The Operating Week Ahead: Unapologetically Speedy
A Weekly Curated Jumpstart from Operating by John Brewton
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One lens. A few sharp moves. Ten minutes to operate better in an AI-shaped economy.
If you’re short on time: read the HBR piece on the AI Intensity Trap, skim the Dario Amodei interview on Dwarkesh, and try the experiment at the end.
Now go have a killer week.
— john —
Three Things I’m Thinking About
1. Your Software Stack Is a Liability
Marc Andreessen said software would eat the world. It did. Now AI is eating software.
Anthropic launched Claude Cowork with industry-specific plugins and the market responded immediately — a 15%+ crash in the S&P Software Index in a single month. Billions wiped from Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others. The market has a name for it: SaaSmageddon.
Ben Thompson’s Stratechery piece on Microsoft and Software Survival lays out the new logic: the software that wins will use AI to absorb other software. Microsoft got punished on Wall Street not because it was wrong — but because it chose to allocate scarce GPU capacity to its own AI-powered applications instead of renting out Azure compute. That’s not a mistake. That’s a signal.
Meanwhile, StackBlitz’s CEO says his startup has built AI agents for BI, coding, support, and sales — making “many SaaS vendors no longer relevant.”
If you’re still paying for tools an AI agent could replace, you’re subsidizing your own disruption.
→ Week Ahead Prompt: Audit your SaaS subscriptions. Which three could a well-prompted AI agent replace this quarter?
2. AI Makes You Faster — and That’s the Trap
A new HBR study tracked 40 knowledge workers at a tech company over eight months. The findings are sobering.
Employees voluntarily worked longer hours, took on broader tasks, and worked through breaks, not because they were asked to, but because AI made “doing more” feel possible. Researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye call it the AI Intensity Trap: short-term productivity surges that mask silent workload creep and growing cognitive strain. Workers started checking others’ AI-generated code, coaching “vibe coders,” finishing projects AI started but couldn’t complete. The eventual cost: burnout, weakened decision-making, blurred personal boundaries.
The trap is subtle because the extra effort is voluntary. It feels like experimentation. Leaders don’t see the damage until it’s too late.
AI doesn’t just change what your team does — it changes the rhythm of how they work. Without deliberate pauses, the tool that accelerates output also accelerates exhaustion.
→ Week Ahead Prompt: Name one workflow where you or your team uses AI to go faster. Now ask: have you redesigned the pace of that work, or just the speed?
3. We Are Near the End of the Exponential
Dario Amodei told Dwarkesh Patel something every operator should hear: “We are near the end of the exponential.”
He wasn’t saying AI progress is slowing. He was saying the current scaling paradigm — more data, more compute, more parameters — is approaching its natural limit. What comes next is different: recursive self-improvement, agentic deployment, and economic diffusion that will be “fast” and “messy.”
Amodei puts Anthropic at 90% confidence that within a decade we’ll have “a country of geniuses in a data center.” Revenue is growing 10x per year. They added “a few billion” in January alone. And he was blunt about how they operate internally: “There is zero time for bullshit. These tools make us a lot more productive.”
The window to build organizational muscle around AI is now — before the next wave makes your current learning curve look quaint.
→ Week Ahead Prompt: If AI agents become genuinely autonomous within 1–3 years, which one process in your business would you redesign today to be ready?
What to Read, Watch, and Listen To
📄 “Microsoft and Software Survival” — Ben Thompson, Stratechery Why Microsoft’s stock got hammered, why the decision was right, and why the software that survives will be the software that uses AI to absorb other software.
📄 “AI Doesn’t Reduce Work — It Intensifies It” — Ranganathan & Ye, Harvard Business Review The most important people-side AI article in months. Read it with your COO. Then design intentional pauses into your AI-augmented workflows before the trap springs.
🎙️ “Dario Amodei — We Are Near the End of the Exponential” — Dwarkesh Podcast (Apple Podcasts · YouTube · Spotify) Podcast of the month. Don’t just listen for the AI predictions — listen for how Amodei thinks about operating under existential competitive and financial pressure while trying to maintain values. That tension is the meta-lesson.
📊 “The State of AI in the Enterprise: The Untapped Edge” — Deloitte AI Institute 3,000+ leaders surveyed. The headline: 25% say AI is transformative (double from a year ago), but only 25% have moved their pilots into production. The gap between AI ambition and AI activation is the defining enterprise challenge of 2026.
Operating Quotes
“There is zero time for bullshit. There is zero time for feeling like we’re productive when we’re not.” — Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic
Operator translation: Real productivity is measurable. If you can’t point to the output, the AI isn’t working — you’re just busy.
“What looks like higher productivity in the short run can mask silent workload creep and growing cognitive strain.” — Aruna Ranganathan & Xingqi Maggie Ye, HBR
Operator translation: Speed without judgment is just burnout with better tools.
“The software that wins will use AI to usurp other software.” — Ben Thompson, Stratechery
Operator translation: Build the thing that replaces the thing. Don’t be the thing that gets replaced.
One Tiny Experiment for This Week
The Pace Audit.
Block 30 minutes. Pull up last week’s calendar. Circle the three moments where AI helped you move fastest.
Now ask one question for each: Did the speed of that work match the quality of the decision it produced?
If you find even one instance where AI-enabled speed outran your judgment — where you shipped something, responded to something, or committed to something before you were really ready — you’ve found the trap.
The fix isn’t to slow down. It’s to insert one decision pause before every major output. One counterargument. One link back to your actual goal.
The difference between “AI helps me go faster” and “AI helps me go faster in the right direction“ is the whole game this week.
Long-Cycle Listening
Not “finish this week” picks. Background curriculum for the next month. All available as audiobooks on Spotify with a Premium plan.
📚 The Innovator’s Dilemma — Clayton Christensen (Amazon · Audible) If SaaSmageddon has you thinking about disruption, go back to the source. Christensen’s framework for how incumbents get displaced by “good enough” alternatives from below is the exact playbook AI agents are running on legacy software.
📚 Thinking in Bets — Annie Duke (Amazon · Audible) Amodei’s interview is a masterclass in probabilistic thinking under uncertainty. Duke’s book is the manual. Read it alongside the HBR Intensity Trap piece: AI accelerates decisions, but without better decision-making frameworks, speed just gets you to bad outcomes faster.
📚 The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz (Amazon · Audible) The book on operating under pressure — when there’s no playbook, when the market shifts under you, and when the decisions are all bad and you have to pick the least bad one. The spiritual companion to this week.
If this nudges you to redesign or incrementally improve even one workflow, introduces you to someone new, or gives you a little inspiration, it did its job. Hit reply and tell me how it landed. I read every response.
Crush it this week.
— j —
Are you new to Operating?
You Might Enjoy These
(Access the entire library of articles and resources for $7.99 per month)
0 to 55,000 - The First 90 Days Playbook - What I’d Do Differently Knowing What I Know Now
The Operating by John Brewton Resource Library - No Filler. All Killer.
WINNING THE LOSER’S GAME: The Creator Economy and the Companies We All Need to Build
Become a paid subscriber to access all the content ($7.99 / month) or get to work with us and become a member of the Operating Founder cohort for $99 (annual).
John Brewton documents the history and future of operating companies at Operating by John Brewton. He is a graduate of Harvard University and began his career as a Phd. student in economics at the University of Chicago. After selling his family’s B2B industrial distribution company in 2021, he has been helping business owners, founders and investors optimize their operations ever since. He is the founder of 6A East Partners, a research and advisory firm asking the question: What is the future of companies? He still cringes at his early LinkedIn posts and loves making content each and everyday, despite the protestations of his beloved wife, Fabiola, at times.
Thanks John for another brilliant post. I ran the pace audit myself on three tasks that I thought I was optimising for AI last week, and in two cases I definitely had made the right decision. However, in the third, if I'd have stuck to human judgement instead, it would have ended up saving me a couple of hours of going round in circles. Thanks for the reminder of what it always pays to insert that extra layer of criticality before handing over to the machines.