Wisereads Vol. 71 — Keep Going by Austin Kleon, Anthropic on agents, and more
Last week, we shared an exclusive preview of David Kadavy's latest release, How to Sell a Book: What I've learned selling 100,000 self-published nonfiction books. This week, we're sharing an excerpt from Keep Going by Austin Kleon, a short book on creativity, focus, and staying true to yourself, which is on sale for $3.99 through the end of December wherever ...
Wisereads Vol. 71 — Keep Going by Austin Kleon, Anthropic on agents, and more
Last week, we shared an exclusive preview of David Kadavy's latest release, How to Sell a Book: What I've learned selling 100,000 self-published nonfiction books. This week, we're sharing an excerpt from Keep Going by Austin Kleon, a short book on creativity, focus, and staying true to yourself, which is on sale for $3.99 through the end of December wherever ebooks are sold.
Because of the winter holidays, this week's Wisereads edition is more streamlined than usual. But don't worry: normal programming resumes next week.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
Building effective agents
"When to use agents: Agents can be used for open-ended problems where it’s difficult or impossible to predict the required number of steps, and where you can’t hardcode a fixed path. The LLM will potentially operate for many turns, and you must have some level of trust in its decision-making. Agents' autonomy makes them ideal for scaling tasks in trusted environments."
The Ghosts in the Machine
"And yet as far as the public was concerned, the company had gone to great lengths to keep the initiative under wraps. Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living."
Faith Is Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be
"I’ve had to keep reminding myself that faith is more like falling in love than it is like finding the answer to a complicated question. Given my overly intellectual nature, I’ve had to get my brain to take a step back. I’ve had to accept the fact that when you assent to faith, you’re assenting to putting your heart at the center of your life... It’s a reminder that we’re rarely changed by learning information, but we are acquiring new loves."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
How To Actually Achieve Your Goals in 2025 (Evidence-Based)
"Researchers found that if you write down your goals, you're around 42% more likely to actually achieve them. Now, I don't know about you, but if I could improve by 42% the probability of me actually achieving the goals I've set for myself—simply by writing them down—I would probably do that."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
Absolutely nobody predicted this: AI Code is the new NoCode
"@SoftgenAI is very impressive. It took me 20 minutes to get my app done. Compared to all other tools I've tried, softgen felt the most autonomous. I didn't have to debug things. It did it all on its own," and "Bolt from @stackblitz has had the coolest run so far. Millions of people are using it now. It's absolutely suitable for real-world apps you would otherwise pay $100k to build."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Monolith: Real Time Recommendation System With Collisionless Embedding Table
"Building a scalable and real-time recommendation system is vital for many businesses driven by time-sensitive customer feedback, such as short-videos ranking or online ads. Despite the ubiquitous adoption of production-scale deep learning frameworks... general-purpose frameworks fall short of business demands in recommendation scenarios for various reasons: on one hand, tweaking systems based on static parameters and dense computations for recommendation with dynamic and sparse features is detrimental to model quality; on the other hand, such frameworks are designed with batch-training stage and serving stage completely separated, preventing the model from interacting with customer feedback in real-time."
Hand-picked book of the week
Keep Going
Austin Kleon is the author of a trilogy of illustrated books about creativity in the digital age: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going. As big fans of Austin's work, we're delighted to share the first chapter of Keep Going—his guide to sustaining creative energy. With memorable tips like: "Forget the noun, do the verb," and "Every day is Groundhog Day," it's both entertaining and insightful.
"We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it. It might seem like a stretch, but I really think the best thing you can do if you want to make art is to pretend you’re starring in your own remake of Groundhog Day: Yesterday’s over, tomorrow may never come, there’s just today and what you can do with it."
Until the end of December, you can snag the full ebook for $3.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Doug Turnbull
From Preferring throwaway code over design docs: "Fail early, gather that organizational knowledge, get to the next idea... This approach dovetails with show don’t tell. A prototype can be worth 1000 design docs. If you want to drive change, you don’t usually do it in docs, but in code."