Will Larson's Blog

One of my gifts/curses is an endless fixation with how processes can be optimized.For a brief moment early in my career, that was focused on improving how humans collaborate,but that quickly switched to figuring out how we can minimize human involvement, and eliminatehuman-to-human handoffs as much as possible.Lately, every time I perform a recurring task–or see someone else perform one–I think abouthow we might eliminate the human’s involvement entirely by introducing agents.This both has...

At some point, you will have learned about the passive voice,where the actor in a sentence is unclear.For example, my software didn’t compile. That’s a good exampleof the passive voice.However, you might not know the full set of rules,because here are some sentences in the passive voicethat you might not recognize:

Claude made an error in my writeup.ChatGPT messed up the commitment.Gemini didn’t write tests.

You might think those are active sentences, but thoseare in fact examples of ...

When I joined Imprint a little less than a year ago, our deploys were manual, requiring close human attention to complete.Our database migrations were run manually, too.Developing good software is very possible in those circumstances, but it takes a remarkable attention to detail to do it.It was also possible to develop good software using Subversion and developing by ssh’ing into a remote server to edit PHP files,but the goal is making things easy rather than possible.

Ten months later, the...

In our latest developer productivity survey, our documentationwas the area with the second most comments.This is a writeup of the concrete steps I took to see how muchprogress one person could make on improving the organization’sdocumentation while holding myself to a high standard for makingchanges that actually worked instead of optically sounding impressive.

Diagnosis

There were a handful of issues we were running into:

We migrated from Confluence to Notion in January, 2025,which had ...

While Staff Engineer was first and foremostan attempt to pull the industry towards my perspective on staff-plus engineering roles,writing it also changed my opinions in a number of ways.Foremost, it solidified my belief that the industry too often treats engineers like childrento be managed, rather than adults to be involved, and that I needed to change some of myown leadership practices that I’d inadvertently adopted.

When I started writing it, I had already shifted my opinion about report...

Remotion is having a bit of a moment at the moment,and I decided to play around with the Claude Code integration.Here are a couple videos I was able to make in <10 minutes summarizring data on my blog.

First, here is published posts over time. I had Claude write some scripts to generate this dataset,and then did a series of prompts to get the right visual. It was pretty straightforward, worked well,and I imagine I could have gotten to the right video much faster if I’d had a clearer destinat...

Despite my best efforts, I have been wrong a lot over the years.I’ve been wrong about technology patterns (in 2014, I thought microserviceswould take over the world), I’ve been wrong about management techniques(I used to think systems thinking was the ultimate technique,but I’ve seen so many mistakes rooted in over-reliance on systems thinking),and a bunch of other stuff as well.

Early on, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to be wrong less frequently.That’s a noble endeavor, and one...

I did a lot of hiring at Uber, some days I would bedoing back-to-back 30 minute phone screens for severalhours in a row. That said, while Uber taught me how tohire at scale, it was Stripe that taught me how to hirecreatively.

Some of that was learning the fundamental mechanics like how to cold source,optimizing hiring funnels, anddesigning interview loops,but Stripe had some fairly unique ideas that I haven’t hearddiscussed much elsewhere. One of those was Stripe’sBring Your Own Team (B...

When we launched Digg v4, the old site turned off,but the new site didn’t turn on.There was a lot of pressure to get things working,but no one knew what to do about it. It took almost a monthto get it wholly functioning. It was not a pleasant month,with many false starts while we tried to dig out of launchingan unfinished, desperate product.

That launch was a foundational early career experience for me.However, it was not a unique one, as many leaders inject that sort of pressure into the...

One of the relatively few AI-native products I use isCora.computer which summarizes my personal inbox.It’s not perfect, but it’s done a much better job than my collection offilters at managing the ever-growing onslaught of spam and unsolicited emailthat flows in.

I’ve run into a few issues with Cora, which ended up in me following folksat Every to report the issues, and more recently thisled me to see their work on compound engineering and specifically the compound-engineering-plugin.

C...