably a good thing).

Here are some features GitHub doesn’t have that could form the basis of a disruptive competitor:

Live collaboration. GitHub is a Sketch-era app. There is a Figma equivalent waiting to be built. Planning, issues, and reviews could all be rebuilt to use live collaboration. For example, why can’t I thread comments on PRs, only code comments? Why can my review overlap with someone else’s and I get no warning?
Tailored review interfaces. GitHub was built for software engineers but there’s a lot more roles who rely on it now like me (a technical marketer). Review interfaces tailored to the type of content being reviewed. For example, reviewing markdown sucks and a change to a website almost always involves deploying a preview and tabbing back and forth between it and the PR. I’m sure infra or ML engineers could come up with their own requirements too.
AI coding. It’s sort of forgotten that Copilot was a GitHub product. Although I’m sure it’s still used a lot, it doesn’t feel like a core part of GitHub. It’s also not on the cutting edge anymore (Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, etc.). There’s no AI interface in GitHub. Where is the issue summarization, chat with your codebase, and code generation?
Native AI code reviews. Although they are the biggest new innovation in GitHub, it feels like AI code review tools like Greptile are bolted on rather than natively supported. AI code reviewers are limited in their functionality in GitHub (only read code and comment) and largely run outside GitHub.
GitHub has bee…

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