December 2025

Brooks’s Law in Reverse: How Four Engineers and an AI Built a Million-User App in 28 Days
“Adding people to a late software project makes it later.”
 • Max Votek
The Storytelling Gold Rush: Why Every Company Suddenly Needs a Human Voice
I came across something revealing in the Wall Street Journal recently: the market is being flooded with “storyteller” job postings.
 • Max Votek
How AI is Changing How Programmers Work (and What It Means for the Rest of Us)
I came across a fascinating study from Anthropic about how their engineers use AI in their work, and honestly, it hit close to home.
 • Max Votek
The Age of Scaling Is Dead. Welcome Back to the Era of Research.
I listened to Ilya Sutskever’s interview with Dwarkesh Patel and once again found myself returning to a thought that’s been nagging at me.
 • Max Votek
The Gift of Being Different: What Alex Karp’s Viral Moment Reveals About Innovation and Mediocrity
Last week I was discussing with my friend, Sergey Bulaev, how society treats people who look and behave differently.
 • Max Votek
The AI IPO Race: Two Companies, Two Strategies, One Market
News broke last week that Anthropic is preparing for an IPO as early as 2026.
 • Max Votek
When Graduate Students School the Machines: A Reality Check on AI Coding
Researchers from EPFL just dropped a study that cuts through the AI hype with surgical precision.
 • Max Votek
How to Influence the Fox Through Content (and Why You Won’t Get Through Without His Circle)
One of my favorite books, Power Base Selling, features a character called the FOX.
 • Max Votek
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