TL; DR: AI’s 1997 Internet Moment — Food for Agile Thought #547
Welcome to the 547th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,532 peers. This week, Benedict Evans tells Lenny Rachitsky that today marks AI’s 1997 Internet Moment and asks whether automation kills tasks or jobs, which Casey Newton’s guest, Kathryn Anne Edwards, treats as real but manageable, faulting unemployment insurance rather than fearing an idle underclass. Itamar Gilad warns that cheap AI coding tempts teams to build before validating, while Malcolm Spittler and Dylan Patel name the value GDP misses ‘Dark Output,’ and Joost Minnaar prefers autonomous-team networks over a single chain of command. Also, Marina Favaro and Jack Clark sketch the implications of recursive self-improvement of AI.
Next, Rich Mironov warns that AI ships 100x more code, yet attention and budgets don’t scale, so products that skip discovery rarely stick. METR, with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI, finds that AI agents could plausibly go rogue but not robustly, while Teresa Torres notes that Cowork’s VM hosts the Mini Shai-Hulud worm without blocking it. Mike Fisher likens siloed teams to hand-copying the Diamond Sutra, and Jeff Gothelf redefines “done” as acceptable variance.
Lastly, Marc Abraham borrows venture capital’s ‘terminal value’ to help product managers judge whether a product merits more investment. Addy Osmani calls the opposite reflex ‘cognitive surrender,’ in which you stop thinking and accept the AI’s answer without checking it. Mark Graban shows confession works only when fixes follow, citing Burger King and Domino’s, while Tobi Lütke runs Shopify’s agent River in public Slack so everyone learns by watching. Finally, Anthropic open-sourced 11 role-specific Claude Cowork plugins for knowledge workers.
Food for Agile Thought #547: AI’s 1997 Internet Moment, Code Isn’t Product, Cognitive Surrender, Admitting Mistakes Is Not Enough – Age-of-Product.com
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You have been prompting AI for months. The results are inconsistent, every conversation starts from zero, and the model forgets who you are. That is the ceiling of prompting.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: AI’s 1997 Moment
and : 📺 A rational conversation on where AI is actually going
In conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans believes AI is a '1997 internet moment,' as big as the internet but only that big. He reframes job loss as 'is this a task or a job?', suggests distribution is becoming the real moat, and thinks things will probably turn out fine.
🎯 Product
: Code Isn’t Product
Rich Mironov warns that AI lets teams ship 100x more code, but customer attention, budgets, and buying don't scale. Skip discovery, positioning, and marketing, and most new products won't stick.
: Skateboards, Cars, and the Return of Code-First Discovery
Itamar Gilad warns that cheap AI coding is reviving the old habit of jumping straight to working prototypes, sidelining faster no-code validation. Building first still slows learning and breeds attachment to ideas.
: My Product Management Toolkit (70): determining Terminal Value
Marc Abraham borrows 'terminal value' from venture capital to help product managers decide whether to keep investing in a product, combining payback period, a customer value scorecard, and strategic option value.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
(via Anthropic): When AI builds itself
Marina Favaro and Jack Clark show that AI is already accelerating AI development inside Anthropic, where Claude now writes most of the code, then ask what recursive self-improvement might mean once machines start building their own successors.
: 📺 'Cognitive surrender is when you stop thinking altogether and blindly accept the answer the AI gives you'
Addy Osmani names a failure mode he calls 'cognitive surrender,' the moment you stop thinking altogether and blindly accept whatever answer the AI hands you, rather than questioning or verifying it yourself.
(via SemiAnalysis): AI Dark Output: The Visible Cost of Invisible Output
Malcolm Spittler and Dylan Patel propose that AI's real output is becoming invisible to GDP, what they call 'Dark Output.' We can measure tokens spent and jobs lost, but not the value created.
(via METR): 📖 Frontier Risk Report (February to March 2026)
METR, with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI, assessed whether internal AI agents could go rogue. The verdict: agents plausibly had the means, motive, and opportunity to start small rogue deployments, but couldn't make them robust.
and : 📺 An economist's case against the AI jobs-pocalypse
Casey Newton interviews economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, who rejects the Silicon Valley ‘idle class’ fear as classist. AI job loss is real but absorbable; the fix is repairing unemployment insurance, not UBI.
: What I Learned from the Recent Wave of Package Hacks (And Is Cowork Immune?)
Teresa Torres examines the recent Mini Shai-Hulud worm and asks whether Cowork shields you. Its virtual machine contains malicious code, but does not block it, so guard what data you share.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Claude Cowork BootCamp #2, June 10-July 2, 2026
You bought the Claude Pro subscription. You installed the desktop app. You pointed Cowork at a folder, watched it churn for thirty seconds, and got something that looked impressive but was not quite useful. You tried again. Same result.
Most people who try Claude Cowork get stuck in the same place. They do not know which of their tasks are good candidates for automation. They do not know how to build Skills that survive a second use. They do not know where the current limits sit. So they keep treating Cowork like a chat tool and miss the point of having an AI assistant who actually does the work.
The Claude Cowork BootCamp fixes that. In four hands-on sessions, you build working Skills and AI Agents during the sessions, not after. You leave with a compounding system, not a stack of prompts.
The Founding Cohort sold out in April 2026. Cohort #2 starts June 10, 2026.
A Note on Positioning: This BootCamp is built for knowledge workers who want to automate repetitive work with Claude Cowork. There is no Agile-specific content in the curriculum. The class is in English. 🇬🇧
Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Claude Cowork BootCamp #2, June 10-July 2, 2026 — No Coding Required.
Customer Voice: “Vijay Reddy, Principal SPC & AI Governance Lead: “Three weeks ago I could use AI. Today I can deploy it. The Cowork Bootcamp is the only AI training I have taken that shifted my thinking from ‘what can I prompt?’ to ‘what should I architect?’ — and that shift showed up immediately: on the same day as Session 3, I shipped a production AI research agent live at sagent.sai4rai.org, applying Stefan’s CLAUDE.md principles and the A3 Framework in real code, not just in exercises. I would recommend this to any agile coach, product manager, or practitioner who is tired of AI training that teaches tools but leaves you without a system for knowing when and how to actually delegate to AI at scale.” (Vijay Reddy, Founder & Executive Director, SAI4RAI.)
➿ Agile & Leadership
(via Corporate Rebels): Chain of command: your organization's biggest single point of failure
Joost Minnaar shows that a single chain of command is one point of failure. Drawing on Menger's theorem, he proposes networks of autonomous teams whose many independent paths keep information flowing.
: Admitting Mistakes Is Not Enough: The Leadership Lesson Behind the Burger King and Domino's Ads
Mark Graban shows why admitting mistakes alone falls flat: Burger King, Domino's, and T-Mobile all paired public confessions with real fixes first, the same candor-plus-improvement sequence that builds psychological safety inside any team.
: From Scriptorium to System
Mike Fisher uses the ninth-century Diamond Sutra to argue that most companies are still hand-copying AI: siloed teams, drifting prompts, no shared standards. Leaders must decide when to stop experimenting and start standardizing.
📯 The Problem of AI Builders: Eric Ries’ 'Incorruptible' Solved the Later Problem. AI Builders Have an Earlier One.
Eric Ries' new book 'Incorruptible' solves a problem most readers will not face for years: protecting a valuable organization from capture once it succeeds. The builders that AI is creating hit an earlier issue: Building software used to force the question of whether it was worth building. That gate has largely collapsed. Eric Ries asks how mission survives success; we, the normals, how judgment survives abundance.
Thesis: Ries's Incorruptible solves a later problem, protecting a valuable organization from capture; cheap building created an earlier one, where judgment about what is worth building is the only gate left. That is the problem this article addresses.
Learn more: The Problem of AI Builders: Eric Ries’ 'Incorruptible' Solved the Later Problem. AI Builders Have an Earlier One..
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: Learning on the Shop floor
Tobi Lütke explains why Shopify's AI agent River only works in public Slack channels, turning the whole company into a Lehrwerkstatt where everyone learns by watching the most experienced people work alongside it.
: What "done" means when you're shipping AI features
Jeff Gothelf suggests that AI has broken our old definition of "done." You are no longer shipping predictable vending machines, but distributions of unpredictable behavior, so done becomes a calibration of acceptable variance, not specification adherence.
(via Anthropic): Open source repository of plugins primarily intended for knowledge workers to use in Claude Cowork
Anthropic open-sourced 11 role-specific plugins for Claude Cowork, also compatible with Claude Code. Each bundle includes skills, connectors, slash commands, and sub-agents so that Claude can act as a specialist for functions such as sales, finance, legal, marketing, and data. Teams customize them with their own tools, terminology, and workflows for consistent results.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:
| Date | Class and Language | City | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 8, 2026 | GUARANTEED: Claude Cowork: Stop Prompting. Start Delegating. (English; Self-paced Online Course) | Self-Paced Online Course | $129 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 9, 2026 | GUARANTEED: HoA 74: "CLAUDE.md" — The One File That Makes AI Remember How You Work. (English) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 10-July 2, 2026 | GUARANTEED: Claude Cowork BootCamp #2 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | $249 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 11, 2026 | GUARANTEED: HoA 75: Token Economics. (English) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🇩🇪 June 30-July 1, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 July 1, 2026 | GUARANTEED: AI 4 Agile Course v3 — Master AI for Agile Practitioners (English; Self-paced Online Course) | Self-Paced Online Course | $149 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
See all upcoming classes here.
You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product YouTube channel to improve learning, for example, about AI's 1997 Internet Moment:
- Stop Writing Prompts. Let AI Do It for You — Hack #01, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- Socratic Prompting — Hack #10, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- Check Your AI’s Plan Before — Hack #7, AI4Agile Online Course v2.
- From Product Requirements to Experiments to Learnings — Supported by Generative AI.
- Never Accept an LLM’s First Offer — Improve GenAI’s Usefulness w/ Feedback Loops and Challenges.
✋ Do Not Miss Out: Learn more about AI's 1997 Internet Moment — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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If you would like to join, all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.
Help your team to learn about how AI Intensifies Work by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
