I write Lenny's Newsletter (the #1 business newsletter on Substack), and host Lenny's Podcast (top ten tech podcast globally). Previously, I spent seven years at Airbnb leading supply growth, conversion, trip quality, and community, and before Airbnb, I was an engineer and a founder (exited to Airbnb).

Lenny Rachitsky

My biggest takeaways from Boris Cherny (Head of Claude Code):

1. Coding is now “solved” for most use cases. Boris hasn’t written a single line of code by hand since November, with 100% of his work now authored by Claude Code. At the same time, he remains one of the most productive engineers at Anthropic, shipping 10 to 30 pull requests daily while leading the team.

2. Anthropic has seen a 200% increase in engineer productivity since adopting Claude Code. As Boris notes, “Back at Meta, with hundreds of engineers working on productivity, we’d see gains of a few percentage points in a year. Now we’re seeing hundreds of percentage points.”

3. AI is moving beyond writing code to generating ideas. “Claude is starting to come up with ideas. It’s looking through feedback, bug reports, and telemetry, then suggesting features to ship.”

4. The next roles to be transformed are those adjacent to engineering. Product managers, designers, and data scientists will see similar transformations as agentic AI expands beyond coding. “Any kind of job where you use computer tools will be next.”

5. Build for the model six months from now, not today. One of Boris’s key principles is to design products for future AI capabilities, not current ones. “It’s going to be uncomfortable because your product-market fit won’t be very good for the first six months. But when that model comes out, you’ll hit the ground running.”

6. Watch for “latent demand.” Claude Code was built by observing what people were already trying to do, and then making it easier. Cowork emerged when they noticed people using Claude Code for non-coding tasks like analyzing MRIs or recovering wedding photos from corrupted drives.

7. Don’t optimize for token cost. Boris advises companies to give engineers unlimited tokens during experimentation phases. “At small scale, the token cost is still relatively low compared to their salary. If an idea works and scales, that’s when you optimize it.”

8. Underfund headcount on purpose. When Boris puts one engineer on a project, they’re forced to let AI do more of the work. Constraint drives creative use of AI tooling, not just faster typing.

9. The most successful people in the future will be generalists. “Try to be a generalist more than you have in the past. Some of the most effective engineers cross over disciplines. The people who will be rewarded most won’t just be AI-native—they’ll be curious generalists who can think about the broader problem they’re solving.”

10. Always use the most capable model, not the cheapest. A less intelligent model often burns more tokens correcting mistakes than a smarter one spends getting it right the first time. Boris runs maximum effort on Opus 4.6 for everything.

Here's the full conversation: https://lnkd.in/gxMjk8Az

Deeply researched no-nonsense product, growth, and career advice

Claude design lead: The classic design process is dead.

Here's what's replacing it.

Jenny Wen leads design for Claude at Anthropic, was previously director of design at Figma, and a designer at Dropbox, Square, and Shopify.

In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:
🔸 Why the classic discovery → mock → iterate design process is becoming obsolete
🔸 What a day in the life of a designer at Anthropic looks like, including her AI tool stack
🔸 Whether AI will eventually surpass humans in taste and judgment
🔸 Why Jenny left a director role at Figma to return to IC work
🔸 The three archetypes Jenny is hiring for now

This conversation changed how I think about the future of design.

Listen now: https://lnkd.in/gXH8vmM9

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 
🏆 Mercury — Radically different banking: https://mercury.com/
🏆 Orkes — The enterprise platform for reliable applications and agentic workflows: https://www.orkes.io/
🏆 Omni — AI analytics your customers can trust: https://omni.co/lenny

Also available on:
• Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gaeTW3Hg
• Apple: https://lnkd.in/gUBY2Nt3

My biggest takeaways from Jenny Wen (Claude design lead at Anthropic):

1. The traditional design process is breaking down. The classic discover-diverge-converge loop that designers have relied on for years doesn’t work when engineers can spin up seven coding agents and ship a working version before a designer finishes exploring options.

2. Design work is splitting into two distinct modes. The first is supporting execution: consulting with engineers as they build, giving feedback, polishing in code. The second is setting short-range vision, now scoped to three to six months instead of multi-year roadmaps. The vision work is still critical because when everyone can build anything fast, someone needs to point the team in a coherent direction.

3. Build trust through speed, not perfection. Anthropic ships products early, labels them research previews, and then iterates publicly based on real feedback. Jenny argues that what actually degrades a brand isn’t launching something rough; it’s launching something rough and then going silent. If you ship fast, respond to feedback visibly, and keep improving, users will trust you more, not less.

4. The most overlooked hire in design right now is the cracked new grad. Most companies are hiring senior designers with deep experience. Jenny argues that early-career people with blank slates, fast learning curves, and no attachment to legacy processes may be uniquely suited to this moment. They don’t carry baked-in rituals that are now obsolete, and their lack of expectations can actually be an advantage.

5. Chat as an interface isn’t going away. Despite expectations that chatbots were a temporary stop on the way to richer UIs, Jenny sees chat as a permanently valuable interface because it offers infinite flexibility. But she expects a hybrid future where models increasingly generate UI elements on the fly for specific tasks (like the interactive widgets Claude recently shipped) while chat remains the connective tissue between them.

6. Jenny went from design director (12 to 15 reports) back to IC. She questioned whether middle management had a safe future and wanted hands-on time during a period of rapid change. The IC time is giving her hard skills she wouldn’t have gained while managing.

7. AI will likely get better at taste and judgment. Jenny says designers may be holding onto “taste” as a moat too tightly. But someone still has to be accountable for what ships, the same way an engineer is accountable for AI-generated code.

8. Figma is still essential, but for different reasons. Jenny says Figma remains the best tool for rapidly exploring 8 to 10 different design directions on a canvas, something that coding tools handle poorly because they’re too linear and create investment bias toward one direction. For micro-level visual and interaction decisions, spatial exploration still beats sequential iteration.

Watch our full conversation: https://lnkd.in/gunZXqq8

I've teamed up with the team at Maven to put together a series of LIVE workshops centered around the theme of "The AI-Native PM," featuring a stacked lineup of product leaders: Tomer Cohen, Wes Kao, Hamel Husain, Peter Yang, Marily Nika, Ph.D, Tal Raviv, Aman Khan, Hila Qu 曲卉, Ben Erez, Ethan Evans, Caitlin Sullivan, and many more.

The workshops are across 3 themes and all totally free:
1. AI workflows
2. Becoming more technical
3. Product sense & influence

A few years from now, these skills will be table stakes for PMs. If you want to learn where things are heading in a hands-on way, this is the perfect way

Open article: The AI-Native Product Manager by bit.ly

My biggest takeaways from Sherwin Wu:

1. AI is writing virtually all code at OpenAI. 95% of the engineers use Codex, and engineers who embrace these tools open 70% more pull requests than their peers, and that gap is widening over time.

2. The role of a software engineer is shifting from writing code to managing fleets of AI agents. Many engineers now run 10 to 20 parallel Codex threads, steering and reviewing rather than writing code themselves.

3. The average PR code review time has dropped from 10-15 minutes per PR to 2-3 minutes. Every pull request at OpenAI is now reviewed by Codex before human eyes see it, and Codex surfaces suggestions and catches issues up front. This allows engineers to focus on more creative and strategic work while dramatically increasing productivity.

4. The models will eat your scaffolding for breakfast. When building AI products, don’t optimize for today’s model capabilities. The field is evolving so rapidly that the scaffolding (vector stores, agent frameworks, etc.) that seems essential today may be obsolete tomorrow as models improve.

5. Build for where the models are going, not where they are today. The most successful AI startups build products that work at 80% capability now, knowing the next model release will push them over the line.

6. Top performers become disproportionately more productive with AI tools. AI tools amplify the productivity of high-agency individuals, so the gap between top performers and everyone else is widening. The ROI on unblocking and empowering your best people compounds faster than ever in an AI-augmented environment.

7. Most enterprise AI deployments have negative ROI because they’re top-down mandates without bottom-up adoption. Success requires both executive buy-in and grassroots enthusiasm. Sherwin recommends creating a “tiger team” of technically-minded enthusiasts (often not engineers) who can explore capabilities, apply AI to specific workflows, and create excitement throughout the organization.

8. The one-person billion-dollar startup is coming, but with unexpected second-order effects. As AI makes individuals more productive, we’ll see not just billion-dollar solo founders but an explosion of small businesses: hundreds of $100M startups and tens of thousands of $10M startups. This will transform the startup ecosystem and venture capital landscape.

9. Business process automation is an underrated AI opportunity. While Silicon Valley focuses on knowledge work, most of the economy runs on repeatable business processes with standard operating procedures. There’s massive potential to apply AI to these workflows, which are often overlooked by the tech community.

10. The next two to three years will be the most exciting in tech history. After a relatively quiet period from 2015 to 2020, we’re now in an unprecedented era of innovation. Sherwin encourages everyone to engage with AI tools and not take this moment for granted, as the pace of change will eventually slow.

My biggest takeaways from Brian Halligan

1. “When you have to eat a shit sandwich, don’t nibble.” Borrowed from Ruth Porat. The temptation during layoffs is to do a small one and grow into it, and then do another six months later. Just rip the bandaid off.

2. “If you want to kill a plant, have two people water it.” Have a DRI (directly responsible individual) for every problem you want solved. When you’re small, everyone’s in the room and aligned. At scale, no one knows what’s happening across org boundaries. Committees produce the same result as two people watering a plant: it either drowns or dies of neglect.

3. "Never waste a good crisis." The best improvements at HubSpot came after major problems forced them to rethink processes. After a devastating outage in 2019, they completely overhauled their deployment approach, resulting in much higher quality and reliability going forward.

4. Brian’s LOCKS framework for evaluating founders: Lovable (do people really, really want to work for them?), Obsessed (deeply passionate about the problem), Chip on their shoulder (almost all great CEOs have this), Knowledgeable (about their domain), and a Student (constantly learning, like an LLM).

5. The biggest skill gap in young CEOs is being able to give hard feedback. Many Sequoia founders Brian coaches are in their late 20s, have never managed anyone, and now need to layer early employees or transition co-founders into different roles. These conversations are deeply unnatural. Brian’s solution: peer groups of about 15 CEOs at the same stage. Misery loves company, and they learn faster from each other than from a coach.

6. Hire the spicy candidate, not the safe consensus pick. HubSpot used to run eight-person panels. When half scored a candidate 4/4 and half scored 2/4, they’d pick the boring all-3s candidate instead. They flipped this—started choosing the polarizing people with real weaknesses—and their hit rate improved. They also shrunk panels from eight interviewers to four.

7. Starting a company has never been easier. Scaling one has never been harder. AI make building trivial, so the number of companies is mushrooming. But that means unprecedented competition and noise. The bottleneck becomes distribution. Technical founders can build but rarely know how to distribute. Brian says the fastest learners will win. And distribution is about to shift—getting found in ChatGPT and Gemini will matter as much as getting found in Google.

8. Build your team like the 2004 Red Sox—a mix of homegrown talent and strategic outside hires. Companies consistently underrate their internal talent and overrate fancy resumes from big companies. If it’s a close call between promoting internally or hiring externally, give your homegrown talent the chance.

Listen now: https://lnkd.in/gC8PX9vn

When a team is underperforming, most people's first instinct is to blame the people. That's almost always wrong.

After 20+ years at Meta, Google, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — and advising leaders at Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, and more — this week's beloved guest author Molly Graham has learned that blaming people for structural problems is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.

In her powerful post, she shares a simple diagnostic tool she's used since leading wilderness expeditions in Patagonia at age 22: the Waterline Model.

The Waterline Model helps you answer one question: What's going on below the surface that's making things harder than they should be?

In other words, "snorkel before you scuba."

Read it here (and share it with your manager):

Open article: How to debug a team that isn’t working: the Waterline Model by lennysnewsletter.com

How to debug a team that isn’t working: the Waterline Model

Marc Andreessen calls him "the best AI CEO nobody knows about."

Elad Gil calls his company "the most successful, most quiet company in AI."

Qasar Younis is the co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition—which brings AI to vehicles, like tractors, planes, submarines, mining rigs, cars, and more.

The company is valued at over $15B, with 18 of the top 20 global automakers (and the U.S. Department of Defense) as customers.

As Qasar shared, "not many people run a $15B+ physical AI company with revenue and free cash flow. And by not many, I think literally zero other people."

And Qasar's personal story is wild: Born on a farm in Pakistan. Emigrated to the U.S. and grew up in Detroit managing engine lines at GM. Harvard MBA. Became COO of Y Combinator (during the era that funded OpenAI, Cruise, DoorDash, and Coinbase). Then left to start Applied Intuition in 2017.

In a rare and in-depth interview, we discuss:
🔸 The counterintuitive reason he's stayed quiet and built in private
🔸 Why reading old books and cleaning your own office makes you a better founder
🔸 How to build a culture where the best idea wins, not the loudest voice
🔸 Why the best companies show traction early—and what to do if yours doesn't
🔸 How physical AI will transform farming, mining, and construction before it ever reaches your home

Listen now 👇
• YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gHzqY9-n
• Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gXQgxMvF
• Apple: https://lnkd.in/ghm3BEmu

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 
🏆 Omni— AI analytics your customers can trust: https://omni.co/lenny
🏆 Vanta — Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny
🏆 Lovable — Build apps by simply chatting with AI: https://lovable.dev/

This week's post on using AI for your job interview has proven very popular, in particular the AI interview coach that's included in the post.

To take this even further, Noam Segal took all of the feedback he's received about the interview coach and made three major improvements:

1. Enhanced memory: It now tracks which questions companies actually ask, what patterns keep showing up, and what's working (or not) for you specifically.

2. Higher challenge: The coach will push back a lot more, stress-test your stories, and give you more hard truths.

3. More guidance: Every command now ends with a specific recommendation for a next step, vs. waiting for you to figure it out.

Download v2 of the coach here: https://lnkd.in/gZkCBR34

Growth and comfort do not coexist.

Designing, Buying and Growing businesses. Humanist of the 21st century. I believe in the power of creativity helped by technology and the human soul to transform organizations, products and lives.

A seasoned entrepreneur and business leader with over 15 years of experience in the digital industry. As the Co-founder and CEO of Modulor Studios, I lead an innovative digital ecosystem dedicated to transforming companies through strategy, branding, design, development, artificial intelligence, and growth.

Throughout my career, I have worked across various digital sectors gaining extensive experience in multiple international markets such as the USA, UK, France, Italy, and Spain. My expertise lies in co-founding, building and scaling businesses that leverage cutting-edge technology to drive meaningful impact.

At Modulor Studios, I lead the business strategy of four ventures:

- mendesaltaren – A specialized digital product design studio.

- Minimum.run – A growth and marketing studio driving business expansion.

- Tailor-hub – A software development and AI solutions studio.

- NoCodeHackers – A digital training platform and nocode/Gen AI studio.

Beyond my role at Modulor Studios, I am an entrepreneur, business advisor, and occasional investor. I am deeply passionate about fostering innovation and helping businesses succeed in the digital economy. My mission is to equip businesses and organizations with the tools, skills, and mindset necessary to thrive in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Jorge Lana

We don’t have investors. And we are targeting 30% organic growth in 2026.

Modulor Studios went from €1M to €9M in fine years - bootstrapped, profitable, no external capital. This year we’re targeting >€12M while transforming the company into an AI-native group and incubating new services like strategy and performance.

People ask me why we set these goals. Here’s why:

	1.	Our clients need us to grow.
We work with companies like Inditex, Repsol, Dormakaba, Cargill, and El Corte Inglés. They don’t need a vendor — they need a long-term partner that evolves with them. Growing our capabilities in AI, design, and engineering means they can scale theirs.

	2.	Our people deserve real career paths.
120+ professionals across five boutiques. If we stay small, we cap their growth and progress as professionals. Scaling means new roles, new challenges, cross-studio mobility, and leadership opportunities that didn’t exist two years ago.

	3.	AI is reshaping everything, and we want to lead, not follow. We’re not just using AI for clients. We’re rebuilding how we work: AI-native operations, exploring potential solutions, new service models. The companies that are leading transformation today will define the next decade.

	4.	Profitability is not optional.
We’ve set a goal of 15% EBITDA throughout our growth. No vanity metrics. No burning cash for market share. Sustainable growth means we choose our clients, invest in quality, and build for the long term.

	5.	The ecosystem effect.
Design, engineering, AI, e-commerce, marketing — five specialized studios working as one but also working individually as vertical expert. Every new client, every new capability, makes the whole group stronger.

Bootstrapped doesn’t mean unambitious. It means every euro of growth was earned, every decision was ours, and every bet was made with conviction. Here’s to building something that lasts.

In 2026 will see if we keep bootstrapping or if we will bet to have a partner aligned with us to keep growing and transforming to AI-native. 

mendesaltaren Tailor Hub SSTIL AGENCY Nocodehackers fik. - Shopify Premier Partner 

André Mendes Salvador Serrano Sara Rivera Jurado Diego Méndez Peño Danny Saltaren Simón G Negrete Viviana Reyes Garzón Alejandro Bernardo Diaz Bill Murphy Sandra Ramiro Paula Rodriguez Paula Lopez Oneto Emiliano Moretti Paloma Almodovar Esther Blázquez Blanco

Co-founder & CEO at Modulor Studios | Strategy, Growth, Creativity and Tech

Next week I'll be at 4YFN Barcelona (MWC) speaking about AI advantage for creativity and design at The Founders Academy.

🎤 Founder AI Advantage: Creativity & Design
📅 Tuesday, March 3 · 17:00 CET
📍 Founders Stage, Hall 8.0

The session is about bridging the creative gap. How founders and creatives can use generative AI to create professional-grade branding, prototyping, motion, videos and marketing visuals. 

At Modulor Studios we spent the last 5 years building a group of creative and technology studios (from branding, product design to software engineering to marketing and e-commerce). We've seen first-hand how AI is changing the way founders, start-ups and corporations go from idea to market. I'll share what's working for us, what's overhyped, and how we are actually shipping great creative with AI tools.

If you're at MWC / 4YFN, come say hi, I am always happy to connect, learn from others and discuss the future trends and challenges of these industries.

🔗 Session details: https://lnkd.in/eUFfiABQ

Just spoke at 4YFN MWC about the future of AI in creativity and design.

The talk was mostly around: "Creatives in the Loop" why humans will always be at the center of great creative work, even as AI reshapes everything around us.

Here's what I shared with the room with the audience in Barcelona:

Before you even think about implementing AI, you need rock-solid processes. No tool will save a broken or not optimised workflow. I explained how processes are important and how the https://lnkd.in/eKbW4YF8 at mendesaltaren has been always a differentiation for us.

The high-level creative process hasn't changed:

→ Challenge
→ Idea
→ Execution

What HAS changed is where AI hits hardest in the research and production parts. The execution layer is being completely transformed and the possibilities now are exponential. The research part is more accurate and faster thanks to Claude and GPT.

But here's the shift most people are missing: we're moving from using AI tools in silos to orchestrating them together. The real competitive advantage isn't knowing one tool — it's knowing how to connect many across the whole process. Use the common knowledge for good.

And this is where taste becomes the ultimate differentiator.

AI gives creators superpowers. Things that were impossible before are now within reach, if you bring 3 things:

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁 — understanding the problem deeply, as an expert.
𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 — knowing what to keep and what to kill.
𝗡𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 — giving it meaning and soul.

AI without criteria is just noise. Knowledge, taste, and critical thinking are what make it work.

The future belongs to creatives who know how to orchestrate, not to those who resist, and not to those who delegate everything.

Creators in the loop. Always.

Special thanks to Danny Saltaren André Mendes Sandra Ramiro Paloma Almodovar Beatriz Ferreira Arantxa Barcia for the support and help preparing the best cases for the talk with the experience of Modulor Studios, MITO AI, SSTIL AGENCY, mendesaltaren and Nocodehackers.

Thanks to everyone at #4YFN2026 #MWC2026 for the energy in the room.

Completely aligned with Aaron Epstein, General Partner at Y Combinator. This is exactly our vision at Modulor Studios👇🏻 

Agencies have always been crazy hard to scale. Low margins, slow manual work, and the only way to grow is to add more people.

But AI changes this.

Now instead of selling software to customers to help them do the work, you can charge way more by using the software yourself and selling them the finished product at 100x the price.

Think of a design firm that uses AI to produce custom design work for clients upfront, to win the business before the contract is even signed. Or an ad agency that uses AI to create stunning video ads without the time and expense of setting up a physical shoot. 

That's why agencies of the future will look more like software companies, with software margins. And they'll scale far bigger than any agencies that exist in these fragmented markets today.

We look forward to to build the agencies of the future. And the future is today.

https://lnkd.in/efPsNSAc
https://lnkd.in/ezh37gJR

Open video: AI Powered Agencies on youtube.com

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