News: LLMs coming to Google Sheets and MS Excel
And fast (sync) vs background (async) models
Hi hi
Here’s the first weekly wrap of news. Happy bookmarking for later (that you won’t ever end up reading).
Opinion pieces
Shipping is marketing, prioritising, building, testing and more. Practice shipping
ProductTalk – “AI Changes Everything (And Nothing At All)”. The real AI skill for PMs is not prompting, it is resisting the urge to skip discovery just because shipping is cheap.
Novel designs
Fast (sync) vs background (async) agents. Cursor’s Composer model is perfect for in the flow AI pair programming. GPT 5.1 Codex is perfect for delegated work
Code heatmaps: Giving devs a bird’s eye map before they touch a file is quietly a 10x experience for onboarding and refactors.
AI coming home to Sheets/Excel: Ramp Labs (yes the neobank) and Claude making moving into the tools finance and ops people already live in.
Deep dives
Lessons from 6 months of using Claude Code to refactor 300k lines of code
Vercel: “What we learned building agents”. The sweet spot of low-cognitive, high-repetition tasks.
How Figma built human-centric AI evals for Figma Make, including design and functionality scoring.
“It’s easy to over-engineer your eval stack, your data set, some part of the quality loop — but it all depends on what users want to use your product for…. Building conviction on where you want to invest is the key part to get right.”
Learning
LangGraphEssentials: Short course teaching LangGraph concepts like nodes, edges and state for building graph-style agents in Typescript.
A quick start guide to MastraAI (LLM framework for Typescript). Get started in 5 minutes