Agentic skills framework for coding agents — Superpowers — TDD methodology — GitHub
Jesse Vincent (Prime Radiant)
Bain & Company brief (**April 2026**) (David Lipman, Greg Callahan, Daniel Goetz, George Sunderland — part 1/5 of the series *"software industry in the age of AI"*) analyzing the impact of AI on the **Rule of 40** (canonical SaaS metric: *growth rate + profit margin ≥ 40%*) and concluding on a **double pressure**: **headwinds** (slowing market growth + massive AI infrastructure costs) and **tailwinds** (AI productivity + 10-25% EBITDA transformation + outcome-based pricing). **Striking central data point**: a *marketing technology* client case — **AI costs multiplied by 3.49 (+349%) while revenue grew only 38%** over one year. **Pivot thesis**: SaaS leaders may have to ***"settle for the Rule of 30"*** temporarily to stay competitive against **AI-natives**, accepting short-term margin compression for long-term positioning. **Two explicit paths forward**: (1) ***Financialize*** — minimize AI investment, optimize cash, operate as a *"durable generator"* but limit future growth; (2) ***Invest to Grow*** — accept short-term margin pressure, reinvest aggressively in AI capabilities across product and operations. **Tailwinds in detail**: sales/marketing/R&D productivity, successful transformations = **+10-25% EBITDA**, future *outcome-based pricing* opportunity (revenue shifting from fixed seats to labor/operations economics), incumbents can leverage customer relationships and embedded workflows against AI-native challengers. **Headwinds in detail**: *"software penetration is topping out in some areas"* (market saturation), AI infrastructure + inference + model access introduce **significant variable costs into businesses that have historically had high margins**. **CFO/board signal**: the Rule of 40 itself, as a **stable norm**, is starting to shift; some players will temporarily fall outside this norm and **that is strategically rational**. **Major relevance** for B2B SaaS CFOs/CEOs/boards and PE/VC software investors evaluating their portfolios — the first quantified institutional benchmarking of the *protect margins / invest aggressively* dilemma in 2026. To be connected with: Bain **part 2/5 cross-system labor $100B** (2026-05), DORA ROI 2026 (financial framework), Wescale (realistic X3-X4), Tatsyi/Raiffeisen (bank −75 people), Curran/Intercom (3× R&D in 16 months), Menlo Ventures *State of Generative AI Enterprise* (2025-12-09).
**David Lipman · Greg Callahan · Daniel Goetz · George Sunderland** — partners et experts Bain & Company spécialistes industrie logicielle / SaaS / private equity software. Article publié en **avril 2026** sur bain.com/insights · **partie 1/5** d'une série Bain sur *"the software industry in the age of AI"*. La partie 2 (*The $100-Billion SaaS Opportunity Hiding in Cross-System Labor*, mai 2026) est dans le dossier de veille.
Developer Taste Versus Mediocre AI Code — Judgment and Discipline — Hiring for Taste — Software Quality — Substack
Fran Soto
Compound Engineering v2.60, mandatory code review with confidence scoring, hardened plan→work→review pipeline
Trevin Chow
Method article by Alex Pawlowski (The Strategy Stack, #151, March 30, 2026) proposing a major epistemic shift in *market research*: no longer collecting static reports but maintaining a ***living decision surface*** — a continuously evolving model of market dynamics. Central contribution: the **Tension Map**, which maps *contradictions and pressure points* (gaps between expectation and delivery, price tolerated without being embraced, incumbents without emotional resonance) rather than market share. Tooling in three modes (Discovery / Tension / Decision), a 7-step workflow, and an orchestrated tool stack (Perplexity for expansion → Claude for depth/continuity → ChatGPT for iteration → Multi-agent for challenge). Implicit reference: Richards Heuer's (CIA) *Analysis of Competing Hypotheses* method.
Alex Pawlowski (auteur de la newsletter Substack *The Strategy Stack*, focus stratégie et IA opérationnelle).
Jevons paradox applied to developers, Red Queen effect, sysadmin→DevOps evolution as analogy
Simon Wardley
Open agentic commerce, x402/mpp protocols, stablecoin micropayments, end of the advertising model
Sam Ragsdale
Historical rebuttal to Andreessen's claim that introspection is a modern invention, philosophical examples spanning 2,400 years - X/Twitter
Riley Ralmuto (@RileyRalmuto)
Developer's role in the face of AI coding agents, one-day BMAD method experiment, evolution toward agent supervisor - Technical blog
Marco Mornati
End of the brain-hour as a unit of value, shift to the kilowatt-hour of intellectual work, economics of agentic computation - LinkedIn
Philippe Ensarguet
Anatomy of an Agent Harness: Agent = Model + Harness, foundational components and the evolution of LangChain harnesses
Vivek Trivedy
IDE Collapse Under the Agentic CLI: Three Developer Abstraction Layers Collapsing in Succession - X/Twitter
Cobus Greyling
Building for trillions of agents: API-first software, agentic infrastructure, new software paradigm - X/Twitter
Aaron Levie
Empirical study by the **Compare the Market** engineering team (Meerkat Careers, UK) evaluating four approaches to **context retrieval for AI code review**: Baseline (no additional context), **RAG** (vector search), **GKG** (GitLab Knowledge Graph, AST-based knowledge graph), and **GKG+RAG** (hybrid). Evaluation on **79 real merge requests** with **MLflow on Databricks**. Striking result: **RAG performs worse than the baseline** on almost every metric — vector noise is counterproductive for code review. **GKG outperforms RAG by +21%** in inline comments coverage (0.696 vs 0.577) through structural AST understanding (Tree-sitter + Kuzu graph database). Code requires **structural** understanding (callers, signatures, hierarchies), not mere semantic similarity. GKG costs 4× the baseline but delivers measurable improvements; RAG costs 3× with no improvement. Implemented as a **Docker sidecar** in CI/CD wrapping the GKG binary (still in GitLab beta) with a local MCP server.
Équipe Engineering Compare the Market (Meerkat Careers, UK — site de comparaison d'assurances et services financiers).
BCG-HBR study (Bedard, Kropp, Hsu, Karaman, Hawes, Kellerman) of 1,488 US employees, January 2026: formal definition of ***AI brain fry*** (acute cognitive fatigue linked to AI oversight), 14% of AI-using workers affected (Marketing 26%, Legal 6%), productivity peaks at 3 simultaneous tools, +33% decision fatigue / +39% major errors / +39% intent to leave among the "brain fried," empirical distinction between **burnout** (emotional, eased by AI on routine tasks -15%) and **brain fry** (acute cognitive, worsened by oversight). 5 recommendations for leaders, "AI orphan tax" (+5% fatigue when the manager expects the employee to figure it out alone), org work-life balance -28%. Pivotal academic source cited by Les Echos and the 2026 debate.
Julie Bedard (BCG MD & Partner) · Matthew Kropp (BCG MD & Senior Partner, CTO BCG X) · Megan Hsu (BCG Project Leader) · Olivia T. Karaman (UC Riverside / BCG) · Jason Hawes (UC Riverside / BCG) · Gabriella Rosen Kellerman (BCG Expert Partner, psychiatre, co-auteure *Tomorrowmind*)
AI adoption blocked by IT/legal in enterprises, gap between innovative and cautious companies, leadership and risk management - LinkedIn
Ethan Mollick
Analysis of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of local LLMs versus cloud APIs in 2026. The article demonstrates that per-token pricing is a trap and that only the full TCO (hardware, electricity, cooling, labor) informs the decision. Key highlight: local/cloud break-even points fell by 40% between 2024 and 2026. Source: SitePoint (developer-focused technical media).
SitePoint Team
Internal generative AI platform for insurance, sovereign S3NS cloud, massive employee adoption
Deep Research (synthèse multi-sources)
**Consolidated dossier** March 2026 on the **death of the billable hours model in the advertising/communications industry** — combining the **VoxComm report** *"Redesigning the Agency Value Model"* (95 pages, March 2026, **Brian Kessman** of **Lodestar Agency Consulting** + foreword by **Tim Williams** of **Ignition Consulting Group**, intro by **Charley Stoney** President of VoxComm / CEO of **EACA European Association of Communication Agencies**) and the **MediaPost opinion article** *"Billable Hours Are Dead, AI Killed Them, Here's How To Survive"* (March 3, 2026, **Joe Mandese**, Editor-in-Chief of MediaPost). **Shared pivot thesis**: the business model of communication agencies (billable hours / labor-based compensation / service business model) is **structurally disqualified by AI**; agencies must ***"decouple revenue and profit from staffing numbers"*** (Stoney). **MediaPost figures (Mandese)**: agency margins **30% (golden age) → 10% (current average)**; creatives produce **~5× the output** for the same pay or less than 10 years ago. **Mandese's diagnosis**: *"We are defining and monetizing our value through time and effort rather than business impact"* — when agencies sell **hourly services**, they sell **commodities** vulnerable to **AI cost compression**. **Tim Williams quote**: ***"At the heart of our industry's challenges lies a simple economic truth: incentives matter. When agencies embraced the hourly rate model, they unknowingly created a structural misalignment. What agencies are rewarded for — more hours — clients are incentivized to minimize."*** Zero-sum outcome, **race to the bottom**. **Williams' pivot solution**: ***"You are not in the service business. Agencies don't sell services and capabilities, but rather solutions to business problems."*** **Mandese's 4-shift framework**: (1) Define narrow expertise areas; (2) Codify repeatable productized solutions; (3) Build teams around outcomes, not utilization; (4) Replace rate cards with value-based models (fixed fees, subscriptions, performance-based pricing). **Concrete examples**: **FIG** (decoupled pricing from staffing), **72andSunny** (modular product menus), **Monks** (single subscription combining talent + tech + improvement). **Methodological critique**: MediaPost commenters dispute the historical 30% margin figure, suggesting real figures closer to 12-15%. **VoxComm report** structured into 8 chapters: When Your Model Works Against You / Mapping Your Value Model / Case Studies / How to Pivot / How to Price / How to Plan / How to Navigate / Online Tools. **Major relevance** for the dossier: this is the **agency counterpart** of the consulting shifts (McKinsey/Sternfels 60,000 = 40,000 humans + 20,000 agents, January 2026) and SaaS shifts (Bain Rule of 40 → Rule of 30, April 2026). **Cross-cutting convergence for knowledge-intensive services**: consulting + agencies + SaaS are simultaneously shifting from *time-and-materials* to *outcome-based*. To be leveraged for agency/consultancy/marketing/communications executive committees, strategic presentations on AI transformation of services, sourcing on the 30%→10% margin figures.
**Rapport VoxComm "Redesigning the Agency Value Model"** :
QMD local search engine for Obsidian vault, skill /recall for persistent memory in Claude Code, BM25 + semantic + hybrid search vs grep
Artem Zhutov (article/vidéo démonstration) · Tobias Lütke (créateur QMD)