Engineering leads and Engineering Managers should definitely read Kaari Saarinen (CEO of Linear) X article entitled 'The disappearing middle of software work' as well as Addy Osmani's 'The Next Two Years of Software Engineering'
Drama this week revolved around the unfortunate layoffs at Tailwind with the community rallying back with massively increased sponsorships as well as Anthropic tightening their rules which disallowed competing agentic harness such as Opencode as well as competitors such as xAI to use their models
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The following messages were posted on the 'All Things AI' Telegram group from Sunday 4th Jan 2026 to Saturday 10th Jan 2026
1 | An interview with analyst Benedict Evans on the role of productization in AI adoption, an AI bubble, OpenAI, comparing Nvidia and Sun Microsystems, and more |
2 | Came across this interesting quote-tweet by Akash Gupta of Linear's CEO Kaari Saarinen recent X article on how the middle of software work aka coding is evolving and what are the skill sets product teams need to have alongwith how their tools need to evolve
Linear’s CEO just described the biggest shift in product team structure since Agile.
For decades, product work meant: PM defines requirements → designers create specs → engineers translate to code. The middle step, translation, absorbed 70% of the time and created most of the |
1 | Nvidia launches the Vera Rubin platform, saying it will offer dramatic reductions in inference and training costs compared to Blackwell, across six new chips https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/rubin-platform-ai-supercomputer
Rubin looks like a beast.
- Vera Rubin official launch (all 6 chips back from fab, H2 2026 production) - 5x inference / 3.5x training vs Blackwell - The killer economics: 1/4 GPUs for training, 1/7 token cost - Rubin GPU with HBM4 (22 TB/s) and 50 PFLOPS FP4 - Vera CPU with
$NVDA Rubin cuts inference token costs by up to 10x and slashes MoE training needs to ~4x fewer GPUs versus Blackwell.
Each Rubin pod contains 1,152 GPUs across 16 racks or 72 GPUs per rack. 
NEWS: Nvidia has released a new video of its next-generation Rubin chips, which are 5X more powerful than their predecessor, Blackwell. The new Rubin chips are already in production.
CEO Jensen Huang: "This is a Rubin pod. 1,152 GPUs and 16 racks. Each rack has 72 Rubins." 
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2 | Probably late to this but I recently came across Alibaba's B2B AI sourcing agent Accio via a great video from Greg Isenberg which I felt might interest members in this group
Supply Chain News #1
AliBaba has an AI sourcing tool called Accio. Since they have such a vast supplier network, it's a natural next step for them to "match" brands and manufacturers more efficiently. As a test - I dumped a google doc full of a single products info and specs, |
3 | LTX-2 is now open source: text → audio + video. Today we’re releasing LTX-2, the first open-source foundation model for joint audiovisual generation, together with a full technical report.  LTX-2 is now open source: text → audio + video.Today we’re releasing LTX-2, the first open-source foundation model for joint audiovisual generation, together with a full technical report.  
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xAI raised a $20B Series E, exceeding its $15B targeted round size, with participation from Valor, Nvidia, and others, and says Grok 5 is currently in training
1 | OpenAI unveils ChatGPT Health, which lets users import medical records and other data from health apps into ChatGPT, available to a small group via a waitlist |
2 | Tailwind Labs cut three out of four engineers on January 5 after forecasting cash burnout by mid-2026, driven by a 40% drop in docs traffic from AI tools letting users skip the site. Adam Wathan, co-owners Steve Schoger and Jonathan Reinink, engineer Robin, and ops lead Peter form the slimmed-down team, with Wathan returning to hands-on work and eyeing AI for efficiency. Tailwind CSS stays hugely popular with over 20 million weekly downloads, but the layoffs highlight AI's toll on open-source monetization through paid docs funnels. Wathan offered generous severance and shared openly, earning praise for his honesty.
Tailwind's lost 40% of their web traffic, a bunch of revenue, and yet has 300%+ growth in npm installs and usage at all time highs.
An incredibly raw, honest take from one of our industry's best on the realities of running a business in the midst of the creative destruction AI  Recorded a new morning walk this morning, hard one to share because I'm sure people will want to roast me for it but have been transparent up until now so publishing it anyways.
Tailwind revenue down 80%, 75% of engineering team laid off in new year, docs traffic down by 50%.
All these despite every single of the 100 million vibecoded sites on the Internet uses tailwind.
One of the big AI companies should consider acquiring Tailwind, or do a strategic investment. And maybe rehire all the devs. They’ve given the ecosystem so much.
Recorded a new morning walk this morning, hard one to share because I'm sure people will want to roast me for it but have been transparent up until now so publishing it anyways.
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The Next Two Years of Software Engineering
Five crazy-relevant questions to ask of yourself and your team with strong recommendations being offered by Addy Osmani who was previously Engineering Manager for Google Chrome and currently bridges Google DeepMind, engineering, product, and developer relations teams.
The Next Two Years of Software Engineering
Exploring five critical questions shaping software engineering through 2026, with contrasting scenarios for each. These lenses help prepare for the evolving ...
Anthropic Locks Claude Max Subscriptions to Official Coding Tool
Anthropic restricted high-tier Claude subscriptions to its own Claude Code terminal agent, blocking apps that mimic official access to prevent unusual traffic and support issues. Users hit errors and flooded GitHub with complaints, some canceling plans, while Basecamp CEO DHH called the move customer hostile for forcing one CLI on devs.
OpenCode quickly partnered with OpenAI as a workaround, and reports emerged of Anthropic also cutting access for xAI staff via Cursor, pushing rivals to build alternatives.
You can already build on top of github.com/openai/codex/t… directly, which includes ChatGPT
Here’s what xAI cofounder Tony Wu sent to staff on Wednesday according to a copy of the internal Slack message I viewed:
“Hi
Below is my personal website which aggregates links to many of my socials as well as the various content and community that I curate. Feel free to share this link to others who you think may find this content/community useful to them
The cover image of this newsletter via generated via the Seedream 4.5 model within the Freepik tool via the following prompt
RAW photo of a mountain lake landscape, clear water, (Instagram able), highly detailed, photorealistic, ultra-realistic photo, 8k, UHD, DLSR, soft lighting, reflection, high quality, film grain, Fujifilm XT3, (masterpiece, panoramic),