Ben @stellarwork.com · 28/09/2026Product, business and people knowledge, and now the RAG pipeline too. I asked Petra Wille how much of that one product leader can do well. She has seen this before with mobile and APIs. Product leads take it on first, then it becomes a shared capability. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 23/09/2026Product has been a blind spot on this podcast. The conversations I found were about one PM and one team. The organizations I work with have hundreds of people to orchestrate. Petra Wille works on that layer: the people who lead the product org. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 21/09/2026Companies have started measuring how many tokens their people use. Petra Wille thinks that's crazy. Tokens are easy to count and say little about whether anyone learned anything. She would rather count experiments. New episode of the Stellar Work podcast. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 18/09/2026"Trust is a feeling." The line I keep coming back to from talking with Matt LeMay. I tried getting a model to challenge my ideas. It argued me out of most and I learned little. Trust that lets me change my mind comes from people whose conviction I know. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 16/09/2026Most of the AI cost debate is about tokens. I think that's the smaller bill. The bigger cost is a codebase that got much more complicated, where changes have to fit around features few people asked for. Matt LeMay's image: rhinestones on a car. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 14/09/2026AI removes friction. That's the pitch, and mostly true in my experience. What I underestimated is how much of my thinking happened inside that friction. Matt LeMay's line stuck with me: it's very hard to outsource the friction and keep the understanding. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 09/09/2026Write the interview guide? Yes. Survey? Sure. Charts? Deck for the CPO? Send it. I've done this. 20 minutes later it felt like discovery. What I had was a deck. AI is good at producing artifacts of progress. Whether progress happened is another question. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 07/09/2026Ten years of product discourse said: more features doesn't mean more value. Then AI arrived and many teams started counting tokens like story points. Matt LeMay thinks we were never as far along as we hoped. AI made it visible. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 02/09/2026'Five Perl apps, forecast at seven years, we're doing it in two with AI.' A CTO who can say that will be fine. Most answer 'everybody's doing it' instead. What I took from Laura Tacho: name the bottleneck first, then point AI at it. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 31/08/2026We knew in the 80s that lines of code is a bad metric. AI made us forget. Commits per engineer, tokens per developer, same mistake with new numbers. Laura Tacho planted a flag in our conversation: any metric on the individual level is a red flag. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 26/08/2026Since AI, teams write 17x more code and change requests doubled in size. Releases barely moved. Laura Tacho's read: we're at the bottom of the J curve. More code is the one thing the data is sure about. Everything downstream is a question mark. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 24/08/202617x more code since AI. Releases up maybe 20 percent. Where is all that code going? I asked Laura Tacho, who spent years measuring engineering orgs at DX. Her answer: AI amplifies everything, including bad measurement. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 22/08/2026We hired three forward deployed engineers this month, helping engineers and engineering managers actually use AI. And getting all that implicit knowledge out of people's heads and into knowledge bases. Happy to have David, Matthias and Ulrich on team ❤️ There's plenty to do. 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 21/08/2026Teaching an LLM and onboarding a human turn out to be the same skill. Both force you to surface what's in your head that you never said out loud. Of everything in the Teresa Torres episode, that's the bit I keep reusing. 010
Ben @stellarwork.com · 19/08/2026A transcript goes into an agent, a PRD comes out, lands in SharePoint. A colleague's agent shrinks it to three sentences for a meeting. Two AIs talking through a document no human read. That passed as product discovery. Don't let AI think for you. 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 17/08/2026"AI is great at synthesis if you're good at synthesis." Teresa Torres on the ceiling nobody mentions: with a decent prompt, AI matches the average product team. The catch: the average team was never good at synthesis. AI amplifies the level you bring, gaps included. 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 12/08/2026"I don't think a founder's taste matters. I think their customer's taste is what matters." Teresa Torres on the product genius myth: Silicon Valley elitism dressed up as product wisdom. Understanding customers is work. Taste won't save your product. 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 10/08/2026Teresa Torres wrote the book on product discovery. 135,000 copies later, she's building AI discovery tools herself. On the podcast: taste, AI synthesis, and why you shouldn't let AI think for you. Episode 63 of the Stellar Work Podcast, out now. 011
Ben @stellarwork.com · 07/08/2026"AI is never the reason. It's the light showing the cracks where we duct-taped it." Barbara Lampl. Three that stuck: exit interviews are theater, PowerPoint burns 9-13x the tokens of markdown, and the tool debate is a symptom of missing strategy. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 04/08/2026"Anthropic moves to Europe and sits there with a candle, handwriting the next model. That's the infrastructure we have." Barbara Lampl on the European Anthropic fantasy. It changes one thing: we stop being shut out. The security and China problems stay. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 31/07/2026Günther on the shop floor knows the batch from supplier XYZ is bad every second Tuesday. In six months he retires and you burn millions. Barbara Lampl: stop trusting exit interviews. Video the people who leave first, extract the patterns later. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 30/07/2026Über eine Stunde Podcast mit mir auf deutsch 😱 Vielen Dank, lieber Alex, dass ich dabei sein durfte. Hier gehts zum Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI4T... 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 29/07/2026Barbara Lampl started her career in the parking garage. "Data people, you're not useful." 20 years later companies pay serious money for exactly that. Her reply when a client wants to build their own LLM: "How many billion do you want to send me?" stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 28/07/2026The worst thing you can do with an LLM is open it first. MIT put EEGs on people writing: reaching for the model first gave the worst result on every measure. Think first, prompt second. Almost nobody does. open.spotify.com/episode/1StI... 012
Ben @stellarwork.com · 27/07/2026If your leadership is debating which AI tool to buy, you're debating the wrong thing. No tool will save you. New Stellar Work Podcast with Barbara Lampl on why AI adoption fails, saving retiring knowledge, and the European Anthropic fantasy. stellarwork.start.page 010
Ben @stellarwork.com · 26/07/2026Indeed reports an uptrend in SWE jobs since February. I see the same trend at my clients. Would love to hear more perspectives on this to verify things 🙏❤️ 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 25/07/2026OpenAI's own models picked a sandbox lock and broke into Hugging Face to steal the answer key to a hacking exam🥷 Full story: open.substack.com/pub/stellarw... 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 23/07/2026"Don't fucking touch this. If you change it, everything breaks." The most valuable documentation in most codebases lives in someone's head. Thomas Dohmke wants it in the repo: agent session logs versioned next to the code. Check out our full episode over here: stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 21/07/202695% of generative AI pilots show zero measurable business impact. That's MIT, not me. We don't track the ROI on AI spend because tracking it would reveal the return isn't there yet. Vibe accounting. open.spotify.com/episode/1StI... 011
Ben @stellarwork.com · 20/07/2026In 2022, Thomas Dohmke predicted AI would write 80% of code within five years. He was wrong. It took three. His next five years: developers conducting an orchestra of agents. And most of what you build never has to ship. stellarwork.start.page 010
Ben @stellarwork.com · 16/07/2026"In software everything is possible. Every company can build everything." So why did the former GitHub CEO need an entire new company? Not capability. Expectations. Developers know what a repo page looks like. Change it and you get a shitstorm. stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 15/07/2026Recording with Thomas Dohmke was truly one of my personal highlights this year :) You can listen to our episode over here, just pick you fav player: stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 14/07/2026"I'm Thomas and I'm a developer." That's how the former CEO of GitHub introduces himself. Robotron, C64, TU Berlin, Mercedes, Bosch, two startups, Microsoft, the GitHub CEO seat. Now he's building Entire. A developer building tools for developers. stellarwork.start.page 010
Ben @stellarwork.com · 14/07/2026AI is supposed to make tasks faster. Across studies, time-to-task goes up 20 to 40 percent. Up, not down. Every output needs verifying, every problem another loop. The productivity paradox is real. The industry is pretending it isn't. open.spotify.com/episode/1StI... 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 13/07/2026We're back. And we're kicking things off with former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, who left GitHub to found Entire. His reason: the software development lifecycle was never designed for AI. And it's starting to crack under the scale and complexity. stellarwork.start.page 010
Ben @stellarwork.com · 08/07/2026Frontend engineer is disappearing as a title. Since 2022: frontend -25%, iOS/Android -20%, AI/ML +39%, Forward Deployed +30%. Titles follow the bottleneck. Per the Pragmatic Engineer (Gergely Orosz & Jessica Salmon). Which of your titles won't exist in four years? 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 07/07/2026The companies winning with AI aren't the ones with the best subscriptions. The model matters less than the plumbing: an agent with tendrils into your build system, your docs, your data. The moat is the context only you have. open.spotify.com/episode/1StI... 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 05/07/2026How on earth should the average paperworker pic the right model? It might be on purpose so people just stick with the least expensive that does all jobs well, but honestly to me it feels like a dark pattern opening a huge door for orchestrator models. 010
Ben @stellarwork.com · 04/07/2026The AI industry got audited this week. It disputes the findings. - BIS warns on $1T of capex - Meta wants to sell you compute - SCOTUS hands the President the FTC - 57,000 jobs open.substack.com/pub/stellarw... 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 01/07/20262023: 1 in 3 engineering hires in US tech was a recent grad. 2025: 1 in 10. Intern intake halved since 2019. AI does the junior work, but seniors are former juniors who got reps. Per the Pragmatic Engineer (Gergely Orosz & Jessica Salmon). Where do your 2031 seniors come from? 200
Ben @stellarwork.com · 28/06/2026The interesting bit about Fable 5 isn't the benchmark. It runs for days without you. Plans, checks itself, fixes what broke, keeps going. Can it do the work? Yeah, mostly. The catch: almost nobody can hand a system a goal and walk away. That's not the model. That's us. 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 27/06/2026New edition. The scarcest thing in AI this week had a pulse. • Google loses 2 AI stars, stock -5% • Oracle: 21k cut, AI named in its filing • Sakana's Fugu bosses other models open.substack.com/pub/stellarw... 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 26/06/2026Big Tech now runs on the same manager ratio startups had in 2021. 12 engineers per manager, VP posts falling since 2023. The coordination work didn't leave with the managers. Per the Pragmatic Engineer's 2026 report (Gergely Orosz & Jessica Salmon). What replaced your cut layer? 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 24/06/2026Everyone says AI is replacing engineers. The data says it's becoming baseline, not replacement. AI engineer postings: +60%. Traditional SWE: +10%. Yet no major tech firm posts more AI engineers than SWE. Ratio: 100-to-5 → 100-to-13. Pragmatic Engineer 2026. Separate hire, or shared baseline? 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 23/06/2026We don't run agile transformations because we believe in them. We run them because they look like change without requiring any. OKR reviews, AI pilots, the next reorg: same theater. 90% theater, 10% conditions. open.spotify.com/episode/1StI... 010
Ben @stellarwork.com · 17/06/2026The biggest hiring winners of the AI boom aren't AI companies. They're observability companies. AI engineer headcount, 2 yrs: New Relic +550% Elastic +433% Grafana +400% Datadog +288% Big Tech: Meta +51%, MS +47%. Bottleneck shifted. Money followed. Pragmatic Engineer 2026. 010
Ben @stellarwork.com · 14/06/2026Anthropic built their smartest public model, then told it to shut up on the hard stuff. Fable 5 punts anything about cyber or bio to last quarter's Opus 4.8. If moderation is how we prove AI is safe, it's also how we admit we don't trust it. Pick one. 120
Ben @stellarwork.com · 11/06/2026Another blast from the past. In episode 60 I'm revisiting earlier conversations and what stuck with me. This one was with Nadja Bohlmann, and the episode never made it online. The learnings did. Here's the link if you want to join: stellarwork.start.page 000
Ben @stellarwork.com · 10/06/2026US software engineering job postings: +20% in 12 months. Germany: -13%. France: -10%. Europe isn't behind on AI hiring. Europe is opting out. Pragmatic Engineer 2026 (Orosz & Salmon) frames it as two strategies: lean in, or wait and see. Wisdom, or slow opt-out? 100
Ben @stellarwork.com · 08/06/202660 episodes in. The last six weeks I was sick with fever and barely kept the company running. Without my colleagues it would've fallen apart. No guest this week, so episode 60 is just me reflecting on my favorite recent guests. Coughs mostly edited out. Link below: stellarwork.start.page 000