My Biggest Takeaways from Lee Robinson

My biggest takeaways from Lee Robinson:

All that matters is what you ship. He works from Iowa and commutes to SF once or twice a month. "If you ship good things, if you ship interesting products, tutorials, code, blog posts, people will find you." He's seen it firsthand. "It's always mind-blowing to me how fast it lands in the Slack channels of the people who matter if you do good work." Where you live doesn't matter. What you ship does.

This one hit close to home. I'm based in Ottawa, which has a similar vibe to Iowa: not a tech hub, government/insurance town energy, far from the SF scene. Growing up, I thought "making it" meant moving to the Bay Area. Lee's path proves that's a false choice.
Learn AI foundations that transfer across tools. For developers figuring out what skills to build: understand how models actually work. Context windows, tokens, tool calls, agents. "That stuff is going to be the foundation for everything in the coming years." Even with breakthroughs in AI, these concepts will remain relevant. Don't just use ChatGPT. Understand why it works.
Go broad first, then deep. He wishes he'd found web development earlier instead of forcing himself to go deep on subjects he wasn't excited about. Explore widely until you find what sparks genuine curiosity, then go deep. "When you enjoy the journey, when you have intrinsic motivation, when you wake up every day excited to build things, you're also just going to learn way faster."
The best engineers have strong taste. They've "ingested a lot of quality content and quality products." They use apps and really think about why one thing is so much better than everything else. Design isn't Figma mockups. It's how the thing works. Lee browses Dribbble and Behance not to copy pixels, but to sharpen his sense of what good feels like. The best builders operate at the intersection of art and science.
Designers who can code are a force to be reckoned with. He calls it the "rise of the design engineer." At Cursor, their designers ship code. They prototype interactions, tweak typography, and push commits. They've cut out the middleman. For people with taste who couldn't previously execute their vision, AI tools have changed everything. "They can just build it now."
Great design culture is top-down. If the people in charge don't get design, you're fighting uphill. Guillermo (Vercel's CEO) and Michael (Cursor's CEO) both know what great developer products look like because they build and use them daily. When leadership has that level of care, it trickles down to hiring others who feel the same way.
You can get 80% of SF value from 20% of the time. Async work is a level playing field. You can learn, build, and post from anywhere in the world. But synchronous in-person time is irreplaceable for building trust and relationships. Schedule trips around conferences or meetups. Maximize time with people. Then go home and focus on deep work.

This reframed how I think about living outside SF. I used to feel like I was missing out by not being there full-time. But the real value is the in-person moments, and you can get most of that by showing up strategically. The rest of the time, focus beats proximity.
AI is opening up more work, not eliminating it. He pushes back on the "AI is replacing developers" narrative. "All of the teams that I see really using AI a bunch are hiring more devs." The lower-value work gets abstracted away. But that frees engineers for more ambitious problems. The total amount of work expands.