The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

There are no silver bullets; take care of the people, then the product, then the profits.

Three takeaways for AI PMs

• Know which mode you are in and say so
• Lead bullets, not silver bullets: The pressure in an AI incident is to find the one clever fix, swap the model or rewrite the prompt.
• Tell the truth early, to everyone: Horowitz's rule is that a company can handle bad news but not being misled.

Do this Monday

• Before the next launch, write a one-page incident plan: who declares wartime, who owns the fix, what gets paused, and what signal returns the team to peacetime.
• In your next retro on an AI failure, list at least ten contributing failures from real traces before anyone names a single root cause.
• The next time a metric drops, tell your stakeholders within the day, with the number, before you have the fix.