A New Benchmark for AI Fluent OrganizationsYesterday, the team at Zapier released their new AI fluency rubric.Wade Foster@wadefoster Today we released our new AI Fluency Rubric. We use it for every hire, focusing on what they’ve actually built. Last May we open-sourced V1. Hundreds of companies used it to screen candidates and develop teams. It worked. But the floor moved fast. An updated look at the 32:00 PM · Mar 31, 2026 · 9.49K Views4 Replies · 11 Reposts · 114 Likes A few things you’ll n...

A New Benchmark for AI Fluent OrganizationsYesterday, the team at Zapier released their new AI fluency rubric.Wade Foster@wadefoster Today we released our new AI Fluency Rubric. We use it for every hire, focusing on what they’ve actually built. Last May we open-sourced V1. Hundreds of companies used it to screen candidates and develop teams. It worked. But the floor moved fast. An updated look at the 32:00 PM · Mar 31, 2026 · 9.49K Views4 Replies · 11 Reposts · 114 Likes A few things you’ll n...

How It StartedYesterday marked 15 years since I moved to New York City, so I thought I’d reflect a bit on my journey to get here. I wanted to live in NYC since my very first internship here (way back in 2008), but I couldn’t get a job in NYC straight out of journalism school in Chicago. So instead I moved home to Philadelphia, and worked in the city for a year. All my friends in Philly knew me as, “the girl who wants to move to New York.” I didn’t mind. At least my direction of travel was cle...

How It StartedYesterday marked 15 years since I moved to New York City, so I thought I’d reflect a bit on my journey to get here. I wanted to live in NYC since my very first internship here (way back in 2008), but I couldn’t get a job in NYC straight out of journalism school in Chicago. So instead I moved home to Philadelphia, and worked in the city for a year. All my friends in Philly knew me as, “the girl who wants to move to New York.” I didn’t mind. At least my direction of travel was cle...

Adopting an Engineering MindsetOver the past 2 years, I’ve been aggressively leaning AI. While a lot of people might presume that this means I’m simply throwing myself into the newest tools of the day, I’ve found that the bigger benefit has not been about learning new tools — or even the productivity gains. It’s been learning how to think like an engineer. Here are the four core skills that I’ve noticed myself applying more liberally than ever before in my career:Decomposition: Taking a big p...

Adopting an Engineering MindsetOver the past 2 years, I’ve been aggressively leaning AI. While a lot of people might presume that this means I’m simply throwing myself into the newest tools of the day, I’ve found that the bigger benefit has not been about learning new tools — or even the productivity gains. It’s been learning how to think like an engineer. Here are the four core skills that I’ve noticed myself applying more liberally than ever before in my career:Decomposition: Taking a big p...

The Great DisconnectThe AI revolution promised to level the playing field. Instead it’s teaching me (from the inside) exactly how the playing field stays tilted.January should have been a pivotal month for my business. After one year of striking out alone, it was the first time I cleared enough in bookings to pay myself the salary I’d been holding out on for the past year. But there was just one problem: Every single client paid me late. On paper I was sitting on $30k of corporate bookings, b...

How to Demonstrate New Skills in an Old MarketWhen I saw Nate Jones announce Nate’s Network today (an AI-native marketplace designed to qualify talent through "artifacts" rather than credentials), I had a massive sense of déjà vu. It pulled me back to 2011, when Joel Spolsky launched Careers 2.0 on Stack Overflow. The thesis then was the same as it is now: Resume proxies are broken; let developers showcase the things that actually get them hired. In practice, not so much.An early look at the ...

Time Traveling in the Present DayOne interesting observation about teaching people AI with such a high velocity is that I sometimes get the feeling of time traveling in the present day. I spend a few hours with super-charged engineers, sporting wearables that capture their ever word, who run their entire personal lives via AI agents in text message threads. Then I step inside a legacy institution — maybe a government building, a library, an outdoor fair, or even a hospital waiting room — and ...

How to Move from Using AI to Building With AIAfter running dozens of AI workshops with PE firms, startup CEOs, nonprofit operators, and corporate teams, I’ve started to see a clear pattern. There are four distinct levels of AI adoption at work. As it turns out, most teams (yes, even the ones who consider themselves “AI-forward”) are stuck at level one. But here’s the real problem: Even though the rest of the world is obsessed with Level 4, you can’t skip the climb. After teaching 1,500 people...

A Room, ReimaginedEver since the January blizzard in New York City, we’ve been living with a plaster-cracked ceiling in our dining area. While we waited for the snow to melt and the weather to warm up so that roofers could address the problem straight to the source, I started imagining what a completely new look might bring for our dining area. I settled on a different paint color (sage green) and a more inviting ceiling light. We haven’t been able to make any of these changes yet, but for my...

Flow State BuildingOver the past 6 months, I’ve noticed an interesting shift in my work behavior: There is no longer any distinction between when I am building with AI and when I am not.When, even several years ago, I might start a new project with a lengthy Google Doc and project plan, today I begin with a voice dictation into Claude Code and an ideation cycle. Together, we don’t build a document: We build a mini-app, often with some agentic features and a front-end interface. Regularly, I’l...

Good Vibes + High Trust = Real-Life MagicYesterday we convened the first gathering for localhost:3000, an all-day vibe coding gathering for NYC builders.Co-hosted with Louise Macfadyen, we set out to gather a group of fellow vibe coders to help us both make sense of what it means to be a builder in the the age of AI. Intentionally small, we capped attendance to 20 people and ended up having 11 folks join in for the day. Among the group was an eclectic mix: Relatively new builders, including p...

The Great DisconnectThe AI revolution promised to level the playing field. Instead it’s teaching me (from the inside) exactly how the playing field stays tilted.January should have been a pivotal month for my business. After one year of striking out alone, it was the first time I cleared enough in bookings to pay myself the salary I’d been holding out on for the past year. But there was just one problem: Every single client paid me late. On paper I was sitting on $30k of corporate bookings, b...

How to Demonstrate New Skills in an Old MarketWhen I saw Nate Jones announce Nate’s Network today (an AI-native marketplace designed to qualify talent through "artifacts" rather than credentials), I had a massive sense of déjà vu. It pulled me back to 2011, when Joel Spolsky launched Careers 2.0 on Stack Overflow. The thesis then was the same as it is now: Resume proxies are broken; let developers showcase the things that actually get them hired. In practice, not so much.An early look at the ...

Time Traveling in the Present DayOne interesting observation about teaching people AI with such a high velocity is that I sometimes get the feeling of time traveling in the present day. I spend a few hours with super-charged engineers, sporting wearables that capture their ever word, who run their entire personal lives via AI agents in text message threads. Then I step inside a legacy institution — maybe a government building, a library, an outdoor fair, or even a hospital waiting room — and ...

How to Move from Using AI to Building With AIAfter running dozens of AI workshops with PE firms, startup CEOs, nonprofit operators, and corporate teams, I’ve started to see a clear pattern. There are four distinct levels of AI adoption at work. As it turns out, most teams (yes, even the ones who consider themselves “AI-forward”) are stuck at level one. But here’s the real problem: Even though the rest of the world is obsessed with Level 4, you can’t skip the climb. After teaching 1,500 people...

A Room, ReimaginedEver since the January blizzard in New York City, we’ve been living with a plaster-cracked ceiling in our dining area. While we waited for the snow to melt and the weather to warm up so that roofers could address the problem straight to the source, I started imagining what a completely new look might bring for our dining area. I settled on a different paint color (sage green) and a more inviting ceiling light. We haven’t been able to make any of these changes yet, but for my...

Flow State BuildingOver the past 6 months, I’ve noticed an interesting shift in my work behavior: There is no longer any distinction between when I am building with AI and when I am not.When, even several years ago, I might start a new project with a lengthy Google Doc and project plan, today I begin with a voice dictation into Claude Code and an ideation cycle. Together, we don’t build a document: We build a mini-app, often with some agentic features and a front-end interface. Regularly, I’l...

Good Vibes + High Trust = Real-Life MagicYesterday we convened the first gathering for localhost:3000, an all-day vibe coding gathering for NYC builders.Co-hosted with Louise Macfadyen, we set out to gather a group of fellow vibe coders to help us both make sense of what it means to be a builder in the the age of AI. Intentionally small, we capped attendance to 20 people and ended up having 11 folks join in for the day. Among the group was an eclectic mix: Relatively new builders, including p...