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2026 customer service planning series: Vol. 05

Capacity planning has always been a high-stakes exercise in customer service. If you get it wrong, you’ll feel it quickly in backlogs and SLAs. AI...

The Toll of Stress on Startup Teams and Its Link to Founder Well-being

Startup Snapshot, a think tank uncovering the unspoken realities of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, has released its latest report, The Untold Toll (Part 2): Navigating...

How to Work Hard

Weird Languages

August 2021When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of...

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2026 customer service planning series: Vol. 03

AI doesn’t fail because the model is bad, it fails because ownership is missing. Once someone owns it, everything changes. Your resolution and automation rates...

Around The World, Part 27: Planting trees : Frozen Fractal

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments  Game Development, Around the WorldIn the previous post, I determined what kind of vegetation should grow where...

Give First Available in Audiobook Format

Give First is now available to pre-order in Audiobook format (it will be officially released on 12/2/26).I’m the reader, so if you are an...

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Beyond Smart

October 2021If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give...

More context, more confidence: The new CX Score explained

Customer expectations have never been higher. People expect fast, accurate, and effortless support, every time. And across industries, from ecommerce to financial services to...

Enshitification – Feld Thoughts

I’ve been a long-time Cory Doctorow fan. His new book Enshitification is delicious. Yup – I understand that a shit emoji doesn’t inspire deliciousness.Now...

Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?

November 2021(This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.)When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't. My father told...

New series: Planning your 2026 customer service organization

Like many support leaders right now, I’m deep in 2026 planning. I imagine this cycle is bringing a big question into focus for most: if...

The Patent Office Is About To Make Bad Patents Untouchable

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has proposed new rules that would effectively end the public’s ability to challenge improperly granted patents at...

Putting Ideas into Words

February 2022Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words...

What’s new with Fin 3: The best AI Agent for complex queries across every channel

At Pioneer 2025, our Chief Product Officer Paul Adams announced Fin 3: the best AI Agent for resolving deep, complex queries across every channel. Our...

Go’s Sweet 16 – The Go Programming Language

This past Monday, November 10th, we celebrated the 16th anniversary of Go’s open source release! We released Go 1.24 in February and Go 1.25 in August, following our...

Heresy

April 2022One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy.In his excellent biography of Newton,...

Hollywood demos vs. real-world demos

There are two types of AI demos: the “Hollywood demo,” which is highly produced, polished, and looks pretty perfect; and the “real-world demo,” which...