What Caught My EyeCulture · Brands · Design · BuildingWeekly Links by Mike LitmanIssue #008Ten Links. No Filler.The AI Fog & Pret's Read on CustomersCurated, Not AggregatedWhat Caught My EyeCulture · Brands · Design · BuildingWeekly Links by Mike LitmanIssue #008Ten Links. No Filler.The AI Fog & Pret's Read on CustomersCurated, Not Aggregated
Weekly Links
What Caught My Eye
Curated links on culture, brands, design and building.
Week of 1 May 2026 · Issue #008
↓ ten links. no filler. your weekend reading, sorted.
AI & BuildingCulture & BrandsDesign & ProductStrategy & BusinessWild Card
HBR's argument: AI's pace has destroyed leaders' visibility into the short-term future. Investment criteria built for skyscrapers and railways are getting traded for tents and bicycles. The advice is to stop optimising for commitment and start optimising for optionality.
This is the strategy piece every C-suite needs this quarter. Long-range planning was already mostly fiction; AI just made it official. The companies that win the next decade will be the ones who build for shorter cycles, faster pivots, and more frequent re-decisions. Stop drawing the 2030 roadmap. Build the next three quarters with conviction and the rest with instinct.
tents and bicycles, not skyscrapers
Send to:any CEO still presenting their 2030 roadmap with a straight face
Naval and Nivi pull at the assumption that AI agents make code skill obsolete. Their counter: agents that can ship one-shot apps to your phone make the people who can think in software more valuable, not less. The conversation gets specific about vibe coding's economics.
Every week another commentator tells you AI is going to make coding skill worthless. Naval makes the opposite case, and he is the one with skin in the game. The new craft is directing agents, not typing. The people who already think in software will compound faster than ever; the ones who never bothered will find AI a much shorter ladder than they were promised.
code skill compounds, not dilutes
Send to:anyone telling juniors "don't bother learning to code, AI does it now"
Daniel Bjorkegren argues the constraint on AI's economic impact is not model intelligence; it is the human supply chain around it. Plenty of capability, very few workflows redesigned to actually absorb it.
This is the most under-discussed AI story of 2026. We have agents that can do enormous amounts of work, and most companies still assign them to summarise email. The bottleneck is not the model; it is the org. The competitive edge in the next 18 months is going to come from companies that retrain, not the ones that download.
the bottleneck is human
Send to:the COO who keeps saying "we just need a better model"
Handy AI on the leaders who have stopped trusting their own judgement and now run every gut decision through ChatGPT. The diagnosis is half-comic, half-serious. The pattern is real, and it is spreading from middle managers into the boardroom.
The first wave of AI-in-management was about productivity. The current wave is a confidence collapse: senior people who used to back themselves now check with the model before they speak. Smart organisations will start protecting taste at the top, the same way they protect product judgement at the bottom. AI in the boardroom is a tool, not a tribunal.
the boardroom needs taste, not consensus
Send to:the chair who keeps asking "what does ChatGPT think"
Spotify has launched Fitness, integrating guided workouts from Peloton directly into the app. Music, audio cues, your usage data, all in one place. The company many wrote off as a music utility keeps deliberately expanding into adjacent attention markets.
This is a textbook second-act move. Spotify already has the music, the headphones, the data and the daily habit. Adding workout content is one product feature; the bigger play is becoming the audio operating system for daily life. Peloton's moat looked like community and bikes; the moat was the music. Watch what gets bundled next.
audio OS for daily life
Send to:any product lead still defending their app's "single use case"
BBC interview with Pano Christou. The Pret CEO breaks down what he is seeing in 2026: customers cutting back on bread, working from home Fridays, and looking for value that means "good and worth it", not "cheapest available."
This is a CEO actually paying attention. Half the high street is racing to the bottom on price; Christou has clocked that mid-market customers will pay for quality if you respect them. The retailers who get the next 12 months right will be the ones with the same instinct: stop discounting, start curating, trust the customer to know the difference.
value is not cheap
Send to:any retail CEO still running a discount-led playbook
The Economist on the soft-drink war and why Pepsi keeps losing despite owning Frito-Lay, Lay's, and Doritos. The piece works through brand clarity, distribution, and the asymmetric pain of being the second name everyone has to qualify.
This is the best primer on brand asymmetry I have read this year. You either own the category or you spend forever being asked "but why not Coke?" Pepsi's portfolio is genuinely strong; the problem is not products, it is positioning. For any second-place brand the playbook is the same: stop trying to be the alternative and find a category you can actually own.
own a category, not a comparison
Send to:any second-place brand stuck pitching itself as "but cheaper"
Framer founder Jorn van Dijk on the difference between borrowed taste, the kind that gets you 80% of the way, and earned taste, the kind that emerges from making thousands of small decisions yourself. Short, sharp, and a useful self-test.
This is the design essay everyone working with AI tools should read this year. Generated UIs look fine because they have copied surface taste; what they lack is the earned version that knows when to break the rule. The competitive edge for designers is going to be their judgement, not their output. Earn the taste, the pixels follow.
earned taste is the moat
Send to:any designer worried AI tools are flattening the craft
First Round Review's deep profile of Lenny Rachitsky, the most-read product newsletter in tech. Cadence, stakes, pricing, why he says no, how he protects writing time. A working operator's manual, not a hagiography.
There is one creator economy story that matters in 2026, and it is this one: a single operator built a media business bigger than most VC-backed publications, and the moat is being trusted by the right hundred thousand people. If you are a founder, an operator, or anyone trying to publish, study how Lenny structures his week. The playbook is the system, not the writing.
the playbook is the system
Send to:any operator who keeps "starting the newsletter next month"
BBC interview with Wizz Air's boss Jozsef Varadi. European airlines are cutting fares aggressively to win back customers who have been put off by jet-fuel-inflated prices. He frames it as opportunity. The piece reads like the opening shots of a price war.
This is one of those structural shifts that will define a category for years. Travel demand is genuinely back; the post-pandemic premium is finally lifting; whoever wins the price-sensitive flyer in the next 24 months will own a generational customer set. Watch easyJet and Ryanair respond in the next quarter. The competitor who cuts smartest, not deepest, wins.
cut smart, not deep
Send to:anyone running pricing in a discretionary-spend category
bbc.com
Spot something I should feature?
Reply to any issue or tag me on LinkedIn. If I use it, you get the credit.
your name in lights (well, in Caveat font)
don't miss next week's picks
Get notified when a new issue drops
A short email every Friday with the link. The reading happens here.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Powered by Buttondown.