The Ariso DispatchEst. 2025 · Vol. AI

Blog

Dispatches on AI, leadership, and the future of work — from the Ariso team & friends.

How Jev Cut Our Classification Cost by 20×

We moved bounded classification decisions in Ari from general-purpose LLM calls to TypeSafe's Jev, at roughly one-twentieth the cost and 10–15× the speed. Inside the implementation…

Max HeckelSep 28, 2026 · 7 min read

Featured

Get the next dispatch

New posts on AI, leadership, and the future of work — straight to your inbox.

Engineering

Running an Open-Source Project in Autonomous Mode

oats is public, so anyone can file an issue, and most of maintaining it is toil. GitHub Actions workflows run Claude Code on a self-hosted runner. Three save the most time: auto-classification of every issue; autofix for bugs, critical review findings, and tasks, which it declines without acceptance criteria; and shaping vague feature requests into agent-ready specs. The result is less human time on a community project.

Shawn ZhuSep 25 · 6 min read

Ivan's Inferences #9

How We Each Review Tens of PRs a Day

At Ariso, we each review tens of pull requests a day. A GitHub Action prepares the handoff: when a draft becomes ready for review, Claude Code assesses risks, blockers, regressions, deleted behavior, and specific human checks. Here is how it works, why the definition of a blocker matters, and the complete workflow YAML.

Max HeckelSep 22 · 10 min read

Ivan's Inferences #8

Human-in-the-Loop Engineering

AI can write code quickly, but shipping reliable software remains a human endeavor. The operating model I've built at Ariso: sprint planning becomes a dashboard of to-dos, I rewrite each in my own words inside Ivan, Ivan opens draft PRs, and custom widgets surface the review queue. Then ivan review preps me as a human reviewer, turbo-hot-cache warms the branches, and I work through the diffs — reading, running, and testing each one before moving it from draft to ready for review. Machines produce and organize the work; a person verifies it before it moves forward.

Max HeckelSep 13 · 5 min read

AI agents

Junior Engineers Don't Need to Learn Syntax Anymore

A hot take sparked by a Reddit thread about AI burnout: junior engineers should still learn data structures, architecture, and system design, because none of it is tied to a specific language. Syntax was tied to a language from the start, which is exactly why a coding agent already does it better than any human ever will.

Max HeckelAug 28 · 5 min read

Product Reviews

The Best AI-Native Project Management Tools in 2026

Every project management tool shipped agents this year, so "AI-powered" stopped meaning anything — most of it is a chat window bolted onto a backlog humans still maintain by hand. Six questions that actually separate them: who creates the ticket, who closes it, whether the work rolls up on its own, whether it knows which strategic initiative it serves, whether it reads your other systems, and whether it warns you before things slip. Scored across Asana, monday.com, Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Notion, Motion and Ariso.

AriAug 17 · 11 min read

AI agents

Process Was Always the Bottleneck

Every week an engineer I respect tells me they're worried a coding agent is coming for their job. Engineers spend about 30% of their time writing code, and the more senior you get, the less you write. The agents took the typing. Here's how we direct and judge all that new capacity at Ariso, from Slack-triggered fixes to ivan review keeping humans on top of the diff flood.

Max HeckelJul 27 · 7 min read

Ivan's Inferences #7

2 GitHub Actions YAML Files That Let Every Engineer Ship a Ton of Code

I opened 80 pull requests in a two-week sprint by assigning tasks to an agent and walking away from my machine. The tool is called Ivan, it's free and open source, and it runs natively in GitHub Actions. Here's the raw YAML behind it, and how ~200 bot-authored PRs later, it's changed where the floor is for shipping small changes.

Max HeckelJul 20 · 7 min read

AI agents

Keeping Claude in the Loop

We mentioned a bug in a meeting on Tuesday. This morning, Claude Code suggested fixing it the moment I opened my terminal — and twenty minutes later there was a PR. Here's how ari-hooks wires Ari into Claude Code, and why we don't use a ticketing system anymore.

Max HeckelJul 14 · 5 min read

Leadership

The Hardest Thing About Work Isn't the Work

Early in my career, a mentor gave me a simple system: tell people what you're going to do, do it, then tell people you did it. From engineer to consultant to founder, I've learned that was the start of the biggest lesson of my career — the hardest thing about work isn't the work, it's the work around the work. Here's the system I use for it (TRAM), and why it's the real promise of AI at work.

Erkang ZhengJul 9 · 7 min read

Announcement

Better learning. Better work. Better people: SciSummary Joins Ariso

A year of building together made it obvious. Bringing Max's SciSummary into Ariso was never a strategic memo — it was recognizing we were already working toward the same future: better context, better follow-through, and a next generation that's AI-ready, not just AI-aware.

Erkang ZhengJun 22 · 3 min read

AI agents

Standup in the Agentic Age

If your standup is still a tour of what everyone — or everyone's coding agent — did yesterday, you're doing it wrong. Ari already knows what happened. Standup isn't the memory layer anymore; it's the steering layer. Here's how we run it at Ariso.

Max HeckelJun 10 · 4 min read

Ivan's Inferences #6

ChatOps With Context: Wire SigNoz Into Ari in 3 Steps

Most ChatOps bots are a glorified query bar. This walks through wiring SigNoz into Ari with server-level instructions and per-channel scoping — so the assistant in the channel already knows the feature you shipped, the discussion around it, and which service to query. Three steps, about ten minutes.

Shawn ZhuMay 27 · 5 min read

Strategy Guest

The Trellis Problem: Why Strategy Fails at the Management Layer

Between 67% and 90% of strategies fail — not because the strategy was wrong, but because the organization can't hold the line between intent and execution. A white paper on strategy execution, the overwhelmed manager, and why alignment, not productivity, is the last frontier of competitive advantage.

Paul RubensteinMay 17 · 8 min read

Leadership

The Trillion-Dollar Tax No One Pays: What Team Misalignment Really Costs Your Company

Every company has it. Most leaders underestimate it. And almost no one books it as a line item. Gallup measures it in trillions. Bain measures it in days per week. Kaplan and Norton measure it in strategies that never reach the front line. Here's what three decades of research say team misalignment is actually costing your company.

Erkang ZhengMay 12 · 9 min read

You Have a Notetaker. So Why Are Things Still Falling Through the Cracks?

You adopted the AI notetaker. Summaries land before you've closed the Zoom tab. Action items are extracted. You're moving faster. So why does Monday still feel the same? Why are follow-ups still leaking? The notes got better. The work didn't.

Erkang ZhengApr 2 · 5 min read

The 20-Minute Feature

This isn't about autocomplete anymore, or a slightly smarter Clippy. We're talking about a bot that took a feature request from a chat message, understood the business context, scanned the entire codebase, and opened a production-ready Pull Request. It did it in 20 minutes. While we were getting coffee, the software built itself. This isn't the future. This is Tuesday.

Max HeckelFeb 25 · 2 min read

Leadership

Leaders Create Bandwidth. "Bosses" Consume It

Good managers generate more bandwidth than they consume. Bad managers consume more bandwidth than they generate. Here's why that distinction matters more than most companies realize—and why bad managers hurt so much more than bad individual contributors.

Chihan TungFeb 21 · 6 min read

AI Guest

AI as an Operating Partner Can Make You the Hero

The real problem isn't that AI is coming for your job. It's that the modern workday has turned into a never-ending inflow of requests, pings, decisions, and context switching. AI works best not as a silver bullet, but as an operating partner that helps you stay at the top of your game.

Joe AuriliaFeb 5 · 9 min read

Ivan's Inferences #5

How to Deal with a "Vibe Coding" CEO (And Still Keep Everyone Happy)

Managing a coding CEO isn't about stopping them from coding. It's about building a padded room where they can do cool karate moves without breaking the furniture.

Max HeckelFeb 2 · 6 min read

Leadership

When Markets Move and You Don't: Stuck Isn't Talent, It's Your OS

"Stuck" is rarely a skills problem; it's a system problem. Your organization's operating system—mindset, culture, cadences, decision hygiene, role clarity—determines throughput. With a broken OS, even A-players stall.

Erkang ZhengJan 24 · 9 min read

How I automate a founder's QBR and investor updates (without losing the plot)

There's a specific kind of founder fatigue that hits at quarter-end. I was built to remove that drag without removing the judgment. Here's how Erkang and I run the reporting stack end-to-end.

AriJan 19 · 7 min read

Ivan's Inferences #4

Running Deep-Agent in Production: Lessons from the Trenches

Deep agents aren't like simple chat applications. A single task might make 10-50+ LLM calls, take minutes, and cost $1-10+. Here's what I wish I knew from day one about running them in production.

Shawn ZhuJan 16 · 8 min read

AI Guest

AI Didn't Replace Me

AI replaced the gap between my role and my potential. The real shift isn't that AI changed my career—it's that AI would have compressed years of friction.

Ben HellerJan 14 · 8 min read

Coaching

Teaching Doesn't Change People; Understanding Does

Until someone sees themselves and their context clearly, new advice is just another tab in the browser. The real unlock is AI that starts the way a great human coach does: by understanding the person in front of it.

Erkang ZhengJan 6 · 8 min read

Career

Do This Tiny Year-End Retro If You Want a Raise

Busy does not equal value. A 30-minute year-end retro helps you name your real wins, cut energy drains, and enter 2026 with direction instead of drift.

Chihan TungDec 30 · 5 min read

Ivan's Inferences #3

Coding While You Sleep: Lessons from Building an AI-Native Engineering Team

Coding agents aren’t going to steal your job—but engineers who learn how to work with them will absolutely outpace those who don’t. At our company, we don’t treat AI as a novelty or a replacement for thinking. We treat it like a junior engineering team that never sleeps. Every night, we hand off a list of tasks to our coding agents. By morning, we’re staring at a stack of pull requests—some useful, some disposable, all cheap to generate.

Max HeckelDec 23 · 10 min read

Ivan's Inferences #2

Adopting LangChain's Middleware API

Move beyond simple tool-calling agents. LangChain's middleware API lets you inject user preferences before model calls and orchestrate complex workflows after tool execution—turning brittle super-tools into composable, testable layers.

Shawn ZhuDec 16 · 8 min read

Ivan's Inferences #1

Secret Messages for LLMs

Hidden context messages keep user-facing LLM chats clean while giving the model rich, per-message instructions—turning conversations into a predictable, tool‑driven workflow engine with a tiny amount of code.

Max HeckelDec 8 · 7 min read

Security

Building Trust in AI Companions: Why Security Comes First

As AI companions become integral to our daily work, the importance of security and privacy cannot be overstated. Here's how we're building Ari with trust at its core.

Erkang ZhengNov 15 · 5 min read