For the second issue we’ve got excellent thoughts on prioritisation, AI slop, and a great little tool for Markdown. It’s felt like a quieter week for writing on the internet so here’s the best bits I’ve found!
Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor
Link: https://longform.asmartbear.com/prioritization/
I struggled for years to articulate why we sometimes had to let smaller fires burn while focusing on survival-level priorities, even when others couldn’t understand it. This article perfectly shows that reality of ruthless prioritisation, especially when your most critical objectives simply can’t be solved by throwing more people at them. I love Jason Cohen’s writing.
The work is never just “the work”
Link: https://davestewart.co.uk/blog/the-work-is-never-just-the-work/
Even though I don’t fully agree with avoiding fixed price pricing - sometimes, you can be absolutely undeniable! - I thought this was a good writeup. Over the years, I’ve been guilty of being very optimistic with estimates because I consistently underestimated the ‘other’ work that goes into the work. We got really good at breaking things down, estimating by the hour, and then adding padding to everything to avoid surprises. There’s no much invisible work that goes into making a thing happen!
OverType - The Markdown Editor That’s a Textarea
Link: https://overtype.dev/
If you’ve ever implemented a WYSIWYG editor you know the pain they try to abstract away - all that ContentEditable nonsense, virtual DOM complexity, and the endless debugging of cursor positions. I love this approach because it’s so damn simple - just a transparent textarea over rendered markdown and suddenly you get all the native browser behaviour for free. The execution is really cool too, love the logo and branding work they put into it, and that demo video shows proper polish on what could have been just another random little side project.
Full-Stack SaaS Development Course on Cloudflare Workers
Link: https://learn.backpine.com/
Every week I fall more for the Cloudflare platform, and this course looks so useful. My favourite structure is a PHP monolith supported by microservices doing things that need to scale down to zero, or are super bursty, and Workers are perfect for this. The AI workflows stuff and the Durable Objects parts look particularly interesting too - I’ve been wanting to play around with both of those for ages.
Don't feed me AI slop
Link: https://www.seangoedecke.com/dont-feed-me-slop/
It does feel very icky to put out AI content as if you wrote it entirely yourself - it feels like something fundamentally dishonest, almost a bait-and-switch. I actually use AI in the writing of this very newsletter, it’s lightly editing the words you’re reading right now, but it’s got a huge backlog of articles I’ve written by hand for tone and it’s a 5 sentence summary! The difference is content density - if you’re just padding “can u add caching” into three paragraphs of generic fluff, that’s pure slop and feels gross to read. But if the AI is helping you polish something that’s already dense with your actual thoughts and maintains that same level of substance you’d produce yourself, that feels totally different.