benbalter

I didn't touch too much on AI in the book itself (since it's changing so quickly), but it was interesting to reflect that the fundamentals of 2012/2014 (Markdown, URLs, APIs, etc.) carry double the weight when we start thinking about machine readability.

> It seems to be listed on multiple outlets, I'm curious how much that part of the process was able to be handled by agents vs being done manually.

Entirely manual, and I suspect that's by design. I've never published a book before, so I did ask (non-agentic) AI questions about the process (should I use service X or service Y, should I do a pre-sale, etc.).

> And I do recommend applying a much stronger human-in-the-loop editing process to any material meant to market this book (and of course the book itself).

100% human in the loop. I wanted the public-facing presence to be reader-centric, not marketing/author centric, which I felt was the norm LLMs are trained on.

> Prior experience and taste are all we have left in this new era.

+100. I held the book to a much higher standard than I do musing I randomly post on the internet that hardly anyone reads. (I didn't expect this to get so much attention). I'm going to take another pass at both the post and the site tonight. Thanks for the feedback.

Chapters built on an earlier post making the same argument:

- Why everything should have a URL → "Why URLs?" (2015) + "Expose process through URLs" (2014)

- Speak like a human → "Write corporate blog posts as a human" (2015)

- Optimize for developer happiness → "On stickers and optimizing for happiness" (2015)

- The zen of open and async work → "The zen of GitHub" (2015)

- Lead like an engineer → "Manage like an engineer" (2023)

- Rethinking management for remote teams → "Deprecate management" (2012) + "Cathedral–bazaar management" (2023)

- Retool your documents → "Word vs. Markdown" (2014) + "We've been trained to make paper" (2012)

- The etiquette of issues and pull requests → "Types of pull requests" (2015) + "Pull requests are a form of documentation" (2023)

- Showing colleagues they're valued → "Three easy ways to show employees you appreciate them" (2017)

- Choosing the right collaboration tools → "Tools of the trade" (2020)

- What I wish I knew before going remote → "Eight things I wish I knew my first week at GitHub" (2016)

- Career conversations → "The brag doc" (2026)

- Intro to software development for non-technical roles → "GitHub for non-technical roles" (2023)

And chapters that are near-verbatim descendants of a named post:

- Leaders show their work → "Leaders show their work" (2022)

- Work loudly → "Work loudly" (2026)

- Meetings are a point of escalation → "Meetings are a point of escalation" (2023)

- The Andon principle for knowledge work → "Transparency & collaboration is the Andon of knowledge production" (2023)

- Engaging with dissent → "Dissenting voices" (2024)

- How to 1:1 → "One-on-one playbook" (2026)

- Agentic workflows → "Agentic workflows" (2026)

- Why you should work asynchronously → "Why async" (2022)

ETA: Need to add "maniac on the front page of Hacker News" to my resume.

Full disclosure, a few months back when I had some tokens expiring, I had Copilot spike out a draft to see if there was anything "there" worth writing. If you check the revision history (linked from the bottom of the post), I did a full (human) blank page rewrite three days ago and then only used Claude for line edits like adding links or fixing failing lints.