Brian Holley's Links Blog

I monitored network traffic, decompiled code, and traced API calls for 200 funded AI startups. 73% are running third-party APIs with extra steps. OpenAI dominates, Claude is everywhere, and the gap between marketing and reality is staggering.

Love to see someone doing a sanity check on the hype and showing their work. I get founders being nervous about their competitive edge when every OpenAI demo day or Google announcement seems like it commoditizes another swath of the industry. This lesson can't be repeated enough (and applies broadly outside of AI startups as well):

The tech stack doesn’t matter as much as the problem you solve. Some of the best products I found were “just” wrappers. They had incredible UX, solved real problems, and were honest about their approach.

Private article, but the author includes a Medium gift link in the article itself.

Agile didn’t fail you. The process theater did. A blunt look at why your team hates standups, story points, and pretending it’s working.

A good write-up of a common feeling across teams I've been on. When the process becomes the point and there's more emphasis on the names and the rituals than on using the flexibility of agile to get things done, then we've lost why this was supposed to be better. The core of the Agile Manifesto is 4 lines. When we care about the documentation more than the product, and about the roadmap more than what the customer needs, then we're not building the right thing anymore.