Open for business

tl;dr - cxo.dev is now live to help you with your company AI transformation.

Early this year we started teaching a course together for executives and other leaders looking for answers on how to get real leverage out of AI in their engineering, product, and design teams. One of the perks of the course is that we provide a personalized reading and watch list for every student based on their company, role, and what we think will be most useful given the specific areas where their org is struggling with AI adoption. People loved it and wanted to be able to see all of the links, not just their personalized list.

So we made all of the resources available to our students, but we also wanted a way to collect and share interesting links on an ongoing basis. That's how this newsletter was born. We stay on top of the dizzying pace of changes and best practices for rolling out AI in the enterprise so you don't have to; we pair that with insight we gather by talking to the most AI-forward teams and working directly with companies at various stages of their AI transformation journey.

But the newsletter wasn't the only thing to come out of the course. After each cohort, students would reach out asking for additional help. The course gave them the inspiration, the confidence, and the playbook for AI transformation, but they saw how critical this was to their business and wanted higher-touch help accelerating that transformation. As Claire is fond of saying, this is what product-market fit looks like. So we began taking on a few clients, and before we knew what was happening a business was born.

This week we launched that business publicly. CXO.dev follows the same ideals that led us to create the course and write this newsletter: transforming your org to operate in an AI-native way is possible, but most teams stall out in the very early stages. The teams at the edge are inventing new ways of working, but not everyone has the resources or liberty to experiment their way there, and the discourse is noisy to say the least. They want to cut through that noise to understand what actually works so they can accelerate real gains for their business.

We help teams get there through executive coaching, AI transformation planning, engineering readiness, and education. We've spent the last 4 months working directly with a handful of companies to AI-pill their orgs and we keep seeing the same patterns holding people back. Investment stalls out at procurement. Codebases aren't ready for agents. Executives aren't walking the walk. Nobody's willing to actually change the way they work.

Now we're officially open for business. If you think we might be able to help your org, reach out to us or learn more at https://cxo.dev/. We made our AI readiness assessment available for anyone to get feedback on where to focus their efforts. * If you're just here for the newsletter that's cool too.

Here's what we're reading this week:

The AI-Native SDLC Playbook

The AI-native SDLC is a reimagined process that combines the old control objectives with new enforcement. Instead of a linear flow, the process becomes a loop, and AI is embedded at each point.

Anthropic released this tome last Friday. There is, of course, no canonical playbook for agentic engineering right now while everyone is still inventing the new way of working. But this is a comprehensive, easy to digest breakdown of the software development lifecycle that walks through a robust collection of current best practices (from a Claude-centric point of view of course).

The Healthcare Company That Built the AI Tool It Couldn't Buy

Katie Parrott for Every. Heads up that the full article requires sign-up. Details mental healthcare company Headway's custom harness "Eddy". It's a good follow-on to the Anthropic post above. Understand the fundamentals, then learn how companies are putting them into practice. And if a custom harness sounds crazy (though it's not as crazy as you might think!), it's not all hype and cheerleading: "If you can get away with off-the-shelf software, save yourself the maintenance costs and risk."

Grok Bot workshop

Lauren Tan from Cursor (@poteto on X). React core team, ex-Meta on the React Compiler, ex-EM at Netflix. Hour long video, but worth your time. Breaks down how she's using Grok Bot to automate much of her work, and does it with clarity and without hype.

Back in June, Lauren detailed her experience joining Cursor and systematically walked through her approach to agentic engineering and loops, which is similarly worth your time: Loops You Can Trust

Agents are like new hires in a constant state of amnesia and idiocy.

Designing Grok Bot with Grok Bot

Sorry-not-sorry to go so Grok Bot heavy on you (we're still obsessed, and lots of other people are too), but this is worth it even if you haven't used or don't care about Grok Bot. Feels like we're on the brink of another shift in how people work, and it's centered around easy-to-use custom cloud-based agents. So whether that's Grok Bot or something else, this view from the design side and the video above from the engineering side are great ways to get a peek into how a team on the edge is operating.

Grok Bot gives me a team of always-on AI design agents with their own computers. They have memory, can use tools, and can carry work from an initial idea to a finished artifact. They also keep working while I’m AFK, which matters because inspiration often strikes away from my desk.

Mark Cuban on how he actually uses agents

Mark Cuban (yes, that Mark Cuban) was not on our bingo card for dispensing sensible AI tips this week. But it's a refreshing shift from the X echo chamber. He gives concrete examples without any technical jargon. Agents are going mainstream.

This is a productivity hack that will only get better.

One thing to try this week

Listen to Mark Cuban: if you haven't already, automate something with an agent. If you don't have access to any agents with scheduling at work, find one you can use in your personal life. It's easy and it just might change the way you work!

Have a restful weekend.

— Claire + Zach