And… we’re back! I’ve had a busy last couple of weeks, with trips to Whistler and New York. Lots to talk about. This is the Monday Letter for March 30th, 2026 (and March 23rd and March 16th).

Give the agents an Autobahn

Issue tracking is dead. Or so says the CEO of the hottest issue tracking company. As someone who works at another sort of issue tracking company (really, an everything tracking company), I don’t fully agree, but there’s some truth to it.

What I think is dead is the how, more than the what. The “what” is fine. A system of record is still critical. Teams that are extremely organized dramatically leapfrog unorganized teams in the agent-driven era we find ourselves in. There’s still a cold-start problem with agents (you can’t just tell Claude, “build a sustainable business; make no mistakes”… yet), so a clear backlog with well-defined tasks is beneficial.

But we keep forcing agents to work like us. There’s no point to the Kanban board anymore, unfortunately. (Candidly, I never liked it to begin with. Drag-and-drop is clunky.) Agents need the Autobahn. A Kanban board (my chosen punching bag, but really all legacy B2B SaaS tooling) is like driving in a school zone with speed bumps.

Waymo is wildly successful in San Francisco, but having humans on the road is tremendously limiting its potential. A Waymo is much smarter and faster at decision-making than you’ll ever be. It just has to be extraordinarily cautious because humans have a penchant for jaywalking. If everything on the road were completely autonomous, what would be the point of traffic lights? Cars could glide through intersections, orchestrating in real time and ensuring both safety and efficiency at scales we can’t imagine today. When the road is completely autonomous, you unlock the true potential of this technology. (Malcolm Gladwell articulated this well in a Revision History episode in 2021, called “I Love You, Waymo.” I love Waymo, too.)

So, let’s return to SaaS. Knowledge workers are doing much the same thing today, jaywalking in the way of their army of agents. The way we work in software is so human: define a task, give it to an engineer, write the code, hand it off for review, resolve conflicts with other code, merge the change. In the fullness of time, there’s no way agents will work like this. Instead, on top of a platform that supports seamless, instant collaboration, agents will swarm and edit the shared codebase in real time. The closest humans come to this is in a time-pressured environment, such as a hackathon. No time for fiddling around with branches and conflicts, just divide-and-conquer.

The right platform to build for the AI era is one that can handle collaboration at a scale humans can’t really wrap their minds around, because we can’t think that fast (and you can’t spawn thousands of us via API calls). This is why I’m extremely positive on companies like Notion (hey!) or Zed, which built an editor that is collaborative from day one. (Have any of you tried Visual Studio Code’s “Live Share” extension? It’s a joke in comparison.) Zed gives you the ability to “watch” an agent as it goes (arguably somewhat pointless, but fun). The agent’s “cursor” teleports around the repository at rapid speed. Multiply the agent count by 10, or 20, in parallel, and that’s where we’re going. (To this end, I’m also positive on Cursor’s experiments with long-running agents, but I think they have the wrong foundation, namely VSCode, to really let the agents rip.)

Agents thrive when they’re embarrassingly parallel. Build the platform that lets them do that with no limits, autobahn style. (This is how you Don’t Die as a SaaS product in 2026.)

And what I’ve been up to.

• I went to New York City! I had the chance to watch the New York Rangers capitulate to the New Jersey Devils (Jack Hughes is still very good at hockey), see some excellent Broadway shows (Maybe Happy Ending, last year’s Tony winner for best musical, and Dog Day Afternoon, where Jon Bernthal shines in a Broadway debut), finally make it out to the Comedy Cellar (the lineup was surprisingly bad!), and eat some great food in Flushing and Jackson Heights. Hopefully I’m back in NYC soon. I forgot how much fun it is over there.
• I’m midway through The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. Now, can I say something without everyone getting mad at me? This book is fine, but it’s not that good (at least so far). The essays are entertaining, and as an enjoyer of fun facts and history (and Diet Dr. Pepper), I’m tearing through the book. But the ratings feel a bit arbitrary and, at least so far, it’s lacking the personal narrative I was hoping for. It feels like doing a Wikipedia click-hole, which is quite fun.
• I watched
  38 at the GardenCode
  (2022) while flying back from New York. It was okay. Then I fell asleep midway through The Great Gatsby (2013); review still pending on that one.
• I have been listening to a lot of Masayoshi Tanaka (what a name). It feels appropriate for the weather we’re having in San Francisco (it’s nice), and I’m manifesting that tickets to the San Francisco show magically drop in resale value (currently? $400). If you’re not familiar, imagine you were a bird, gliding over the Golden Gate Bridge. That’s what the music sounds like.

That’s all for now. Hope you enjoyed!