Wisereads Vol. 114 — The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Alex Lieberman on training high-agency employees, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Warren Buffett's entire collection of Berkshire Hathaway letters, thoughtfully compiled into a single volume by Max Olson. This week, we’re sharing an excerpt from Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soul of a New Machine, about Data General’s race to build minicomputers.

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The engineering team at Anthropic guides users through upleveling their agents with the newly released Skills. "Building a skill for an agent is like putting together an onboarding guide for a new hire. Instead of building fragmented, custom-designed agents for each use case, anyone can now specialize their agents with composable capabilities by capturing and sharing their procedural knowledge."

A quiet majority in tech takes a more measured view of AI than the loudest boosters and critics. Writer and technologist Anil Dash sums it up: "Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value."

Marketing expert Seth Godin knows how to capture consumer attention, so we’re all ears for his take on attention as a luxury good: "A Birkin bag is a luxury good, and so is reading an entire non-fiction book... By 'wasting' our attention on nuance, narrative, experiences and everything except the checkbox takeaway, we’re sending a message to ourselves and others."

Former Tesla and OpenAI engineer Andrej Karpathy joins Dwarkesh Patel to discuss the flaws of reinforcement learning, the future of education, and the breakthroughs needed before labs approach anything like AGI. "We're building ghosts or spirits or whatever people want to call it because we're not doing training by evolution. We're doing training by imitation of humans and the data that they've put on the Internet. You end up with these ethereal spirit entities because they're fully digital and they're mimicking humans. It's a different kind of intelligence."

Morning Brew cofounder Alex Lieberman shares a simple rubric from Steph Smith he uses to train high-agency employees: "Using this framework, here's what I say to every new employee… You will live at Level 4 from Day 1 and as we build trust you will rise to Level 5."

Blocking distractions, scaling your abilities, and achieving results are the keys to great work, according to Perplexity AI. Their how-to guide on leveraging its product suite (the Comet Browser, Agent, email assistant, and more) includes prompts and tips to do just that. "This isn't about working longer hours or taking on more tasks. It's about working at the scale of your actual curiosity, finally able to pursue the questions that genuinely interest you with the rigor they deserve. You transform from someone who manages tasks to someone who explores possibilities."

When it came out in 1981, Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine quickly became essential reading on the rise of the American tech industry. With thriller pacing and journalistic precision, it tells the story of Data General engineers racing to build a 32-bit minicomputer, capturing the obsession, ingenuity, and office politics of a pivotal moment in computing.

"In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer’s power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design. It did mainly bookkeeping and math, by rote procedures, and it did them far more quickly than they had ever been done before."

Through the end of October, you can grab the full ebook for $2.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada.

Matrix Partners investor Matt Brown writes crisp strategy notes on fintech and vertical software, complete with smart sketches and visuals. From Your data model is your destiny: "Product market fit is the startup holy grail. “Product” and “market” are essential, but a startup’s data model is the dark matter that holds them together."