The Curious Engineer

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Tools, tactics, and taste for product builders. Click to read build mode, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Software / engineering practiceAI / MLEngineering management / careers

’23’24’25’26
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96 from 8 Mar 2023 to 26 Oct 2026
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weekly (30 in the last year)
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company blog
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2026 26

  1. Jobs every engineer should automate with agents
  2. 38 things we've learned about building AI products
  3. We're building multiplayer AI. Here's what we've learned so far
  4. What happens to engineers when AI writes all the code?
  5. Read this before deleting your AGENTS.md
  6. You need to find product-market fit again (sorry)
  7. This post will save you tokens
  8. Can software factories actually work?
  9. What nobody tells you about writing agent skills
  10. How much can you delegate to agents?
  11. 2030-shaped software
  12. Product for Engineers is now build mode
  13. Stop being the code review bottleneck
  14. We used context engineering to 5x conversion and 2x activation
  15. Why we're bullish on loops
  16. LLMs are picking winners. Here’s how to become one
  17. 24 tips for giving S-tier demos
  18. The stuff nobody tells you about startup marketing
  19. Great companies are built in hackathons
  20. The golden rules of agent-first product engineering
  21. What we wish we knew about building AI agents
  22. WTF does a product manager do? (and why engineers should care)
  23. The engineeringification of everything
  24. The hidden danger of shipping fast
  25. 10x job posts for 10x engineers
  26. How I actually get good advice

2025 28

  1. The best of Product for Engineers in 2025
  2. Your product ideas probably suck (that's ok)
  3. How startups lose their edge
  4. Collaboration sucks
  5. Non-obvious pricing advice for startups
  6. 32 things we’ve learned about building a startup that scales
  7. Avoid these AI coding mistakes
  8. How bolt.new works
  9. What we’ve learned about building AI-powered features
  10. Glue teams vs back-office teams
  11. Failure modes for engineering team leads
  12. 40 things we’ve learned about marketing for developers
  13. Finding a job as a product engineer
  14. You're doing quarterly planning wrong
  15. An engineer's guide to vibe design (with prompts)
  16. Job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)
  17. The hidden benefits of being an open-source startup
  18. How to not break up with your cofounder
  19. What nobody tells developers about documentation
  20. 43 things we've learned about hiring at PostHog
  21. This is why you're not shipping
  22. What engineers get wrong about communication
  23. Good taste makes great products
  24. 50 things we’ve learned about building successful products
  25. Non-obvious SEO advice for startups
  26. WTF is activation and why should engineers care?
  27. Don't make these feature flag mistakes
  28. The deadline doom loop

2024 25

  1. Product management is broken. Engineers can fix it
  2. How we choose technologies
  3. How to do sales with no experience
  4. Why you're bad at giving feedback
  5. Non-obvious behaviors that will kill your startup
  6. How to think like a growth engineer
  7. How not to be boring
  8. Doing support makes you a better engineer
  9. How to get a job at a startup
  10. A/B testing mistakes I learned the hard way
  11. Using your own product is a superpower
  12. The magic of small engineering teams
  13. How we got our first 1,000 users
  14. How software salespeople screw you over
  15. Hiring (and managing) cracked engineers
  16. The habits of effective remote teams
  17. An engineer’s guide to talking to users
  18. How first-time founders fail
  19. What we learned about hiring from our first five employees
  20. Read this before you pivot
  21. What engineers get wrong about analytics
  22. Pragmatic startup lessons from Elon
  23. Beyond the 10x engineer
  24. Defining our ICP is the most important thing we ever did
  25. How we decide what to build

2023 17

  1. The companies that shaped PostHog
  2. Startup marketing for noobs
  3. How we work asynchronously
  4. How to design your company for speed
  5. Measuring product-market fit is more than vibes
  6. How to uncover your users' real problems
  7. Everything we've learned about hiring for startups (so far)
  8. 10 things we've learned about A/B testing for startups
  9. When, why, and how GitHub and GitLab use feature flags
  10. Why we sell features, not benefits
  11. What motivates me as a CEO of a startup
  12. 6 mistakes we've made at PostHog (and what we learned)
  13. What we've learned about product-market fit
  14. How to build new features users love
  15. 10 things we've learned about pricing for SaaS startups
  16. The common startup rule you can ignore
  17. What we've learned about talking to users