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Will Larson

@lethain.com
7.9K followers 284 following 144 posts

Write at lethain.com. Author of An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, and An Engineering Executive’s Primer. Worked some places.

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Will Larson @lethain.com · 03/01/2026
Our workflows are relatively simple, so usually the issue here is large files associated with the workflows, which are we’ve mostly solved by using subagents for file processing. Beyond that our compaction strategy is literally “use a leaked version of Claude code’s compaction prompt” after 80%
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 02/01/2026
Wrote up a series of nine short posts on interesting problems we encountered while building an internal agent framework (virtual files, compaction, LLM vs code-driven workflows, etc) lethain.com/agents-series/
lethain.com
Building internal agents
A few weeks ago in Facilitating AI adoption at Imprint, I mentioned our internal agent workflows that we are developing. This is not the core of Imprint–our core is powering co-branded credit card pro...
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 28/12/2025
Great site! It’s pretty cool how approachable projects like this are getting
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 26/10/2025
Thank you! 🙏
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 25/10/2025
There's also a sense, for me anyway, that the frontier has moved somewhere else -- I'm not quite sure where -- but a lot of social media today feels like a regurgitation of things that already happened rather than something new/interesting/evolutionary.
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 25/10/2025
Yeah, absolutely an era I miss fondly. There was a post from @copyconstruct.bsky.social a week or two ago that captured the reality for me -- most of the folks I want to talk with are gone, and I've personally *mostly* left social media for all significant purposes.
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 25/10/2025
Digital edition of my fourth book, Crafting Engineering Strategy, is up for purchase! (Print copy should start shipping in next 2-3 weeks.) Tried to apply "Staff Engineer" formula to eng strategy topic, with a lot more editing 😂 www.amazon.com/Crafting-Eng...
amazon.com
Crafting Engineering Strategy: How Thoughtful Decisions Solve Complex Problems
Crafting Engineering Strategy: How Thoughtful Decisions Solve Complex Problems - Kindle edition by Larson, Will. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Crafting Engineering Strategy: How Thoughtful Decisions Solve Complex Problems.
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 20/07/2025
*Good 😅
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 20/07/2025
Could point! This probably does exist somehow already
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 20/07/2025
Yeah, so you can imagine another stage in this process of summarizing all rfcs to extract problems, but I’m more specifically looking for a pattern we could scale across many functions, eg compliance feedback, security feedback, etc
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 20/07/2025
Any good patterns for loading a Notion page as modifiable prompt to respond to other Notion pages and Slack messages? Eg as a simple example you could imagine I want to write architecture guidelines and then use that to comment on RFCs. Is this just Zapier?
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 10/07/2025
I love your post!
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Reposted by Will Larson
Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 09/07/2025
New post up, with a bunch of thoughts on what drives me personally, and my own 40-year career (h/t @lethain.com). I have a pretty unusual life story. But one of the reasons I love the tech industry so much is how common unusual stories like mine have historically been. charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...
charity.wtf
Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career
I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pus…
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 16/06/2025
Did my first podcast in some time as I start ramping up a bit around getting started as new CTO at Imprint and also getting close to releasing next book! Podcast up at www.executiveruntime.show/episodes/04-...
executiveruntime.show
Will Larson — Executive Runtime Podcast
I'm thrilled to welcome Will Larson, Chief Technology Officer at Carta and a thought leader whose work has shaped how many of us think about engineering leadership. Will is the author of three influen...
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 14/06/2025
I think programming languages are already pretty exhaustively represented in the training sets, although it certainly varies language by language, and providing more detailed in-context learning is usually preferable in my experience.
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 14/06/2025
Have six (draft, unedited) chapters of my upcoming book exploring this idea in a bit more detail! craftingengstrategy.com/aic/generate...
craftingengstrategy.com
AI Companion / Generating Systems Models
Crafting Engineering Strategy has a chapter on systems modeling along with a number of examples. Those examples focus on using the lethain/systems python library to generate models using a Jupyter not...
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 14/06/2025
Full piece at lethain.com/competitive-... going into the concept a bit more deeply.
lethain.com
What is the competitive advantage of authors in the age of LLMs?
Over the past 19 months, I’ve written Crafting Engineering Strategy, a book on creating engineering strategy. I’ve also been working increasingly with large language models at work. Unsurprisingly, th...
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 14/06/2025
Over the last year, as I've spent more time working with LLMs to power product features, I've also been thinking about how LLMs impact me as a long-form author. Of the ideas I've had, I'm particularly interested in the idea of building, and selling, books as "datapacks" for LLMs.
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 12/06/2025
Part of this project that I'm excited about is also releasing an LLM-optimized version of the book designed to be throw into an Claude/ChatGPT project as in-context learning, which I'm working with O'Reilly to distribute. Not available yet, but you ca see use examples on website!
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 12/06/2025
You can already read the full, unedited version of the book online at craftingengstrategy.com (most of those have also come out on my blog over the past 18 months as I wrote)
craftingengstrategy.com
Crafting Engineering Strategy
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 12/06/2025
Still only part way through the editing process, but excited to announce Crafting Engineering Strategy, my upcoming book with O'Reilly on engineering strategy coming later this year (sometime Q4).
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 07/06/2025
My bi-decade update on my desk setup 😂 Finally found a dock that lets me swap from windows desktop with dedicated GPU to OSX laptop with a single thunderbolt cable! lethain.com/desk-setup-2...
lethain.com
My desk setup in 2025.
Since 2020, I’ve been working on my desk setup, and I think I finally have it mostly pulled together at this point. I don’t really think my desk setup is very novel, and I’m sure there are better ways...
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Reposted by Will Larson
Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 02/06/2025
This is a fascinating thread. And it has lots of my favorite thing: details. I could give a shit about people who pounce online, flaming on and on about how wrong I am. I love it when people reply with details about their very different experience. The details give it heft. I can learn from them.
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 23/05/2025
Coordination between company facilities teams and building’s janitor teams on how to clean rooms
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 23/05/2025
Hah, I've heard of a few companies that did something similar! I don't think the _intent_ is wrong, but I do think it might be a lot more direct to educate the folks not sharing the space effectively.
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 23/05/2025
Looking for startup to angel invest in that solves problem of chairs being routinely positioned to block video cameras in office meeting rooms. (I've tried petitioning to remove chairs from rooms, but this innovation has met substantial resistance, so we need to innovate here.)
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 22/05/2025
I respect you for that, but cannot join you lol
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 21/05/2025
Each time I open LinkedIn I pray I don’t somehow accidentally click on the brain teaser game and become shamed forever off the internet
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 10/05/2025
This time experimenting with MCP server for generating and running systems models ( github.com/lethain/syst... ). I think it's pretty wild how well this works, especially the tool to inject domain-specific language usage documentation into the context window.
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 05/05/2025
Yeah… this is what I believe but if you told me I was wrong I wouldn’t argue too much 😂
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 05/05/2025
Good question. I’m not sure! I think my mail is in a good spot at this point after doing the cleanup. The bulk unsubscribe is a really nice feature imo, and if anything brought me to buy something like this it might be that.
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 05/05/2025
(Or I've created a complex, provably false, mythology to explain why it seemed to only work that one time and not the other five times I tried it.)
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 05/05/2025
Maybe the biggest non-documented learning is that you _can_ do things like "in:inbox before:2025/1/1" and then "select all" and "archive" in GMail, but as best I can tell from repeated attempts it only seems to actually work if you leave the window open. even though the messaging doesn't imply that
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 05/05/2025
Got to zero inbox on my personal email address(es) for the first time in a decade or so. This was mostly (1) declaring bankrupt on anything older than 6 months, (2) unsubscribing/filtering spammy stuff, and (3) setting up a transient tag for emails I want to *briefly* see lethain.com/filter-old-g...
lethain.com
How to filter out old email from inbox
Every few years I take a pass at reducing the chaos in my personal inboxes. There are simply too many emails to deal with, and that generally leads to me increasingly failing to follow up on important...
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 22/04/2025
*image descriptions* could be better, not images
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 22/04/2025
Another writing workflow tool I've found useful is using LLM API to describe images. Here's is an example of script that replaces empty image descriptions with reasonably good ones. To extent the images could be better, it's b/c my prompt needs some work gist.github.com/lethain/9c5e...
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 21/04/2025
Threw together an MCP for navigating Markdown knowledge bases (e.g. recursive folders with markdown files with markdown headers). Very basic, and very vibe-coded, but works well and interesting learning experience github.com/lethain/libr...
github.com
GitHub - lethain/library-mcp: MCP server for operating on Markdown knowledge bases
MCP server for operating on Markdown knowledge bases - lethain/library-mcp
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 20/04/2025
(More on staff-plus archetypes in staffeng.com/guides/staff... )
staffeng.com
Staff archetypes
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that ap...
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 20/04/2025
Love this post from @keavym.bsky.social, really captures the right hand archetype of staff-plus engineer (ty to @kstewart.bsky.social who reminded me of Keavy's post) keavy.com/work/art-of-...
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 20/04/2025
Small weekend project, I finally moved staffeng.com from Gatsby to Hugo. Gatsby is just fairly hard to maintain with so many JS dependencies for something I don't update frequently. Now actually possible to fix issues again 😅
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Reposted by Will Larson
Erica Stanley @ericastanley.com · 17/04/2025
And don't miss my full CTO Craft Con keynote, more conference highlights, book recommendations, and links featuring: @patkua.bsky.social, @sarahedo.bsky.social, @jackdanger.com, @lethain.com & @thiagodefaria.com! www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VXa...
youtube.com
Leadership Keynote – The CTO as a Global Citizen with Erica Stanley
YouTube video by Erica Stanley
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 16/04/2025
🙏🙏
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 16/04/2025
🙏
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Reposted by Will Larson
Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 15/04/2025
Will Larson (@lethain.com) recently wrapped up an *incredible* streak of posts on engineering strategy on his blog, lethain.com. Strategy is hard, much harder than it looks. Especially since, much like design and management, when done well, it looks easy. Easy and obvious.
lethain.com
Irrational Exuberance
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 13/04/2025
This one worked exceptionally well to create an SEO-driving FAQ page for page for new book. Done in a Claude workspace with entire book loaded into project via some light preprocessing plus repomix of all Markdown files.
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 12/04/2025
🙏 thank you!
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 07/04/2025
💯 Ty! I think I agree
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 07/04/2025
Left is Figma!
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 07/04/2025
Not really! Is it good?
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Will Larson @lethain.com · 07/04/2025
I'm leaning towards Excalidraw, mostly because I don't think it matters that much and I would only have to redo one image versus redoing ~15 of them.
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