A high schooler is out there, somewhere. She is in tenth grade, sending Snaps, communicating in foreign tongues. She debates; she shops at Sephora; she posts about it; she is paid to post about it. She does not know how to read.1

Next year, she will apply to college, probably Stanford. She will write an essay; she will talk about intellectual vitality; her essay will get run through an AI detector. It will be marked as mostly human. Good enough, they will say; better than most.

The year after that, she’ll go to Stanford; the year after that; she’ll drop out. She’ll post on Instagram: Stanford has taught me you can learn more from doing than you can learn from learning. She will take an internship at an AI company, or a robotics company, or a crypto company, or a social media marketing company that creates clips for creators.

And then, the year after that, in 2030, she will start her own startup. She will do it for genuine reasons, because she believes in her idea, in herself, and in the urgency of what she’s building. She will apply to YC. She will tell them that the future of western democracy depends on what she is building. She will mean it.

She will build. She will grind. She will post about grinding. She will raise money; hire people; raise more money. She will become a prominent personality on Twitter. She will go to VC dinners; she will speak at conferences. She will get written about in the Wall Street Journal. Her parents will wonder when she’s going to go back to Stanford.

In 2040, when she’s 30 years old, she will fly to New York, stand atop the New York Stock Exchange, and, under a cannon of confetti, ring the opening bell, and become a (mere) billionaire.2 She will be heralded as one of tech’s new wunderkinds. Strong buy, the analysts will say.3

Here, then, is the question:

What does her company do?

—

Two days ago, Anthropic released Fable 5, their most advanced large language model. The reviews were breathless: It can build more complicated stuff than prior models; it can work for longer; it can fill in more unspecified details, with better defaults.4 It is a new era. And this, as everyone always says, is still just the beginning. OpenAI is allegedly testing a model that might be even better; Anthropic is allegedly building a model that can nearly build itself.5

A few days before Fable came out, I was at a dinner with a handful of engineers from a major AI lab. They worked on “harness engineering,” and were building technologies to make large language models better completing work, using tools, and running persistently. These universal harnesses were getting very good, they said. You can give them tasks, and they can research what they need and use third-party services and APIs to gather data and files. Better compaction methods made it possible for agents to run for hours without getting lost. And the models are now smart enough that they can understand very specialized tasks and deal with messy, ambiguous prompts.

The technology was generalizing. So long as the agent had access to the right things—so long as it could read the files it wanted, or reach the websites it needed to work on—it usually worked.6

So I asked them: If that progress continues, what space will be left for other companies? If a general harness and a general model is increasingly able to gather its own context, construct its own prompts, and use its own tools, what products still need get built on top? The whole point of a managed agent platform is to host the agents other people build. And surely, there will still be startups in 2030. But given that there are more days between today and the start of 2030 than there were between today and when ChatGPT came out, what will those companies have left to do?

None of us had much of an answer.

—

It’s easy to imagine the enormous industrial businesses of the future, like chip manufacturers and infrastructure providers and rocket ship, AI, and social media conglomerates that build data centers on Mars. The next decade’s trillion dollar companies will probably do stuff like that.

But what about the next billion dollar companies? What about the normal IPOs? The mobile generation produced Apple and Facebook, and a bunch of huge-but-not-that-huge app companies. Cloud computing produced Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and a bunch of huge-but-not-that-huge SaaS businesses. The first few years of AI development will likely produce OpenAI and Anthropic, and a bunch of huge-but-not-that-huge “agentic” tools. But what will come out of the next few years? When we are done “agentifying” everything—especially if that happens because the models get better and the generalized harnesses can do more—what will the next wave of huge-but-not-that-huge companies do?

Because it’s also easy to talk about the future in broad generalities, and to point out what AI can’t do. It doesn’t have taste; it can’t be taught on human judgement; it can’t be held accountable for its actions; it can’t be trained on the untrainable. It still can’t write.7 It has no intention or intrinsic motivations.

Fine, sure. But then what? If the most valued people are those with good taste and judgement, what are the most valuable products? Do the IPOs in 2040 sell taste? Is YC’s 2030 class full of carefully crafted SaaS apps?

Though huge IPOs get most the headlines, the promise of Silicon Valley has always been in its everyman potential. Any computer whiz could make something valuable, because knowing how to use a computer used to be a valuable thing:

A lot of today’s technology is the levered ideas of technologists. It is a book store, run by an engineer from a hedge fund; it is computerized cash registers, from a social media founder and Oracle employees; it is fitness classes, built by a Bain consultant and an MIT grad; it is a note-taking app, built by someone who knows enough Typescript to build a note-taking app. But if these products succeed, it’s often more because of the technology than the idea of the technologist. It’s not that the idea was bad; it’s that the idea was not the transformational advantage. A fine CAD program beats a drafting table. A fine banking app beats driving to a branch. Even my app beats hand-written note cards. And because people who are technologists first, and architects or bankers or writers second, are the only people who can lever their ideas with technology, their ideas win.

Moreover, this isn’t just some accidental selection bias; this is the whole point of Silicon Valley. Flagship incubators like Y Combinator are built on the thesis that a smart kid with a computer and summer internship at Goldman Sachs can outwit all of American Express. That’s not because the kid understands the needs of payment processors better than people at American Express, or has better ideas than they do; it’s because the kid can build their idea.

But when you can buy a computer whiz in box, what’s left for the whiz kids to build?

Kermit: Uh. That’s very effective.

—

If you want to make money, there may never be a more effective way of doing it than saying, “It is 2026, and I’m here to sell you artificial intelligence.”

Anthropic is selling so much artificial intelligence that its revenue has grown from $9 billion in January to $47 billion today, adding a full Salesforce of new business, in about five months. According to the Atlantic, “researchers at Goldman Sachs who conducted interviews with 40 software companies about their AI use in mid-April found that many were ‘overrunning their initial budgets’ for AI tools ‘by orders of magnitude.’” Uber burned through their annual Claude Code budget in four months. Nvidia now spends more on AI compute than on employee salaries.

And so, obviously: Nearly all companies are now AI companies. Photo-sharing apps are building $200-a-month vibe coding agents. Rocket ship companies are trying to impress investors not with rocket ships, but with AI. Shoe manufacturers are leasing data centers. Brian Chesky plans to start a new AI company. ChatGPT has a billion users.

It is 2026. Get in the token path. Sell artificial intelligence.

Gonzo: Yeah, it’s great when it works.

—

But how? How do you sell artificial intelligence? You could manufacture new chips, but that’s very expensive; you could train new AI models, but that’s very expensive and doesn’t always work. The better answer—or at least, the easier answer—is to sell tokens, by building an agent.

Because, first, it’s not so hard to build an agent. Agents, which are roughly synonymous with a “harness,”1 are the applications wrapped around an LLM that fetch data, prompt the model, read its responses, re-prompt the model, and share stuff back to the agents’ users. This is all just software, and people have been wrapping software around databases and third-party services for decades. You need billions of dollars to build chips and models; you need a computer and a few days to build an agent.2

Second, despite their relative simplicity, agents can still be valuable products. According to a research paper from Meta, “changing the harness around a fixed large language model can produce a 6x performance gap on the same benchmark.” Though a small startup can’t outbuild Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s models, it can build a harness that improves their models.

Third, it’s also not that hard to come up with an idea for an agent. What do you do with a computer? Don’t do it anymore! Build an agent to do it! Agents are the first order effects of AI—we used to make documents, or manage emails, or analyze data, or look for dates. But what if agents did all of that instead?

And finally—and maybe most of all—agents can make money. Cursor built a coding agent a few years ago; it now makes more than $2 billion a year, and was recently bought by SpaceX for $60 billion.3 Cognition also built a coding agent; it now earns $500 million a year, and is worth $26 billion. Replit and Lovable built agents that make websites; together, the two companies make more than a billion dollars and are valued above $15 billion. Sierra sells an agent for customer support teams; it makes $150 million a year and is worth $15 billion. Harvey sells an agent for lawyers; it makes $200 million a year and is worth $11 billion.

And so, obviously: Nearly all software companies are now agent companies. Linear used to be an issue tracking application; now, issue tracking is dead; introducing Linear Agent. Introducing Scout, your always-on personal agent. The Figma design agent is here. dbt Wizard is the AI agent built for analytics engineers. Meet ZoomMate, your AI teammate. Meet Slackbot, your personal AI agent for work. Meet your Townie, your personal AI assistant.

It is 2026. It is the beginning of the harness era. Build an agent.

Beauregard: Did you want me to stop, or, what?

—

But if 2026 is such a great year to sell agents, why did Cursor—which sells one of the world’s most popular agents—sell itself to SpaceX?

One answer is because when someone offers you $60 billion dollars for anything, you should probably say yes. Another answer is because lots of other startups are building coding agents, and anything that goes straight up can come straight down. But the main answer, probably, is that they sold themselves because Anthropic and OpenAI and Google are also building coding agents. And you compete with those companies at your own risk:

anthropic watched cursor become the largest single buyer of frontier coding tokens on earth and correctly identified that as a problem rather than a partnership.

so they built claude code, and they priced it to win. … once a lab decides a profit pool is theirs, they burn the surrounding economics down until the people sitting on it leave on their own.

It’s not just the economies, either. Because there is another line that that oft-cited Meta paper about the benefits of a specialized harness, and it is not so kind to the companies building them:

Our findings reflect a recurring pattern in machine learning: once a search space becomes accessible, stronger general-purpose agents can outperform hand-engineered solutions. A natural next step for future work is to co-evolve the harness and the model weights, letting the strategy shape what the model learns and vice versa.

That is: Specialized agents might work at first, but they do not last. Eventually, a powerful model running inside a general-purpose harness that is designed alongside that model will catch up. And the labs are starting to understand that:

Nearly 18 months later, OpenAI leaders—including Thibault Sottiaux, who oversaw the new team—came to a stark realization: The company’s Codex coding tool works better for many tasks than its flagship AI service, ChatGPT. For instance, Codex is better than ChatGPT at completing long-running, multistep tasks and at using external tools and writing code to complete tasks such as editing complicated spreadsheets, Sottiaux said in an interview.

The result is that OpenAI is now casting Codex as a tool that can do much more than coding and that a wide range of people other than developers can use. The company’s release on Tuesday of a research report on how Codex “is becoming a productivity tool for everyone” spotlighted that shift. Codex, OpenAI said, is “helping people across professions automate routine work, move faster and eliminate the bottlenecks of modern knowledge work.”

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have hundred-billion-dollar war chests, and hundred-billion-dollar revenue targets. If they own the models on the frontier; if they are building generalized harnesses to use those models; if most effective harnesses are the ones that are co-developed with the models; if every standalone agent lives or dies based on how much better it is than that universal baseline; if the company that owns the distribution channel owns the customers—if all of that, are thousands of companies building their own agents really the future of the entire software industry?

Eventually, Claude Code or Codex comes for us all. Did you want them to stop, or what?4

Beauregard: Where are you guys going?
Kermit: The Happiness Hotel.
Beauregard: Oh good, that’s where I’m going. .. How do you get there?

—

A lot of startups today are caught in two dizzying crosswinds:

1. The world is changing so much, and they don’t know which direction to run.

2. Wherever they go, Anthropic or OpenAI are one release away from eating them alive.

Here, then, is an alternative idea:

Do not put AI in your product.

Do not get tempted. Do not let yourself build that chatbot, or that sidebar, or that text box that says “What can I help you with today?” Do not give the text box a cute name. Do not use Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s APIs, or use their managed agents. Do not build a harness. Do not tell yourself that you have a special set of context that nobody else has, that you can build an agent that nobody else can, and that you can be the platform that everyone builds on, or the agent that everyone defaults to. Do not let yourself become tempted by the allure of the token path, and instead ask yourself: If I had to build something without AI, what would it be?

Because it’s possible the next big wave of software is agents, and that agents are all that’s left to build. And it’s possible that everything needs to be AI-native now, and that AI-native software is software that’s full of AI.

Perhaps, however, AI-native software will actually be software that is for AI. The world is getting overrun by robots; more bots use the internet than people do now. Those robots have enormously expensive brains, and they are acquiring a few general hands: Persist memories, basic tools to use computers and the web, the ability to spawn more brains and more hands.

But these robots need help getting where they want to go. The hands will want more advanced tools. Sure, general agents can build their own, maybe from literal ground up. That’s expensive and inefficient, though, and everyone is worried about efficiency now. The robots will need better tools, designed for them. They will want notebooks to write down their ideas, sandboxes to play in, easy ways to connect to different sources of data, reliable ways to correspond with people, and utilities for making charts and presenting information. They will also need hundreds of other things that we haven’t thought about yet5—things we haven’t thought about in large part because we’ve all been too consumed with trying to build our own automobiles, instead of thinking about what we’ll do when the world is full of traffic jams.6

So which way from here? The answer might be to give yourself a hard constraint—stop trying to compete indirectly with general agents; don’t build something with a bunch of AI inside; pretend it’s November of 2022 all over again7—and to imagine what you would do then.

Sports used to have a different rhythm. The shot would go up; a gasp; a pause; an explosion. In one final decisive moment: Diggs. Sideline. Unbelievable. Bang. Santa Maria. I don’t believe what I just saw. In trials argued in milliseconds over disputes of millimeters, the executioner would drop their irreversible hammer; the jurist would fling out their arms to declare their certain verdict. The arc of two universes would, immediately and immutably, be cleaved in half. Did we just see what I think we just saw?

But now—did we? What did we see? The cadence of these moments is different. The drama is fragmented, disjointed, unwrapped in slow motion. A strikeout; a winning catch; a last-second heave—and the camera snaps to the dugout; to the sidelines; to two teams squinting up at the jumbotron, waiting to see what they think they just saw. They twirl their fingers; they throw the red flag; they cover their ears; they tap their helmets. The officials convene. “The previous play is under further review.” The officials convene to review if the catcher tapped his helmet to call for a review.

Was his toe on the line? Was his toe down? Was his toe off the plate? The broadcast shows us a replay; we see fans looking at replays; we see fans looking at their phones. We look at our phones. We welcome NFL rules analyst Mike Pereira into the broadcast booth. “Mike, what do you see here?” And then, eventually, in halting rulebook jargon, through a crackling lavalier microphone, we are told what we saw.

Of course, not every call is reviewed. Not every catch is disputed; not every home run is in doubt. But the possibility of a review is enough. After every big return—are there flags on the field? After every bang-bang play, including one to decide the World Series—“they might take a look just to take a look.” After every buzzer beater, including one to decide the NCAA basketball championship—“Jim, they’re gonna check it.”

That is the tradeoff in modern sports. The calls are correct, but the drama is clumsy, revealed to us in fitful piecemeal, like a poorly kept surprise party. And you can’t just watch sports anymore; you have to participate in officiating them too.

Live long enough on the internet—which is increasingly synonymous with just living—and you have to become your own Mike Pereira. I subscribe to a popular daily newsletter on technology news, and I noticed a consistent similarity—in topic and tone—between its emails and an AI-generated one sent by a SaaS product. Have I been reading the thoughts of the author, or the tightly-bulleted ramblings of lazily prompted bot?

Jeff Bezos’ rocket blew up yesterday. Here’s a picture—is it real and an embellishment?

Can peacocks fly? Does this video prove it or not?

Can a tree grow in the white sands of the New Mexico desert? Does this picture tell you that it can?

Here is Magnifica Humanitas, a 42,000-word encyclical about artificial intelligence, written by Pope Leo XIV. Or was it written by AI?

Slop is everywhere now. To keep our humanity, we have to be watchful. AI is a valuable tool, but we must be vigilant.

But at what cost? It is not so easy to separate the internet from the rest of our lives. Once on, we cannot turn that vigilance off. Live in the metaverse long enough, and you disembody yourself; your animated hands become as real as your physical ones. Stream enough sports on TV, and you catch a similar feeling. Even when you go to a game live, in the momentary reflex to check your phone, you hesitate—what if what I’m watching is lagged, and the score alerts on my phone are ahead of the “stream” in front of me?

The internet has always dulled us. Our morning are spent blitzing through feeds of tragic headlines and awful pictures and thirst traps and rage bait and Wikipedia rabbit holes about the natural wonders of the world. Surely, that multimedia mutes us, in the rare moments that we encounter the same thing in the real world.

Is the same true for doubt? If our afternoons become skeptically parsing through emails and LinkedIn posts, wondering which are “real” and which are partial forgeries, will we ever let ourselves get lost in what we read? Will our first response always be to question if something is real—and only then, after Googling and counting fingers, a sober sense of reluctant awe? Will we become doubting Thomases who doubt too much, unable to believe anything unless we see it ourselves?

But even seeing may not be enough. Through hazard and happenstance, I spent this week in New Mexico, where the altitude lights the sky on fire.

You see it, clearly, blazing all around you, but you still feel that—that subtle disembodiment; that twinge; that instinctive hesitation. That is the cost of pervasive skepticism and the scientific method: you do not choose when it creeps into your consciousness. Challenges aren’t allowed on some plays and not others; they are a different set of rules, and a different way to play the game. Once trained on doubt, a mind doesn’t so easily give in to enchantment.

I do not know how to make sense of what’s happening now, or where it will all go. The lines between what is “real” and what isn’t will blur; we will argue over them; we will debate if what’s real is fake, if what’s fake is bad, or if it matters at all. Most people will wisely encourage us to be responsible about what we trust. Slow down; measure twice; confirm the call. You cannot run through a house of mirrors.

But amid the reflections and hallucinations, you still sometimes see exactly what you thought you saw. The real skies are as pink as they’ve always been; the sun still rises out of airplanes’ windows; there is still something in that orange light, just as there was before.

And for us to see that—to live that—we have to be willing to occasionally get the call wrong. We have to be reckless enough to let go, even when you do not know what is beneath you, and surrender to the air. To keep our humanity, we cannot be too vigilant. Sometimes, you could not write a script like this, because the world still writes its own scripts, too.

A question that people often think about these days is, “how good is AI at doing stuff?” A lot of stuff that people do—like building software, and responding to customer support tickets, and drafting legal documents, and analyzing data—is either stuff that they would rather not do, or stuff that their employer would rather not pay them to do. Large language models seem capable of doing that stuff. So, for better or for worse, whenever a new AI model comes out—which, in 2026, happens every roughly every other day1—people want to know: Can the new model do the stuff?

Over the last few years, a popular method for answering that question has been to administer a test. Create a long list of questions, about software or support tickets or charts or the law; give the questions to the model; see if it gets the right answers. Can it write code? Can it follow instructions? Demonstrate empathy? See pictures? Do math? Do math when the problems are pictures? Pass a Mensa test? Use a computer? Use the internet? Pass the LSAT? Pass the bar? Resist lying after it passes the LSAT and the bar? Create a test and find out.

Of course, everyone knows these tests aren’t perfect, but what else can you do? And surely, these tests are better than nothing.

A question that people think about a little less these days is, “how good is a person at doing stuff?” It used to be that if a business needed to do stuff—if they needed to debug software or respond to customer support tickets or draft legal documents or make charts—they wouldn’t go shopping for a computer agent; they would create a “job”—that is, a collection of tasks to be done inside of a particular company—and hire someone to do it. And so, people wanted to know: Which people can do those tasks, in that company?

For a while, one popular method for answering that question was to administer a test. The company would invite candidates to their office, ask them to solve logic puzzles or do math or play chess, and see if they got the right answers.

Part of the theory behind these interviews was the same as theory behind any academic test: Sure, the test isn’t the job, just as the MCAT isn’t an operating table, but performance on the test correlates with performance at the job. People who are good at solving coding puzzles on a whiteboard might be good at debugging production software; people who are good at math puzzles might be good at making useful business charts; people who are good at abstract games of logic might be good at finding market, uh, inefficiencies.

But a bigger part of the theory was, “what else can you do?” Companies only get so much time with job candidates. Nobody would’ve argued that the tests were perfect; some people would’ve argued that the tests are better than nothing.

Fewer people would argue that now.2 From The Atlantic, thirteen years ago:

“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,” Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, told the New York Times. “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

And new methods became trendy instead. From Linear, a few years ago:

We believe the only way to build a quality product and business is to hire people we can trust to make good judgments, across all functions and levels. …

The problem is that these types of people, unfortunately, are few and far between. The majority of companies don’t work in the way we do, which leads to fewer people with these kinds of skills. We found that standard interview processes didn’t work well for us. It’s challenging to assess in interviews if someone is truly a builder, has good taste and judgment, can take initiative, and approaches problems productively. … A conventional interview process, often modeled by large companies, doesn’t account for this.

To evaluate if a person is a fit for Linear with the skills to be successful, we bring candidates in for a work trial as the final step in the interview process. A work trial is a paid 2-5 day period where a candidate works with our team on a real project that we plan to implement (or as close as possible to that) with access to relevant internal tools and resources.

In other words, despite many years of test development, a job still cannot be contained in a test. Not only does a job take “good taste and judgment,” but employees also have “relevant internal tools and resources” that test-takers do not. A person who is very familiar with those tools or good at asking questions of those resources, for example, might be great at the job and terrible at the test.

Moreover, a job evaluation cannot be contained in an afternoon. Companies have been interviewing people for jobs for decades, at great expense. And currently, the state-of-the-art method of evaluation is to work with them for a while, in the actual office, on the actual job. When every business has its own quirks—its own culture; its own processes; its own problems; its own coworkers—the only way to test if someone is good at the job, it seems, is for them to do the job, to encounter those quirks, and to see how it all goes.

So, you know. Could AI be bound to the same constraints? At first, when large language models were primarily used inside stateless call-and-response chatbots, you could fill a test with representative examples of what people wanted the chatbot to do. But now, AI is an agent—it is a persistent system that talks to itself, it has memories from prior conversations, and it has access to internal tools and resources. That’s not an employee, but it does a lot of things that employees do. And how do you benchmark that?

A question that a handful of people think about very intensely is, “how good are baseball players at playing baseball?” Millions of people play baseball, and there is a very lucrative market for the few hundred people who are the very best at it, so there is also a very lucrative market for the people who are the very best at appraising baseball players. How do those people decide who is good?

The original answer was basic statistical benchmarks. A pitcher that can get 27 outs before giving up three runs is very good. A hitter that gets three hits in every ten at-bats is very good, as is a batter that can drive in 100 runs in a season, or hit 500 home runs in a career. Baseball is full of bold lines around round numbers.

Over time, people realized that these numbers are too crude, and came up with more advanced statistics. Don’t just count hits; count the number of times people get on base, weighted by which base they reach. Don’t count wins; count baserunners allowed per inning pitched.

But these numbers still had problems, because they were absolutes. Players aren’t evaluated against some arbitrary fixed standard; they’re evaluated against their contemporaries. So the baseball appraisers came up with “wins above replacement,” or WAR, which aggregates everything a player does on a baseball field in an attempt to define how much better (or worse) the player is than the average player that a team could call up from the minor leagues.3 And:

Over the last two decades, the Wins Above Replacement metric (WAR), which combines the contributions of different performance elements, weighted according to their contributions to team wins and adjusted for the environment in which a player’s statistics were accrued, has become the metric of choice for global evaluation of player performance. WAR is superior to traditional counting stats like [home runs, runs batted in, wins, and strikeouts] because it incorporates many diverse elements of performance that contribute to team wins and adjusts for the environment (league, ballpark, era) in which a given player performed.4

Though the exact formula for WAR is complicated—and there are a number of different variants—the idea behind it is simple: How much better is this player than a generic one that would take no effort to identify and relatively little money to pay? It’s a metric that doesn’t measure specific performance; it measures how far something is above an easy baseline.

A question that nearly everyone now thinks about is, “if I YOLO a bunch of MCPs into Claude, will it be able to do my job for me?” For every task, that is the new global competitor: Claude Code (or Codex, or Cowork, or ChatGPT, or Copilot, or Cursor, or Clawdbot, or, I guess, the generalized form, C*), connected to everything. Want to build a better coding robot? It’s your product versus Claude Code integrated with Linear. Want to build a better analytical agent? It’s your product versus Codex connected to Slack, a dbt MCP, and Databricks. Want to build a better automated personal assistant? It’s your product versus Clawdbot, running wild on a Mac Mini. Want to be a product marketer? It’s your launch blog post versus one written by Cowork, connected to Google Drive.

When we built a new analytical benchmark last year, that was the lesson we quickly learned: Nobody cared about the scores or about which models performed the best against some arbitrary set of tasks. They cared about how well different products performed against some system that they’d hacked together over the last two weeks, and had integrated with their relevant internal tools and resources. They cared about the new tool, against the easy—and increasingly default—baseline.

It points to a fundamental tension that now exists in nearly every benchmark: How do you create a standardized benchmark when context—the idiosyncratic stuff that is, almost by definition, impossible to standardize—is the critical thing that makes one tool useful and another tool unusable?

But maybe that is a question that we can all stop thinking about. We don’t benchmark employees, nor do we benchmark traditional software. Perhaps AI software will soon be the same. And instead, the next question that every product—and maybe every employee?—will have to answer, is, how much are you worth above C*?

CSS

It has become a truism to say that it’s not the model that matters; it’s the harness that matters.

But what is a harness? The normal answer is that it’s a complex set of logical instructions that turn a user’s request into a series of recursive, self-authoring prompts. We speak hyperbolically of harnesses now; harnesses are on the frontier of computer engineering; harnesses are the platform; harnesses are AGI.

But perhaps that is overcomplicating things. Could a harness be a web interface that encourages its users to write better prompts? Could it be a text box with useful suggestions for what to type? Could it just be a text that is tall enough to type in?

We have joked about this before:

If you’re Google, here’s another idea, if you want a better and cheaper wrapper around Gemini: Make the Google search box bigger.

People already like Google’s AI Mode more than ChatGPT! But one-line boxes are for search! Two-line boxes are for chat! Even if you can AI Mode from google.com, nobody’s gonna chat in a one-line box! So just make it a two-line box! That’s the thoughtfully designed interface that make Gemini accessible to everyone. Google doesn’t need a $2 billion acquisition. Google just needs some new CSS.

Or was it a joke?!

Google changes its search box for the first time in 25 years

For 25 years, Google’s iconic search box was a long, slender bar where people typed in keywords like “World Cup.”

But over the past three years, artificial intelligence allowed people to type in longer, more complex questions like “Who are the top 24 teams in the World Cup and what chance does the United States have of advancing?”

On Tuesday, Google said the A.I. shift had inspired it to overhaul the dimensions of its search bar for the first time since 2001. The box is getting bigger and more interactive so that people can ask even longer questions and upload photographs and videos into queries.

Your move, OpenAI.

Am I working?

Am I working, or am I wasting time? Working, surely. Because it’s what people do for work. Because if it works, there is money to be made. There is a business to be built. Every piece of software began with a first commit. Every startup was once a rough prototype. Every unicorn took its first steps. Every good idea was discovered, amid 10,000 bad ones. Am I working? Yes, because, if nothing else, I am learning.

Am I working? Well, it’s not working. It worked at first—one prompt in; twenty minutes into the machine tearing through an empty folder; 8,000 lines added, 0 lines removed. It worked then. Check it out, the machine said; localhost:3000; see what we have built together. The snap of a few sparks; a quick whiff of ozone; and it blazed forth, with electric possibility. Since, though, the blistering pace has slowed. Confusion; exceptions; obstacles; previously unconsidered complications. Let’s plan this; I say; it plans it, in eight phases. I read the first one carefully. Do the first phase. Do the next one. Do the next one. It keeps writing plans; there is so much text; there are so many words. Do the next one. Do the rest of them. I’ll test it when you’re done. I’ll fix it when you’re done. Is it working? Not anymore.

What is it, even? We’re losing track; clarity was compacted out of the codebase long ago. We started with a vision; now we are dead reckoning from one feature to the next, the vision evolving with every prompt. The current app is a blurry JPEG of its original ambition.

But that’s ok. This is an exploration; this is a first draft. It is not a final product; it is a starter codebase. It is a clickable spec. It is future lore. All this scratch work—these bad ideas; this tech debt; these evolutionary vestiges; all of my stairs to nowhere—they can be fixed later. I’ll redo it with a better model. I’ll rebuild it with a better plan. I’ll rebuild it with Opus 4.8; with GPT 5.6; with Opus 4.8 writing the code and with GPT 5.6 reviewing it. I’ll rebuild it in Rust.

The empty folder is filling up. There is a second folder; a third. This is the Claude Code version; this is the Codex version; this is the Gemin–eh, no never mind. This is the one that had a nice UI; this is the one that was a Swift app. Create a parent folder; $ cd ..; $ claude; $ there are two apps in this folder, I want you to combine.... There were 14 versions; now there are 15 versions.

It’s dinner time, but the machine is done combobulating. It needs more instructions. The Red Queen is not running, and she must run. We must review her output—no, not quite, it’s too far to the left; too far to the right; try it to the left again; try hiding the menu. Maybe it should be its own page. Maybe it should be its own app. Maybe it should be a different company.

Pull the lever on the slot machine; ask for one more treat. Ask for an update to the home page; for a new Gmail integration; for dark mode. Pull it again—ask for new ideas. Pull it again—tell it that the app doesn’t make sense anymore. You’re not getting it. I need you to think harder. I need you to ultrathink. I NEED YOU TO ULTRATHINK. Pull it again—ask it what makes a meaningful life. That’s exactly the question you should be asking, it says; do you want me to dream for you?

The dream was a stable job and a steady pension. It was then a big tech company, with free lunches and unlimited PTO; it was an exploding startup, fat with VC money; it was a lean startup, free from the shackles of VC money. It is now a software studio; a founder and army of agents. It is a self-sufficient Kalshi bot, running on a Mac mini. It is Jane Street, vibe coded. It is a billion dollars, and zero employees. Am I working? Yes, on someone else’s dream.

What is work now, anyway? There are only four jobs left; there are only three jobs left. There is one job left: the Entrepreneur. The “builder,” with dirty hands.

Am I “building,” or do I just have a hobby? A midlife crisis? An addiction? Was Animal Crossing building, or playing a game? Is day trading for making money, or for gambling? Nancy Lemann, via Ava: “Some take to the bottle, some look to the sky, but it is all the same. Byzantine empires, lives of the saints? Mr. Collier took to his books, and got overintellectual.” He took to his computer, convinced himself of the profundity of his ideas and the urgency of their existence, and forgot to ask if the world really needed to hear so much from him. “Build me an app that manages all of my notes,” he told the machine. “Manage all of my notes,” he should have said.

But what fun is that? What ambition is that? What job is that?

Sally Rooney, via Camille Charrière: “All my mania for culture”—and so much of our mania for building?—“for ‘really good’ things, for knowing about jazz recordings and red wine and Danish furniture, even about Keats and Shakespeare and James Baldwin, all what if it’s all a form of vanity?”

In 2020, a friend used to joke: In two years, thousands of people are going to wake up in some distant mountain house, and be grateful that they were jarred free from a game that they never intended to play. And thousands more will wake up wondering how on earth they ended up in Montana.

This epidemic, too, will pass. No magic remains mesmerizing forever. The novelty will wear off. The subsidies will disappear. Our ideas will hit the wall; we will build them, and nobody will come. The conjuring machine may be the future, but the thrill of it will fade, its crackling sense of possibility will dull, and “building” will lose its vain luster. And when it does, will we be grateful for the places that this delirious moment took us? Or will we wonder where in the world we thought we were going?

If you are a bold entrepreneur who wants to change the world with ambitious artificial intelligence technologies, how should you do that? Two answers seem obvious:

1. Build ambitious artificial intelligence technologies.

2. Talk about building ambitious artificial intelligence technologies.

Arguably, the second thing is just as important as the first thing.1 You are selling sweeping visions of prosperity and productivity as much as you are selling technology. Leading artificial intelligence researchers—the people you need to build ambitious artificial intelligence technologies—want to work at big companies with lofty missions that can make them rich. Customers want to buy stuff that will help them survive the looming mass obsolescence event. Venture capitalists want to fund companies “with more ambition than ever.” One AI startup periodically publishes essays about how their ambitions are somewhere between destroying the world and saving it; they are about to raise $50 billion.2 Another AI startup told investors that they should consider their investment a donation because “it may be difficult to know what role money will play” in the world if they are successful; it was the greatest fundraising pitch in history. To change the world with ambitious artificial intelligence technologies, do not talk quaintly about “making something people want;” talk about an age of 100x productivity; talk about recalibrating your gradient; talk about ushering in new eras of maximal abundance.

Before you can do any of that, though, you will have to first talk to the government about building ambitious artificial intelligence technologies. To incorporate a company, you have to pay various fees and fill out various forms, and some of those forms will ask you about your company. As a matter of accuracy and as a matter of ego, you might want to memorialize your bold ambition into your company’s founding charter. You will click the dropdown—“What does your business or organization do?”—and look for the appropriately audacious selection: Revolutionize labor; or, Launch intergalactic data centers; or, the Jetsons. You would probably be happy with Artificial Intelligence. You might even settle for Software.

But, no. Those will not be options in the dropdown. The IRS bureaucrats are unfazed about your ambitions. The BLS econometricians do not recalibrate their gradients. They do care if you have already raised $4 billion, if you have so many Porches that you get stuck in your traffic, or if you live in a moon house floating over San Francisco like the mothership. They care about the consistency of their statistics. And so, when you fill out their forms, you will have to declare, officially, to the United States registrar of permanent records, that your business does Information Technology.

It will feel like a terrific indignity. IT is the opposite of ambition; IT is anathema to ambition. IT is administration. IT is paranoia. IT is a hall monitor, blocking websites. IT is your mandatory anti-phishing training; IT is the disabled skip button on the video player playing your mandatory anti-phishing training. IT is your flaky VPN. It is a PC. It is Microsoft Teams. It is a stiff suit and a lanyard; it is khakis, a polo with “IBM Medallion Partner” on the sleeve, an OGIO Renegade RSS backpack, with both straps on. IT is the brakes.

Bold entrepreneurs and ambitious artificial intelligence startups are all gas. They do not follow the rules. They experiment; they dangerously skip permissions; they build with unhinged and explosive abandon. They run swarms of phishing software directly inside their VPNs. IT is supervising Jira. AI is replacing Jira; AI is agentifying Jira; it may be difficult to know what role Jira will play in the world AI is building.

Information technology, pfft. You are building a cathedral that will change the world, and all the government can see is the bricks.

And, I mean, just look at how much AI is changing the world. It is changing Block:3

today we’re making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we’re reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. ... we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.

but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.

And earlier this week, Coinbase:

Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. … AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what’s possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it’s accelerating every day.

And, just yesterday, Cloudflare:

We’ve made the decision to reduce Cloudflare’s workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally.

The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done.

Of course, there are questions. Is AI changing these companies, or are they using it as an excuse to correct past mistakes? Have they oversold themselves on AI’s hype? Many people are saying this.

Still, regardless of the motivation,4 the companies are changing:

Cloudflare – [We are] defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era.

Coinbase – We’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era.

Block – We’re going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do.

Coinbase – We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native.

Cloudflare – We are reimagining every internal process, team, and role across the company.

Block – Block is showing what it looks like to fundamentally rethink organization design.

Cloudflare – [Cloudflare] cannot rest on the workflows and organizational structures that worked yesterday. We’re confident that our reshaped organization will be even faster and more innovative as we continue building the future.

Block – The intelligence lives in the system. The people are on the edge.

Coinbase – [We are] rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.

Block – Player-coaches [will] replace the traditional manager whose primary job was information routing. A player-coach still writes code or builds models or designs interfaces.

Coinbase – Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.

Block – Companies move fast or slow based on information flow. Hierarchy and middle management impede information flow. … Block is building what comes next.

One way to read all of this is that AI is reinventing Block, Coinbase, and Cloudflare. But the other, more literal way to see it is that Block, Coinbase, and Cloudflare are reinventing Block, Coinbase, and Cloudflare. They are defining how their companies will work; they are rebuilding their companies with intelligence at the core;5 they are rethinking organizational design; they are building what comes next.

Decades ago, companies like Microsoft changed the world with Windows and the personal computer. But they did not author what happened after. That was figured out on the ground, across a million IT teams, testing new ideas against their specific problems, rebuilding their companies around the computer and the internet. It was in partnership with Microsoft, perhaps; as Medallion partners, perhaps; but the final cathedral of the modern corporation was designed by Jeff in IT as much as it was by Silicon Valley’s storied founders.

The same, it seems, will be true again. Box CEO Aaron Levie:

Whether it’s existing consulting firms, new ones that emerge, FDEs from agent vendors, or new internal agent engineering roles, the amount of work that is going to be created to implement agents in enterprises will exceed anything we imagine today.

AI companies cannot do that work. They can help with it—they can spend billions building consultancies and deployment companies—but it too will ultimately be carried out on the ground, across a million “internal agent engineering” teams, testing new ideas against their specific problems, rebuilding their companies around “intelligence.”

It is a frequent question now: What will work be like? If we are revolutionizing labor, what will labor become? AI companies are building the new technology, and it is easy to assume that they will be the ones who tell us the answer.

But the long tail of teams experimenting with AI will be much bigger than the AI companies themselves. OpenAI and Anthropic may build the model and some of its generic products; everyone else will figure out how to use them. And it will be their discoveries that become tomorrow’s standards.

Or, framed differently, if you are a bold entrepreneur who wants to change the world with ambitious artificial intelligence technologies, are you building the cathedral, or are they? Who is the real architect of the future—who is the most trailblazing pioneer?—the AI company, or the internal teams that are thinking about, uh, business technology and the internal flow of information?

XaiXspaceXanthropic

Last week, we talked about AI companies, their computers, and the cyclical race they’re all running:

1. To build frontier AI models, you need a lot of computers.

2. Frontier AI models are so popular that even big companies like OpenAI and Anthropic do not have enough computers.

3. So the companies have to choose: Do they use their computers to train new models, or do they use them to sell those new models, through applications like ChatGPT and Claude Code?

4. In some sense, you have to do both—you can’t sell a bad model, and a great model is no good if you don’t sell it.

5. So, you devise a two-step plan: First, focus on building the best model. Then, once it’s the best, you sell the model.

6. But! Once you build the best model, everyone will want to buy it—more people than you have capacity to serve.

7. What do you do??

8. You probably use the computers to sell your AI. Money has a way like that.

9. When you do that, though, you open the door for your competitors, who will simultaneously be selling less of their AI and in need of better one. So, they will probably focus on building the best model…

10. Etc., etc., etc.

However, in the original post, there were eleven steps. Between steps 5 and 6, there was a joke:

Sometimes, [building the best model] doesn’t work. You spend a zillion dollars, and do not build the best AI. Ah, awkward, an A for effort, I guess.

So what do you do then? One option is to spend a zillion more dollars and try again. But the other, easier option is to give up and sell all of your computers:

Anthropic on Wednesday announced a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at his company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.

As part of the agreement, Anthropic will get access to more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity, and it also “expressed interest” in working with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of compute capacity in space. Anthropic said the deal will directly improve capacity for its paid Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.

Right, if you are in a bike race, and you are close behind the leader, it’s not that hard to stay in the race. From inside the peloton’s slipstream, you are one sprint from being back in front. But if you’re in 29th place, you can’t draft behind the leaders, nor are you likely to catch up to them. In which case, maybe biking just isn’t your thing.6

From a conversation with a smart friend,1 a fun theory:

1. To do AI, you need a bunch of very fancy computers. However, because lots of people want to do lots of AI, there is a shortage of these computers. In a few years, we might have enough of them—we are putting data centers in Texas and in Tennessee; we are putting data centers in the ocean; we are putting data centers in orbit, on the moon, we might put data centers on Mars; can we borrow your computer to use it as a data center?—but, until then, we are short. Not everyone who wants a computer can have one.

2. This is even true—especially true?—at a handful of huge companies, like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and SpaceX-X-xAI.2 Though they have a lot of fancy computers, they also want to do the most AI, and still have to make hard choices about how to use their computers.

3. Specifically, they have to choose if they want to use their computers to build AI or sell AI. Training new frontier models is how you build the smartest AI, and customers want the smartest AI. But offering people a way to use that model—that is, using the model you trained to provide inference, via websites like ChatGPT or programmatic APIs—is how you make money. The model is your secret recipe; inference is the food on the plate. Customers don’t want to eat bad food; customers can’t eat a recipe. You have to invent a good recipe, and use it to cook the food.

4. But, the computers. You do not have enough computers to do both.

5. So, you make a plan: “First, we’ll use most of our computers to build the smartest AI. It will cost a zillion dollars, but that’s ok, because once we have the best AI, we will aim to achieve turnaround.” Sow today, reap tomorrow, a classic business move.

6. Sometimes, it doesn’t work. You spend a zillion dollars, and do not build the best AI. Ah, awkward, an A for effort, I guess.

7. Other times, it does work! You spend a zillion dollars, and build the best AI. Everyone loves your AI. They love the products that use your AI. They want to stop using that company’s AI and use this company’s AI. They want to run your AI everywhere, all the time. This is great; this is exactly what you build the best AI for.

8. But, the computers! There is so much demand for your AI, and you only have so many computers. So you have a choice: Do you capture the moment, and use some of your training computers as inference computers? Or do you let it slip, and not sell the thing that you just spent a zillion dollars making?

9. I mean. You probably sell the AI.

10. Now, though, you have fewer computers to train an even better AI. And other companies—which no longer have the best AI—might get to thinking: “The company with the best AI is using a lot more computers selling AI. What if, while they’re doing that, we use most of our computers to build an even smarter AI? It will cost a zillion dollars, but that’s ok, because once we have the best AI…”

11. Round in round, round after round.

Yes, sure, this cuts a lot of corners. Good AI isn’t just built by computers; it’s also built by good researchers, unique training data, and, increasingly, the product around the AI. AI companies can do many things at once; their computers are not so easily fungible; many of their computers are actually, famously, also their competitors’ computers, leased back and forth in a giant trillion-dollar web of incomprehensible partnerships and frenemy-ships. There is no knob that says “build” on one side and “sell” on the other.

Still, that is the pattern, isn’t it? In 2023 and 2024, OpenAI was the dominant default, Anthropic was the IYKYK upstart, and Google was incinerating its reputation, and many billions of dollars, one disastrous demo at a time. Then, Google built the best new models—“Gemini 2.5 is the new SoTA;” “I tested Google’s new Nano Banana image AI, and it’s insane”—and became the smart money. Then, Anthropic put out Opus 4.5; it was a “world-changing shift;” everyone became obsessed with Claude Code; “move over, ChatGPT.” Anthropic blew past OpenAI’s hype, its revenue, and its valuation; OpenAI started missing revenue targets. But revenue is a lagging indicator. Over the last six months, while Anthropic was selling Opus and Claude Code—and struggling to find enough computers to do so—OpenAI was building GPT 5.5, out last week. And GPT 5.5 has it all; GPT 5.5 blew people away; GPT 5.5 is a new frontier in everything; cracked devs on X are abandoning Claude Code and coding on Codex.

And OpenAI is an inference company now. Build phenomenal cosmic power; get everything that goes with it. Round and round, round after round.

The implication, I suppose, is that this old post was partially right: AI labs are bad businesses. Models really are fast-evaporating moats, clever employees really are two weeks from leaving, and every billion-dollar model is one competitive release away from being leapfrogged into near-immediate obsolescence. But, this comparison was wrong:

There is, however, one enormous difference [between AI labs and cloud providers like AWS]: You can’t build a cloud vendor overnight. Azure doesn’t have to worry about a few executives leaving and building a worldwide network of data centers in 18 months. AWS is an internet business, but it dug its competitive moat in the physical world. …

What, then, is an LLM vendor’s moat? Brand? Inertia? A better set of applications built on top of their core models? An ever-growing bonfire of cash that keeps its models a nose ahead of a hundred competitors?

The problem is the premise. AI companies are actually no different than cloud providers: They build models, but they sell computers. And their lasting moat—their only lasting moat—is their computers. Models converge; talent migrates. Computers endure.

The other implication—the more useful one, maybe—is that AI whiplash is structural. The vertigo is systemic. The hype cycle is scripted theater. In science fiction stories, the AI company that builds the best model has a compounding advantage over its competitors. Someone builds the smartest model; that model helps its developers improve itself faster than the second-smartest model; a small gap becomes a big gap; a big gap becomes an insurmountable gap. There is urgency in small differences, because you never know when pulling ahead could explode into pulling away.

Perhaps that is backwards. Perhaps the AI race is less of a space race and more of a bike race: The headwinds are borne by whoever is in the front. Perhaps it’s Mario Kart: There are hardcoded advantages to being behind. Perhaps there is an invisible asymptote to every AI company’s lead: The further ahead your AI gets, the more people want to buy it, and the less new AI you can build. Perhaps it’s not a race at all, but a ___ run.3

Spectating from the dizzying center of the arena, maybe there is something steadying in that. When the peloton moves together, does it matter who’s winning right now? When no lead is safe, should we bother worrying about the leaderboard?

How do you make a chart, in the age of artificial intelligence? You have many choices:

1. Give an Excel file to an image model like Nano Banana or ChatGPT Images, and tell it to make a picture. Have it read your data, squint at some imagined piece of paper in its head, and draw a bar chart, of the Charlotte Hornets 2025-26 season, in a nostalgic 1990s aesthetic.1

2. Make your chart directly in Excel. Use AI in Excel™, powered by Microsoft 365™ Copilot™. Or, other models can use computers now; tell them to take over your computer, open Excel, click “New chart,” and flip through all of Excel’s menus and dropdowns.2

3. Ask an AI to use a simple charting library to create the chart with code. There are so many: Matplotlib, Plotly, Seaborn, ggplot2, Bokeh, Highcharts, Observable, Vega, Vega-Lite, Apache ECharts, Google Charts, Fusioncharts, ZingChart, Chart.js, I could do this forever. The robots will create your chart with a few simple configurations, like defining which fields go on which axis, and let the charting library handle the exact details.3

4. Ask it to make the chart using a low-level charting framework like d3, “the JavaScript library for bespoke data visualization.” In other charting libraries, there are concepts like “bar charts” and “legends.” In d3, there are concepts like “rectangles” and “text.” It’s a collection of visual Lego bricks: Most of the bricks are shaped like things that might be useful for making charts, but you can make anything with the bricks.4

5. Make the chart using native Javascript. Javascript is the language that people use to create any website—YouTube, Wordle, the homepage for the original Space Jam. If Highcharts lets you draw charts, and d3 lets you draw shapes, Javascript lets you draw anything.5

6. Make the chart in C. C is a general-purpose programming language for creating programs and operating systems. If AI can do anything, why should it use Excel, a browser, or even Windows? That is generic software. It should create a program designed for making exactly the right chart. It should design an operating system designed for making exactly the right chart.6

7. Make the chart in a bespoke programming language. Design the language for exactly the chart you want. Is the language Turing complete? It does not matter. It only needs to be “a bar chart, of the Charlotte Hornets 2025-26 season, in a nostalgic 1990s aesthetic” complete.7

8. Grow corn. Grow corn to feed the workers, who build the mine, which digs up the silicon, which goes into the semiconductor fabrication plant, which manufactures the chips, which assembles the computers, that create the operating system, that hosts the program, that draws the chart. Rebuild the entire global economy, literally from the ground up, to make the perfect chart.8

One way to think about this question is that it is dumb. Nobody needs to start a farm to make one chart. Nobody needs to even build a custom app to make a chart. There are a million charting programs out there already; just pick one, and tell a robot to make the chart. Use Excel; it will be there forever.

Another way to think about this question, though, is that all of our jobs and money depend on its answer. A lot of the world—and nearly all of Silicon Valley—exists somewhere between “a polished software application like Excel making a complex task possible in a few clicks” and “grow corn.” There are conglomerates and research labs that design and maintain foundational programming languages; there are huge corporations like Apple and Microsoft that build operating systems that can run software programs; there are thousands of companies that build technical infrastructure like databases that runs in those operating systems; there are even more companies that build consumer products like Excel that make those technical applications accessible to the masses. Everything that is done on a computer passes through an entire supply chain of software, a supply chain that supports thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.

But, you know, AI. The faster and more capable the models get, the theory goes, the less of the supply chain needs to exist. AI can work directly with technical infrastructure; it can build its own software; it can generate charts. And the question—about charts, sure, but about every software product and software company—is, where is the line? How far down the list can they go?

Here’s one answer: MotherDuck is a cloud data warehouse.9 It is a technical application that is typically one step removed from charts, and from the business people who want to look at charts. Engineers set up MotherDuck and fill it with data; they connect it to a tool like Excel, or to a drag-and-drop business intelligence software like Omni; business people use Excel or Omni or whatever to make charts of the data in MotherDuck.

But, you know, again, AI. So, two months ago, MotherDuck released Dives:

Dives are interactive visualizations you create with natural language, directly on top of your data in MotherDuck. Ask a question to your AI agent, and MotherDuck generates a persistent, interactive component that lives in your workspace alongside your SQL.

How does Dives build visualizations? With robots that write JavaScript, the programming language that can create any website:

[Instead of clicking through a UI or writing visualization code,] just describe what you need. Interactive visualizations from a single prompt, built by your AI agents, living in your MotherDuck workspace. And the beauty of it: Dives is Javascript code. You can build anything you want, with any interactivity you’d like.

It’s the future of analytics, some say. There is no more visualization software. That’s what gets replaced. Don’t buy Tableau; instead, open Claude Code or Codex, and ask it to make a custom dashboard in JavaScript or Python. And that’s better than using dedicated charting tool, because with JavaScript or Python, you can build anything you want:

Fabi’s Python dashboards are faster to build (minutes vs weeks), more flexible for advanced analysis and custom visualizations, and fully transparent so you can see and edit the underlying code.

The idea has even leaked into the LLMs themselves. In a later post, MotherDuck asked Claude what would happen to BI tools as AI continued to advance, and it said the same thing:

LLMs already draw better charts than Tableau from a simple prompt. … The “drag-and-drop dashboard” becomes a curiosity, like a fax machine with a particularly nice interface.

Maybe; I don’t know. If you’ve ever tried to create a chart from scratch, or even with a visualization library, you know the Rubik’s’ cube of frustrations: Overlapping axis labels; misplaced legends; colors that collide with one another; you move one thing to fix a problem over here and it creates a new problem over there. Software isn’t just a convenient shorthand for doing something; it solves the very hard problems that you don’t realize exist until you have them. In that telling, while the entire software industry might pivot toward building user interfaces that LLMs can work with, software itself would remain as useful as ever, and the supply chain would remain intact.

Or, maybe LLMs really do get good enough to work through those edge cases and annoyances. But of course, if they can do that—why would they stop with making visualizations? If they can work around all of the headaches that Tableau has spent twenty years solving, could they not also work around the headaches that make it hard to host those visualizations? Could they not build a better database? Sure, the latter two seem harder, but how many things did we once say were too hard for an LLM, and soon realize were not?

There are obvious reasons why an LLM probably shouldn’t grow corn. Nor, probably should it try to rebuild every piece of software. But how do you draw the line?

Big vibes

Or, maybe the answer is to not make a chart at all?

…the future of business intelligence isn’t a better dashboard.

A support leader at one of Omni’s customers went through 75 pages of conversation with an AI to identify 10 categories of rep mistakes. The system read support logs, cited specific examples per rep, & suggested concrete changes. Not just a dashboard.

We’ve talked about this a number of times before: The real future of analytics might not be analytics, but vibes:

If AI is good at anything, it is good at interpreting the vibes. It is good at aggregating massive amounts of text—and increasingly, of video and audio—into its approximate average. Give it your support tickets and customer communications, and ask it questions about what it read. Don’t classify and categorize images; just ask an AI model what it thinks it sees. … Ask it for the vibes.

That’s another thing the vibes—there are no edge cases in how something feels. There are no overlapping axes, or misplaced legends, or Rubik’s cubes full of frustrations. The vibes are much less of headache than the analytics.

Cursor

See, maybe SpaceX is also a normal startup after all:

1. They started with big, fun ambitions: big rockets; colonize Mars; technology to save humanity; build robots; buy Twitter; buy Tiktok?

2. They raised an absolutely titanic amount of money.

3. They changed their mind. They are now pivoting to the enterprise. Time for some realism—they now want a robot that makes software and does business:

   Though [SpaceX CEO Elon Musk] once forecast that humans would take off for Mars as early as 2024, he has de-emphasized reaching the planet.

   
   Instead, SpaceX on Tuesday said it had struck a deal with the artificial intelligence start-up Cursor that could result in its acquiring the young company for $60 billion. …

   
   Mr. Musk appears eager to push SpaceX further into A.I. In the deal with Cursor announced Tuesday, SpaceX said the combination with the young A.I. company, which makes code-writing software, would “allow us to build the world’s most useful” A.I. models.

On one hand, the deal makes an uncanny amount of sense: SpaceX has a ton of big computers and nobody to use them; Cursor has a bunch of customers and training data, and not nearly enough big computers.

On the other hand, man, what? In preparation for a huge IPO, SpaceX—a rocket company that is trying to build a city on the moon—is marketing its huge ambitions, its technological prowess, and its enormous financial potential by…buying a SaaS product that helps people build websites. The literal rocket ship company is trying to prove to investors that it’s a corporate rocket ship by buying an app.

I don’t know AI coding agents are a technological singularity, but they are definitely the attention singularity.

Here is what “pivot” means:

1. While sitting around in a conference room with a couple coworkers, you have an idea for a startup. “Man,” you say about some internal tool you built at your company, “Nighthawk / Stuffie / Vulcan / Hacky Sack / Shake ‘n Bake is really good. What if we made a business out of it?”

2. Or, while reading about some other huge startup—Uber, Stripe, whatever—you come up with some way to apply their solution to another problem. “Man,” you say while looking at how big the company is, “What if there was Uber for drugs? Or eBay for drugs? Or Stripe for drugs? Or iPhone for drugs?”

3. You research it. You talk to potential customers. You pitch it to investors. You convince a few of them that it is a good idea, and they give you money, to use technology to sell drugs.1

4. You hire engineers and designers, and spend months—years?—building a delightful product. You hire marketers, and spend months—years?—carefully crafting a striking brand. You recruit “design partners;” you cultivate a “community.” You launch your product with great panache.

5. At some point months—years?—later, you eventually realize that your idea was, in fact, not a good idea. Despite your comprehensive research and delightful product and striking brand and great panache, nobody is using your app.

6. This is a problem! You spent a bunch of money building something nobody wanted! You hired a bunch of experts to solve a problem that didn’t need to be solved! You filled your phone with drug dealers, and you are not doing any drug deals.

7. And so, you do it—compassionately, in front of the entire company, and later, resolutely, on LinkedIn: We must Pivot. You say you still care deeply about your original mission, but the timing is off. The product was too early; the market was not ready. You are grateful for your passionate customers—their support has meant everything—but the landscape has shifted, and we must evolve too. We cannot be afraid of hard choices. Today is a tough day, but it is the beginning of a new chapter. In building our app, we have built several exciting technologies. We have made many useful community connections. We have been researching a new idea; we have been talking to potential customers; we are sure that this one is a good idea. We have made this decision deliberately, and now we will do it forcefully. Gradually and then suddenly. We are excited for what’s next.

There are a lot of implicit assumptions loaded into The Pivot: That companies should have a clear direction; that they can change direction, but the decision is heavy; that when they do decide to pivot, they must do so definitively. And, of course, that it probably won’t work. Because great companies have clear directions; great companies do not spin in circles. “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,” says Harvard; the essence of execution, this blog once suggested, is steadfastly doing it:

Making the decision is more important than the decision you make. The success of a startup—or of a strategic decision in an established company, or even, to go all Chicken Soup for the Soul for a moment,2 of decisions in life and love—doesn’t depend on the specific choice. It depends on how committed you are to that choice. Often, we don’t fail because we choose the wrong thing; we fail because we refuse to choose anything at all.

Pivots represent neither of these things. They represent experimentation, doubt, and indecision. They are Silicon Valley’s equivalent of a fighting couple “taking a break”—often, the gentle beginning of an inevitable end. What comes after a pivot is usually a long, fitful march downhill. Nobody congratulations anyone on their upcoming pivot.

Four days ago, a friend told me they were in a perma-pivot. Everyone is right now, they said. Everything is moving too fast, and everyone is building on quicksand. Your market seems great today; it’s been mowed down by Anthropic’s howitzer tomorrow. You’re constantly looking for your footing. You never know what direction you’re heading.

Whatever you do, they said, don’t get caught in that dizzying whirlpool.

—

Two days ago, another friend recently told me that they run an ice cream shop that launches a speculative new flavor every Wednesday. It’s a whole event—come to the shop, try the flavor, for one time only. Some flavors are popular enough to repeat, but most are meant to be made, to be enjoyed, and to be gone. “So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”

You should come, they said, and best to come on a Wednesday.

You could ask two questions about all of this, I suppose. First, are pivots outdated? Nobody would accuse an ice cream shop of pivoting. Launching a new flavor every week is something between a constant experiment and a marketing campaign. The weekly “pivot” isn’t a change in direction; it’s the entire strategy.

If it takes as much time to prototype software as it does to develop an ice cream flavor, could startups be doing the same thing? Should they be doing the same thing? When software was slow to build, commitment to a direction was important, and pivoting was expensive. When software is cheap to build—and when you have to go faster to keep up with everyone else—do the rules invert? Commitment becomes expensive, and pivoting is what’s important.

We’ve talked about this before, and the downfall of the fundamentals:

[It may be that] Apple—and [Ben] Thompson, and me, and probably many of you—have an outdated understanding of how the world works. It may be that nobody was talking about Apple’s big launch event because Apple isn’t doing interesting things with AI, but it also may be because big launch events have no cultural traction. They, like us, are part of a shrinking conversational artery. Apple’s playbook is stale; its vocabulary is stale; its entire economic model of demand generation is stale. Apple’s launch events are losing their grip over Silicon Valley because everything has to be a meme or a controversy now, and polite launch events don’t produce memes or controversy.

What it means to build software has changed dramatically; why would what it means to build a software business not change just as much?

Which raises the second question: Are we outdated?3 That prior post continued:

It is easy to see when other people are the unc. They are from an earlier generation; a different time. For a while, when you’re living in the main channel, the world confirms your instincts: Their weird anachronisms are disappearing, and your vocabulary is ascendant.

But then we get stuck. And it is much harder to let go of our own sense of cosmology—because our beliefs don’t feel like fads, but fundamentals. … The old generations believed in discredited science; our beliefs are settled science; the new generations are chasing pseudoscience.

But you see the problem, right?

My friend said they were in a perma-pivot, because what other word would they use? But maybe that’s the problem. Calling it a pivot loads it up with other implications—that it’s temporary; that it’s bad; that the job of a startup founder is to find a firm direction for their company—and maybe those implications are no longer true. Maybe their situation isn’t bad; it’s just what a software company is now: A test kitchen, launching new flavors every week, where the short shelf-life is the point.

Everyone is looking for a durable place to plant a flag. What product has a moat? What market is safe? Companies are exploring, with the goal of finding a place to settle down, and make a home.

But there’s no promise technology companies will always work like that. Maybe we’re more like ice cream shops, or musicians—only as good as our latest album. Constantly evolve, or drop dead. Maybe we do not need a direction; we need to just keep moving. Maybe we cannot hide from Anthropic and OpenAI; we can only keep running from them. Maybe we aren’t pivoting; we’re just playing Pac-Man.

Don’t lose faith. You’ve got a great name, you’ve got a great team,4 you’ve got a great logo, and you’ve got a great name. Now you just need an idea—over and over and over again.

Maybe there is a pivot

What is a celebrity?

For a long time, I would’ve said that a celebrity is someone who accomplished some profound professional success, and got famous because of it. They played for the Lakers; they made a blockbuster; they made some good songs; they won an election. Though their fame might extend beyond the initial thing that made them popular, their profession was always their anchor. They were an athlete, an actor, a musician, a politician. And it was a bizarre novelty when they escaped one world and appeared in another, like when a TV star ran for president.

Now, ah, you know. Celebrity is a much looser concept. Celebrities are influencers: They are a portable endorsement that can be attached to whatever art project they are working on, office they’re running for, or drugs they’re selling. Famous people aren’t athletes or actors or musicians or politicians. They’re brands.

Anyway, this wasn’t quite what I had in mind two weeks ago, but, uh, sure?

After agreeing to sell all its assets last month for less than 1 percent of its previous $4 billion valuation, the shoe company Allbirds announced on Wednesday that it would “pivot its business” to artificial intelligence. …

In a statement, the company, which is based in San Francisco, said that an unnamed investor5 had agreed to spend $50 million to finance a shift to A.I. infrastructure. That money, the company said, will be used to buy graphics processing units, known as GPUs, powerful chips that can run calculations and analyze enormous amounts of data.

On one hand, lol, what:

“At first it read like a really well-executed April Fools’ joke,” Mr. Kleyman said of the Allbirds announcement. But, he added, “given the craziness of this industry right now, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.”

On the other hand, it has worked before!

$24 million iced tea company says it’s pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200%

And it can work again!

Allbirds soars 582% after sneaker firm rebrands as AI stock.

That is the general take on the situation: This is either a ridiculous Hail Mary or a cynical stunt, and either way, it’s dumb. But, everyone is crazy and everything is a meme, so, ok, maybe the best way to make some money with a niche brand that has some loose nostalgic value is by using it to make a joke.

Or—consider how Matt Levine described the joke:

I feel like, if you ran a big technology company, and you were looking to expand your artificial intelligence capabilities and needed to rent access to graphics processing units, and a GPU-as-a-service/AI-cloud company came to pitch you, and you said “so tell me a little bit about your company,” and the company said “well two weeks ago we were a sneaker company but we have since pivoted to AI,” you might say “huh, thanks but no thanks, we’re going to go with someone with a bit more AI experience and, you know, an actual data center.” Maybe that’s wrong; maybe the sneaker guys are great at AI. But you might worry.

But! If you said “so tell me a little bit about your company,” and the company said “well two weeks ago we were a sneaker company called Allbirds, but we have pivoted to AI,” your reaction might be different. Because, in this hypothetical, you run a big technology company, and you probably spent years wearing Allbirds. “I used to love Allbirds,” you might say; “high five!” And then you might sign a long-term cloud hosting agreement with Former Allbirds, because like many tech executives you have a nostalgic fondness for their brand.

Replace “Allbirds” with “Tom Brady” or “Timothée Chalamet” or “Alix Earle” and it’s not that weird! Replace “Allbirds” with “Steph Curry” and it’s practically true! Because that’s how celebrities work today: We feverishly buy whatever Alix Earle is selling us, not because we love the product, but because we love Alix Earle. Alix Earle doesn’t pivot; Alix Earle simply points her howitzer at her next market.

So, maybe Allbirds is meme-finance taken to its grim conclusion—or maybe it’s the next evolution of the firm. Before, companies were means of production that made and sold catalogs of related stuff. Now, they’re influencers. They’re an aesthetic, a portable logo that can be tacked on to whatever product or service that some particular type of customer is into at the moment. Allbirds launches a data center. Allbirds launches an incubator. Allbirds launches an agentic personal CRM for founders. Get ready for Coachella with Allbirds. If people can become brands, maybe brands can become brands.

Don’t lose faith in Allbirds. They’ve got a great name, they’ve got a great team, they’ve got a great logo, and they’ve got a great name. Now they just need an idea.

I thought a lot about space as a kid, but I never wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to play for the Atlanta Braves. I wanted to be Chipper Jones; then, when I realized I couldn’t hit,1 Andruw Jones; then, when I realized I couldn’t field, Greg Maddux.2

Then, I realized I should probably find another calling. It happened, all at once, when I found out, from a Sports Illustrated profile on him, that Alex Rodriguez started attracting the attention of professional scouts when he was in eighth grade. I was in seventh grade—and I hadn’t so much as attracted the attention of my middle school coach. I wanted to play with the best, and it was then that I realized that the gap between me and them was much, much further than I had imagined.

No matter. The world offered other ambitions, in other arenas. There were classrooms; there were colleges; there were internships to apply for; there were grad schools to try to get into.3 There were careers in Washington, D.C., and then in San Francisco—and scoreboards hang over those fields, too.

That is growing up, I suppose. You start out wanting to be good at what you think is fun, and eventually, you find yourself in other, more circumstantial ponds, pulled by other, more memetic ambitions: Status, notoriety, and—that most universal gravity—money.

Torque

Generative AI’s playful phase did not last long. In 2023, we had emails in the style of C-3PO; in 2025, everything in the style of Studio Ghibli. In 2026, it’s adapt or die.

Large companies are reconstructing themselves in AI’s shadow. We must do the same, people say; we must future-proof ourselves too. The economy is K-shaped: Some of us will adjust, learn, and climb the hill towards abundance. The rest of us will tumble into a permanent underclass.

That’s how it’s always been, though. There have always been new skills to learn; jobs have always come and gone. People have been worried about K-shaped economies for years. The careening, combustible boom of AI—and of our manic obsession with it—is simply compressing the letter’s angles. Get good at something, be the best, and make your money, before the walls close in. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss; this one is just pushing us faster through the turn. Meet the new gravity, the same as the old gravity; this one just pulling harder through the takeoff.

Meet the next new boss. Three days ago, Anthropic published the performance specs for Mythos, their latest large language model. But they did not publicly release the model, because it was deemed too dangerous:

Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe. Project Glasswing is an urgent attempt to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes. …

We do not plan to make Claude Mythos Preview generally available, but our eventual goal is to enable our users to safely deploy Mythos-class models at scale.

According to Anthropic, Mythos wasn’t built to hunt for these vulnerabilities. It got smart enough to find them on its own:

We did not explicitly train Mythos Preview to have these capabilities. Rather, they emerged as a downstream consequence of general improvements in code, reasoning, and autonomy.

For better or for worse, it’s all going as planned. The models have a handful of intellectual skills. Those skills generalize. They’re getting better. And they’re getting better, faster: “Anthropic’s capability trajectory bent upward in the period leading to Claude Mythos Preview.” Could it go faster still? Could the curve tilt back further? Is this the steepest part of the climb uphill—is this max q?—or is it just the beginning?4

Either way, flipping through the system card, the feeling comes back: A middle schooler versus a freak; the sense of a gap that might be much, much further than I had imagined. Except this time, it isn’t a single sport, but all of them. Be an engineer? No. A product manager? Doubtful. A doctor? Perhaps not. A lawyer? Try again. This Substack? For now.5

In an early description of its corporate structure, OpenAI warned its investors that “it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.” It was a line that always felt like it went too far—the usual AI hocus-pocus, the sort of utopian myth-making that venture capitalists love, and that AI companies love to sell. Because scarcity is relative. Though we’ve long earned money with our wits and work ethic, if intelligence is abundant and workers are tireless, something else will take their place. There will always be another bottleneck; there will always be money for those who clear it. Society will always have a scoreboard.6 We can take off, but we cannot escape that gravity.

Up

You already know the metaphor. Last week, aboard a literal rocket ship, four kids who grew up wanting to be astronauts went to space. After an amazing ride uphill, they went farther into the distant frontier than anyone else ever has.7 Now, they are barreling back to earth, a mote of dusk blasting through the void, hours from searing a final incision in the sky, and coming home.

What do they teach us? That even up there, from the pinnacle of professional achievement, what matters most is what—and who—is down here:

“And we would like to call it Carroll.”

But we know this already. We know it and rarely live it. We try to tell ourselves to slow down; we chase things anyway. We become our own sort of astronaut: We get lost our games,8 our ambitions, or in our own heads, and let the good thing go. The overview effect cannot fit on an iPhone either. You can only feel it.

Perhaps, then—how privileged we are for this moment of real existential weightlessness. We can ask ourselves, what would you do if the gravity were actually gone? Not: What would you do if you no longer needed to make money? But: What would you do if you were free from the tyranny of being able to make money? What ponds would you want to swim in? What ambitions would you want to manifest? Where would you go, if you were in space, where there is no such thing as “up?”

But before you answer, notice it: We are made anxious by those who have the new skills we’re supposed to have, like taste, judgement, and agency. We are jealous of those who are winning the games we’ve long played. But we are moved by those who have the courage to leave all of those old gravities behind.

See, maybe OpenAI is a normal startup after all:

1. They started with big, fun ambitions: digital intelligence; technology to benefit humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return; a robot that can create TikToks.

2. They raised an absolutely titanic amount of money.

3. They changed their mind. They are now pivoting to the enterprise. No more TikToks— they now want a robot that makes software and does business:

   OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users… “We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” [Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications,] told staff last week, according to remarks reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front.”

Can they do it? The good news for OpenAI is that teaching a robot how to be a good software developer isn’t easy, but it is tidy. For example, if you want to train a large language model to write code, you can lock the model in a room with a bunch of coding assignments, and tell it to get busy. The model will go whirr, whirr, whirr!, the sun will eventually come up, and then you will grade how well it did on your tests.1

This is rough and imprecise, of course. The problems that you give the model might be very hard; Cursor asked their model to build a web browser; Anthropic told theirs to build a compiler; some venture capitalists asked Claude Code to grow corn. You might make the assignments intentionally vague, and the model might need to figure out some details on its own. You might yell into the void that software developers don’t just write code; they interpret messes, and make tradeoffs, and translate business requirements into something that actually works. And you may not know exactly how to grade the model’s output. Does the browser work? Is the website good? These parts are not tidy.

Still, of all the things you can train a model to do, writing code is one of the crisper ones:

Training follows this idea of what’s called “gradient descent,” which is that as I make changes, as I do training cycles—incrementally how much improvement do I see, and at what point does it stop or even reverse? In certain domains, the data has a really high rate of gradient descent, meaning that small changes provide a huge signal back to the model. So they’re very good at those things. A good example of that is software itself. If I make minor changes in code, I don’t get minor differences on the other side; I get broken software. So there’s a huge signal that flows back into training when you make minor changes in software. … There could hardly be a better domain for training a large language model than software.

Teaching a robot how to be a good employee, however—that is not so tidy. Sure, there are lots of small problems that business people want AI to solve for them, like sending emails and reading emails and organizing emails and deleting emails. But those are minor ambitions. Real business productivity is about making decisions. It is an analyst, figuring out what the company should do. It is a marketer, defining a new campaign. It is a salesperson, deciding who to call. It is a model that is a good CEO. “Once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return,” the CEO of OpenAI once said.

What assignments do you give that generally intelligent system to make it better at making business decisions? Unlike code, companies do not exist in a sandbox. “Create a web browser” is a big and somewhat ambiguous problem. “Tell me how to turn around my struggling business” is not only big and ambiguous; it is also uncontained. Maybe the answer is in your data, if you were to look at it just so. Maybe it’s in a careful reading of thousands of customer interactions. Maybe it’s in what your employees are saying to each other in Slack. Maybe it’s in some seemingly unrelated event on the other side of the world, in one TikTok that created a new meme, that created a new competitor, that created a new fad, that cratered your market and blew up your company. You cannot lock a large language model in a room with all of those things, because those things are everything.

In other words, to teach a robot to be an engineer, you need to write a computer science test. To teach a robot to be an employee, you have to first invent the universe—or at least, invent an entire company, with millions of fake product orders, and a diversity of fake customer service tickets, and countless fake internal emails and fake Slack messages, and years of fake market swings and fake trends on Twitter.

Or, there’s this:

Allbirds, Once Silicon Valley’s Favorite Shoe, Sells for $39 Million

…

When Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger founded Allbirds in 2015, Silicon Valley was immediately enraptured by its sustainable sneakers. Made from Merino wool, the comfortable shoes became a staple in tech office attire, with executives and engineers filling their wardrobes with the minimalist designs.

Management saw the growth potential and tried to expand the business around the world by opening 15 stores by late 2019, mostly in the United States. They opened locations in China, Britain and New Zealand. By the end of 2023, Allbirds had 60 stores globally.

Executives spent millions to try to lure consumers with splashy television ads, pushing new versions of the wool shoes and showing off sneakers made with new materials like eucalyptus tree fiber pulp.

I mean, no; it might not be legal; it is definitely bad optics; this is a joke; I’m not saying OpenAI should’ve bought a failing shoe company to use it as a gym for a bunch of AI employees. But…should they? Allbirds operated for ten years; it sold over a billion dollars in shoes; it employed hundreds of people. It is an entire corporate universe, packaged up for sale: Emails, Slack messages, databases, CRMs, ERPs, ATSs, ad campaigns, social media conversations, legal agreements, financial statements, SEC filings, leases, lawsuits, and an inconceivable number of documents and slide decks. If you are betting $122 billion on “a single enterprise platform” that is “integrated with systems of record, governed by enterprise-grade security, and designed to improve with experience as agents do real work”, is that sandbox not worth $39 million dollars?2

Thirty-nine million dollars is what OpenAI spends every 16 hours.3 It is 0.004 percent of their $852 billion valuation. It is, according to one wildly unsourced Twitter post, a fraction of what OpenAI paid for a YouTube channel.4 It is, relative to how much money OpenAI has and how much money OpenAI spends, violently affordable.

You could make two points about this, I suppose. One is that, when you raise hundreds of billion dollars with the explicit goal of replacing all knowledge work, normal math equations no longer work. Everything is affordable, and everything that increases your chances of success, even by some tiny percentage, is potentially worth it. It’s capitalism’s version of Pascal’s Wager: If the potential gain is all the money in the world, you can justify almost anything.

The other point is that, in the olden days, software was primarily useful when the software did something useful. Now, there is another use for software: Its code can be sold to AI companies, to fed into the model’s insatiable maw.

Similarly, big businesses used to be worth money because they made money. But maybe the ones that don’t could still be worth something too, because they might be useful to a model that needs to learn how to do—and not do—business.

Have you tried a text block?

How often does Block, the financial services provider formally known as Square, think about the Roman Empire?

A lot, apparently:

Two thousand years before the first corporate org chart, the Roman Army solved a problem that every large organization still faces: how do you coordinate thousands of people across vast distances with limited communication?

Nine hundred words later, they continue:5

At Block, we’re questioning the underlying assumption: that organizations have to be hierarchically organized with humans as the coordination mechanism. … For the first time, a system can maintain a continuously updated model of an entire business and use it to coordinate work in ways that previously required humans relaying information through layers of management.

…

In a remote-first company where work is already machine-readable, AI can build and maintain that picture continuously. What’s being built, what’s blocked, where resources are allocated, what’s working and what isn’t. That’s the information the hierarchy used to carry. The company world model carries it instead.

…

The org structure follows from this, and it inverts the traditional picture. In a conventional company, the intelligence is spread throughout the people and the hierarchy routes it. In this model, the intelligence lives in the system. The people are on the edge. The edge is where the action is.

The edge is where the intelligence makes contact with reality. People reach into places the model can’t go yet. … But the edge doesn’t need layers of management to coordinate it. The world model gives every person at the edge the context they need to act without waiting for information to travel up and down a chain of command.

That is: Block is no longer a network of people and departments passing notes back and forth to each other. It is a giant box of facts, and its employees’ put facts in the box, retrieve facts from the box, and eventually, carry out the will of the box’s hive mind in the physical world.

We’ve talked about this a bit before:

What if we stopped making PowerPoints for each other, but for the machines? What if all of our TPS reports were absorbed into context layers and decision traces, and nobody ever saw the actual documents we put into the system? What if we never saw the documents that we put into the system? We dump our ideas into a text box; the machine uses our input to update its inscrutable repository of facts; other people interrogate the repository, not by reading it, but by asking the machine to fetch what they need. Why collaborate when you can add context? … For better or for worse, that seems to be where we’re heading—working around one another.

Unsurprisingly, Block believes it’s for the better. This is progress, they say, for Block and for Block’s employees: “The edge is where the action is;” “the system coordinates, and everyone is empowered.” But there is a fine line between a system that coordinates and decides. And between an AI that knows everything and us, who have “a smattering of specialized experiences and meaty hands,” who should be the agent and who should be the executive?

As you use these tools for a bit, you notice something else: It has good ideas. It asks good questions. It nudges in compelling directions. It offers options that you didn’t think of, and asks you how you want to fill gaps that you did not realize would be gaps. Though it is not perfect—sometimes you have to grab the wheel back, and take it down an entirely different road—you begin to like it when it drives. Sometimes, this is because you’re lazy and don’t want to make decisions. But just as often, it’s because it’s a better driver than you are.

And in that moment, who exactly is the intern?

Interns, after all, also reach into places that executives do not go, like dry cleaners and coffee shops. But also—interns have more fun, so maybe executive agency is overrated, and our demotion is a good thing?

What if Anthropic did it? What if Anthropic did it, and we refuse to believe it?

We believe half of it. Man, do we believe that half. That half is all we can talk about: Look at how much more we can do with AI. Look at how productive we are. Sure, you can quibble about the details: That AI can be sloppy; that some of the enthusiasm about Claude Code is theatrics and bluster; that some of what people are building is needless, directionless, or, most damning of all, tasteless. But at this point, it seems naive or willfully retrogressive to say AI does not help us do more.

We’re obsessed with this half. Wall Street torched the stock market because it thought SaaS businesses couldn’t keep up with this half. The productivity gap “between ‘great traditional SaaS’ and ‘AI-native’ is a full order of magnitude,” says one venture capitalist. AI can make engineers “30x more productive”, says another. “Now that generative AI is here, your definition of speed has to increase 10x,” says a third. In a recent survey, 98.2 percent of engineers said AI saves them time. More than 50 percent say it makes their work better. We believe this half with a religious fervor: Look at how much we’re shipping; look at how much Anthropic is shipping. Look at how many features we’re adding; at how many agents we’re running; at many tokens we’re burning. Look at how much money we’re spending.

Maybe that last one is part of the problem. Anthropic did it, and they’re making so much money because of it. There must be a catch; it must be a trap; this must be the pump before the inevitable dump. They will turn on us, because capitalism at that scale always does: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” If anyone is making that much money, best to be suspicious.

Or, maybe it’s that our employers are making so much money. Our productivity is not our gain. Engineers who ship ten times more software get rewarded with a 10 percent raise and nine fewer colleagues. “Companies are capitalistic extraction machines and literally don’t know how to ease up”, and “startup founders are out there draining people at a faster rate than at any time in history,” says engineer Steve Yegge. “You need to push back. … You need to educate [your company’s leaders] about sharing the AI value capture between the company and the employees, and how to strike a good balance of sustainability and competitiveness.”

But even that is incomplete, because it is not our employers who are telling us to do it. The accelerated pace is voluntary; the call to do more is coming from inside the house. People are burning themselves out because they like it. For example: “I’ve been having such an amazing time with Claude Code.” And: “ive done more personal coding projects over christmas break than i have in the last 10 years.” And: “I have NEVER worked this hard, nor had this much fun with work.” And: “Using Claude Code has a weird side effect: You don’t just get more productive, you actually want to work more.”

So we give it the language of addiction. It is a drug; they are our dealers. We are gamblers, tweaking for the next hand; for one more pull on the slot machine. We are leaving our friends’ parties to spend time with it. We go to bed thinking about it, and wake up eager to use it again.

That is one way to tell this story: The capital entrapping the labor. For the last twenty five years, Silicon Valley spent billions of dollars trying to trick employees into believing they wanted to work long hours. Companies filled their offices with beer fridges and ping pong tables; they recruited people with people with “Cheetos, Fritos, and Doritios!;” they dared everyone to take time off. A spoonful of sugar, to help the medicine go down.

Coding agents are the next sleight of hand. “‘It is now one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley: How many tokens come along with my job?’ [Nvidia CEO Jensen] Huang said. ‘And the reason for that is very clear, because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive.’” And what is AI for, if not to make us more relentlessly productive?

But that is not the only way you could describe what is happening. Because there could be another half to the story: That AI makes the actual work actually fun.

Ever since people had jobs, we’ve fantasized about leaving them behind. We daydream about vacations; we celebrate our retirements; we idolize the four-hour workweek. We imagine worlds in which work is done for us, and we live lives of infinite leisure; or worlds that sever us from our jobs, and we send some other consciousness to our offices. Progress—social progress; personal progress; technological progress—is a life with less work.

The last few months have been a different sort of science fiction. Anthropic is not freeing people from the burden of having a job; it is freeing people from feeling like those jobs are a burden. It is a drug that makes us like to work—not the stuff around the work, like the sugar high of an office full of toys or the actual high of an office full of drugs, but the authentic, honest work.

Yes, it is early. Yes, people might be thrilled by the novelty of AI, and eventually tire of it. Yes, the products and companies that people built with AI may collapse, and people may find out that they only thought they were working. Yes, it might be less of a productivity tool, and more of a fidget spinner that occasionally throws off something useful. Yes, a world in which everything is built by one shared brain could steamroller our culture. Yes, a drug that makes us like work is not without its mortal dangers. Yes, it is almost incomprehensible to imagine a world where work generally makes people happy, and it is even more incomprehensible to imagine that there wouldn’t be some dystopian catch. Yes, the AI companies could be invaders.1 Yes, there is more to life than your job; yes, there is a life beyond this.

But jobs are (probably?) an inevitable fact of life. And right now, thousands of tech companies are trying to reinvent all them, just as Anthropic is reinventing software engineering. They could see two things. One is that productivity sells. The future is industrialization. It is turning everyone into factory foreman, the anxious chaperone overseeing lines of AI employees. It is an inbox full of chirpy agents; it is an inbox for monitoring the situation. It is a future optimized for output.

The other is that fun sells. It is that productivity can be a side-effect, and jobs we tolerate can be turned into jobs we want to do. It is that the best question to ask is not, “How do I make this person ten times more productive?,” but “How do I make this job ten times better?” It is optimizing for what people like.

The story we believe is the future we’ll build. And what is happening over the last few months—it is something. Maybe it is something big; stories like that get a lot of clicks. Maybe it is something bad; that gets even more clicks. But what progress it would be—what a genuinely better world we could make—if we allow ourselves to believe that it could be something good?

Here is how it happened:

Two days ago, Anthropic released an enormous study on what people think about AI. Though the results of the study are interesting—people are both excited and nervous; they feel its power and its burdens;1 AI is the light and the shade2—I was more immediately struck by the study’s methodology. In one week in December, Anthropic interviewed 80,508 people.3 Interviews were conducted via a choose-your-own adventure chatbot. “Interview transcripts were processed through a suite of hand-validated Claude-powered classifiers.” The groupings that Anthropic used to organize the responses were “designed first by analyzing answers with a bottom-up clustering algorithm,” and “categories were derived from clusters that surfaced during initial analysis.” And the final report was, no doubt, authored with the help of AI, and illustrated with graphics that were surely built using Claude Code. It was, Anthropic said, “the largest and most multilingual qualitative study ever conducted,” and it was done in three months.

An immediate story emerged: This is the future we’ve been talking about.

From two years ago:

If you had a day to save your [business], where would you go looking for answers? In your comprehensive database of financial indicators, operational KPIs, customer behaviors, and market trends, where every metric and insight is a query away? Or in 25 straight hours of unedited video interviews [with 750 customers]?

Two things about this situation seem obvious. First, the actual solution to your [business’] problems is in the customer interviews…And second, despite that, you’d probably use the data, not the interviews. You have 24 hours! There are 25 hours of videos! You only have time to watch a few! You would be insane…if you proposed a bunch of changes based on a handful of randomly selected snippets of feedback. …

[If AI revolutionizes how we work with data, it won’t come from analyzing numbers.] It’ll come from pointing AI at a new well—the unstructured video interviews in Dropbox—and letting us do the basic things with it that we’ve never been able to do before.

From last year:

The enthusiasm that SaaS startups had for analytics, experimentation, and rigorous quantitative thinking has been almost wholly replaced by a demand for people with taste and “agency.” One popular AI company…[has] formal evals to measure how their product is performing, they said, but decisions are ultimately made based on how new features feel.

None of this is to say that data is going away. But it is falling out of fashion. It is fading into the background. In data we trusted; now, God is in the vibes. …

If AI is good at anything, it is good at interpreting the vibes. It is good at aggregating massive amounts of text—and increasingly, of video and audio—into its approximate average. Give it your support tickets and customer communications, and ask it questions about what it read. Don’t classify and categorize images; just ask an AI model what it thinks it sees.

And from earlier this year, after OpenAI released a similar study in which they classified users’ ChatGPT conversations by asking ChatGPT to do it:

If two companies handed their decision-making over to ChatGPT, which one would you bet on? The one that attempted to map every email, Slack message, and database entity into a complex ontological simulacrum and a “semantic mesh,” or the one that figured out how to collect a giant folder full of transcribed voice notes of people describing why they did everything they did? Which one would you trust more: Our ability to model how 1,000 people collectively think, or a state-of-the-art AI, looking for patterns in a large corpus of unstructured text?

There’s something uncomfortable in the latter proposal. We’re used to solving problems with rules and imperative logic. But computers are pretty weird now. And the best companies—in this domain, and many others—seem likely to be those that embrace that, do the dumb thing—build a text box; collect the data—and convince people to always be writing stuff down in it.

This will be an easy post, I thought. A clean narrative; a clear affirmation of what’s coming next. Write it up; declare something dead; announce the beginning of a new era. Talk about the rise of a new market; brand it with a punchy name; call it “big vibes;” call it “ambient analytics;” call it the “enterprise context engine.” Issue a call for new tools: A new Segment for logging unstructured events and observations; a new Mixpanel for building dashboards on top autonomously conducted and automatically analyzed user interviewers; a new Fivetran and a new dbt for moving and transforming video recording and customer interviews into a library of markdown files and “context.” Close with a prediction that someone from Anthropic will leave to turn their internal classifier into a commercial product. Are you an ambitious founder building in this space? We would be excited to talk to you.

I wrote down some notes. I started to fill in the details. Just how big is that Anthropic study? They provide a convenient comparison: The largest prior studies that they found, one conducted by the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and another run by the World Bank, both interviewed 60,000 people. How much faster did Anthropic run their 80,000 person study? The World Bank’s project, called “Voices of the Poor: Crying out for Change” and conducted in the late 1990s, took years. They planned it for six months;4 for six more months, interviews were conducted by teams of local researchers deployed into 23 different countries, and, “on average each research team member worked 14-15 hours per day.” “Notes were written up every day, often until dawn,” with researchers producing “close to 10,000 pages of field notes and national synthesis reports.” “In September 1999 a preliminary global synthesis was complete;” a final 336-page book was published in August of 2000.

The final tally: The World Bank—60,000 interviews, from 23 countries, tens of thousands of hours of work done by almost 400 people, taking two years from start to finish. Anthropic—81,000 interviews across 159 countries and 79 languages, in three months, done by 25 people. It is a breathtaking acceleration; a staggeringly short ride in an incomprehensibly fast machine. Think of what is possible now. Think of what we can learn.

But then I began reading the World Bank’s report:

In Uzbekistan the researchers write that participation in the study helped them see their own country with new eyes: “honestly speaking, the sympathy and sense of sharing the destiny of each person encountered which arose during the research process was an experience never achieved in any of our previous studies, either qualitative or quantitative.. .The sensation of insight and sympathy for our own people is the most important finding of this study.”

And:

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the team leader writes, “Two of our note-takers, young men, were strongly affected by the process. Milos crying silently while taking notes during one discussion group.”

And:

The study demonstrates the powerful impact participatory appraisals can have on those who facilitate them. … Staying in poor communities for even short times and serving as field facilitators in participatory poverty studies create experiential opportunities to listen and learn face-to-face from poor people.

And:

Poverty is like heat: you can not see it, you can only feel it; so to know poverty you have to go through it.

– A poor man, Adaboya, Ghana

Of course, we’ve known this for 70 years5—that distance begets prejudice, and immersion begets understanding. You cannot see some things. You can only feel them.

—

I spent this past week driving through the south, from North Carolina to Mississippi and back again, with an old friend from high school. When we crossed over the border between Georgia and Alabama, it was the first time he’d ever left the time zone he was born in.

Later on the drive, he told me he had changed in other ways too. Growing up, he said, he had been casually ignorant about other cultures, and that metastasized into a lazy racism. He was white; other kids were black, Asian, or “Mexican;” there were no other identities. But in recent years, he’d gotten a job working with people from South and Central America, and, “How I was before—that wasn’t right of me,” he said. “I was a product of my raising,6 but now, after getting to know more people, I know it was wrong. And it’s important for me to fix it.”

—

There are two sides—a light and a shade, if you will—to the capabilities that powered Anthropic’s study. On one hand, they demonstrate how much more we can learn with AI. When a machine can have conversations and another machine can summarize them, we can hear far more voices. Companies can hear from huge percentages of their customers; the World Bank’s 60,000 interviews can become hundreds of thousands. From an MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium proposal:

As development economists, we perceive economic challenges faced by the poor and design research around these perceptions. We don’t listen sufficiently to the perspectives of the poor.

This gap is not due to a lack of intent, but rather, a lack of technology. When researchers collect qualitative data, they can only process it by reading transcripts or listening to interviews with their own preconceived notions and without the capacity to feasibly process 1000s of hours of conversations. These limitations have prevented researchers from asking the poor directly, at scale, about the challenges they face…

In this project, we propose developing a Generative AI tool that can listen to, and analyze thousands of hours of conversations to automatically discover insights into the lives of the poor that we did not expect.

On the other hand, is this listening? We have always known that facts and figures are sterilizing. “I am not a statistic,” people say, because statistics anonymize us. Numbers can chart poverty, but they cannot make us feel it. With AI, interviews can also be conducted at the same remove, turned into amalgamated aggregations, and anonymized too.

And if we don’t feel what people say, do we understand it? If we don’t grapple with it, does it change us? From Ezra Klein, in a conversation with David Perell:

I used to conceptualize knowledge the way you see it in the movie The Matrix, where it’s like I wanted the port in the back of my mind that the little needle would go into, and then I had read John Rawls’s “Political Liberalism.” I thought that what you were doing was downloading information into your brain.

And now I think that what you are doing is spending time grappling with the text, making connections. It will only happen through that process of grappling. So, the idea that you could speed run that, the idea that it could just be summarized for you…

Part of what is happening when you spend seven hours reading a book is you spend seven hours with your mind on this topic. The idea that [large language models] can summarize it for you…you didn’t have the engagement. It doesn’t impress itself upon you. It doesn’t change you. What knowledge is supposed to do is change you, and it changes you because you make connections to it. …

Not very much that AI has given me has really changed me very much.

Books are the antidote to bulleted summaries. Interviews and face-to-face conversations have long been the antidote to dashboards and data. Or, more dramatically:

You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist?

A few lines later, Robin Williams’ character accuses Matt Damon’s character of being afraid to talk to him. “You’re terrified of what you might say,” he says. To its credit, AI could solve that half of the problem. People may be more comfortable talking to robots,7 and the best models may become as good of a conversationalist as any doctor or researcher—and they can certainly be a more prolific.

But what about the other half? If AI intermediates every conversation, if every expression is reduced to a transcript, and every transcript is compacted into a few bullets and pull quotes, will we still hear other people? Will we still understand what they’re really saying?8

From a participant in a discussion group in Zawyet Sultan, Egypt:

Only God listens to us.

Soon, the machines will too. We’ll find out if that counts.

Here’s a question, for the second half of March: If you’re watching a game between two teams that you don’t like, who do you root for?

I mean, it’s simple:

1. If one team is good and the other is bad, you root for the good one. Because nobody is that happy about winning a game they should win. The good team wins; their fans feel a little satisfied; the bad team loses; their fans feel a little disappointed; a boring game, signifying nothing. But if the bad team wins, they’ll celebrate. They’ll storm the court. They’ll gloat on the internet. They’ll save their season. Some awful highlight will become a permanent fixture on top ten lists, and you’ll never be able to escape it. No—much better for nothing to happen, and everyone to forget the whole thing as quickly as possible.

2. You want the game to be close, though. You want the bad team to almost win, and then have their hearts ripped out. Undeserved relief for the favorites; heartbreak from the underdogs. Lots of sound and fury, getting this close to immortality, still signifying nothing.

3. But it’s delicate. If one team wins in spectacular fashion, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, you’ll have to put up with another inescapable highlight. But if a team loses in spectacular fashion, fumbling away an easy victory in some stunningly catastrophic way, you might get a highlight, a meme, and an entire oral history of the trouble.

4. If both teams are good, you root for the underdog. Sure, they’ll be happy about winning, but probably not as disappointed as the favored team that lost. That team was playing for something; they were in the hunt; they were title hopefuls. Much better to regress everyone to the mean—both teams being pretty good is not nearly as annoying as one of them being great.

5. If both teams are bad, you also root for the underdog. Have the bad team drag the slightly better team down a little further into the mud.

6. Unless—if one of the teams is historically bad, you root for that team to lose. Spend them spiraling toward new lows. Having to watch a team you hate win a meaningless game is a small price to pay for desperate headlines about terrible, horrible, no good, very bad seasons.

7. Finally, all of this is overridden if the game is particularly significant for one team—if they’re trying to clinch a division; if it’s senior night; it’s the final game in a famous coach’s 42nd season against a hated rival in their first-ever meeting in the Final Four.

I know, I get it, all of this is very petty and dumb. But being a sports fan, as a general rule, is very petty and dumb. We don’t play on the teams; we often don’t live in their cities; we didn’t always go to their schools. We get nothing if “our” team wins; we lose nothing if they don’t. We pick meaningless allegiances based on where we grew up, or where our parents grew up, or who they liked, or who they didn’t like, or which players we thought were cool, and then we spend the rest of our lives losing our minds about it.1 The whole thing is a construct, and so, why not make decisions based on the colors of uniforms or the team’s dating life? When it’s all a game of made-up rules for made-up stakes, every reason to root for something is a good reason.

But that’s just sports. In our actual lives, our allegiances are more substantial. Companies make products that we use; politicians make policies that affect our lives. We can’t choose what we buy or who we vote for based on what they wear or who they date. Our preferences are built on top of more material concerns: How much does this product improve our lives? How much money does this policy put in our pockets? As sports fans, we’re swayed by people and pettiness. In the real world, it’s the economy, stupid.

So here’s a funny chart:

Every week for the last sixteen years, YouGov, a market research firm, has asked about a thousand U.S. voters if they thought the economy was getting better or worse. And for every week for sixteen years, except one, Republicans said yes more often than Democrats when a Republican was president, and Democrats said yes more often than Republicans when a Democrat was president.2

Though this is a very well-known and well-documented phenomenon, it is also (probably3) pretty petty and dumb too. Because, “it’s the economy, stupid”—but the economy is our pre-existing politics. And to the extent that the economy dictates how we vote, it seems to do so in convoluted and self-referential ways, where our perceptions of the country are more defined more by the person in charge of the country than by the country itself.

Ok, sure sure sure, but polls are just vibes. Sports are a construct and polls are vibes. What people say is not what people do. There’s a difference between cheerleading and making material choices about their lives. In matters of real importance—in war; in questions of life and death—we’re not like this.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

A ‘Fight About Vibes’ Drove the Pentagon’s Breakup with Anthropic

The AI giant’s CEO Dario Amodei and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have contrasting personalities and worldviews. They proved difficult to reconcile in a high-stakes showdown over the future of warfare. …

“This is a fight about vibes and personalities masquerading as a policy dispute,” said Michael Horowitz, a former Defense Department official who worked on AI policy.

From the New York Times:

The contract controversy involving the Defense Department, OpenAI and Anthropic was the latest round in a long-running and deeply personal feud between the tech industry’s two most important A.I. start-ups and two executives with differing views of how A.I. should be created.

And The Information:

[In a leaked internal memo, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei] accused Altman—who last Friday reached a deal with the Pentagon to put OpenAI’s models on classified systems—of engaging in “dictator-style praise” of President Donald Trump and “mendacious” messaging around OpenAI’s agreement with the Defense Department. Amodei concluded the memo by kicking OpenAI employees in the shins, calling them a “sort of gullible bunch.”

Look, I’m not saying that sweeping existential questions about the relationships between AI, military force, and government power are being answered by how a handful of middle-aged men feel about each other, but it does seems like sweeping existential questions about the relationships between AI, military force, and government power are at least being influenced how a handful of middle-aged men feel about each other:4

Ultimately, [Emil Michael, the Department of Defense’s chief technology officer] preferred [OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman—who has courted the Trump administration—over Dr. Amodei, the people with knowledge of the negotiations said.

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith won the Nobel Prize in economics for their research into the weird kinks that people have in their utility curves. People are not entirely logical about probabilities and uncertainty, they found, and the pair won the prize because of their “analysis of human judgment and decision-making.”

It seems, perhaps, we need an update, and another study into how reality is not mechanically “rational.” Because, more and more, we don’t buy faceless products; we buy from influencers, from companies with celebrity CEOs, who write personal blogs. We get our news from personalities on TV and on TikTok. We’re all influencers now; the self is the platform.

I’m not saying any of this is good, but—in that world, is it still a fallacy to like (or dislike) things based on whoever is on the other side of them? When you believe in nothing, should pettiness not be part of your utility curve? When everything is a game to gamble on—sports are gambling; financial markets are gambling; war is gambling; everything is gambling—should we be surprised when we start choosing our favorites in the same way we choose our fandoms?

For a while, I worked at a company that branded itself as the “enterprise social network,” though for all intents and purposes, it was the enterprise Facebook.1 Facebook was moving all of our personal communication out of emails and into a shared feed of posts and replies; our product was designed to do the same thing for our professional communication.

That meant our product was also designed to look like Facebook.2 There was a newsfeed; there were messages and threads; there were users; there were user profiles. There was a like button. It was Facebook, in a small corporate sandbox.

A couple months after I joined the company as a data analyst, the product and engineering department held one of its regular hack days.3 Everyone had 24 hours to work on anything they wanted to, and then, a strict three minutes to present their project to the entire department. It was judged; there was a stage and an emcee; there was a soundboard full of jeers; there were trophies for winners; there was an open bar. There was pride in it, and everyone wanted to put on a good show. For this particular hack day, the data team was participating for the first time, and in the days leading up to the event, we talked about our ideas. What do you want to do, we asked each other? What are you going to build?

My idea felt obvious. If you had access to data on how people were using Facebook—which is the data we had, in a bizarro bureaucratic sort of way—what would be the first thing you’d look up? If you knew someone else had that data, what would be the last thing you’d want them to look up?

Profile views. It’s clearly profile views. It’s who’s looking at your profile; it’s the profiles that you’re looking at. That was the holy grail; the third rail; the third life. If you wanted to put on a good show—if you wanted to make a drunk audience look up from their laptops—that’s the data that will make them pay attention.

And it was, of course, data that we already had. Like any responsible SaaS product, our app was thoroughly “instrumented”—it recorded every click; every page view; every mobile interaction. We tracked the user who did it; the device that they did it from; their browser; their IP address; the sequence of clicks that came before; the sequence that came after. This type of logging was all generic, mundane, the “industry standard.” We used the same tracking libraries that everyone else used. We recorded the same events that everyone else did. It was mindless and mechanical—years before I joined, an engineer had stuck a few lines of code in our app’s codebase, it captured millions of events an hour, and everything was dumped into a huge table called “event properties.” Because, as the legal documents all say, some piece of it might one day be useful to “improve our Services.”4

Though all this data was carefully protected in an encrypted database behind several firewalls and one very long password, that was not what made it secure. It was secure because it was a pain to use. You had to come up with interesting—or, you know, indelicate—questions to ask of it. You had to figure out how to answer that question using a sprawling array of machine-generated event logs. And you had to write 595-line SQL queries to do it all.5 But any employee—at our company, or at the hundreds of other SaaS startups that were functionally identical to us, and who all logged identical streams of data—could write that query, combine those logs, and answer those questions.

Or, more generally: Prior to working in Silicon Valley, I assumed that data was secure because it was obfuscated by impressive cryptography and stored in buildings that were guarded by tall fences. And I assumed that what we did on the internet was private—and people’s ability to draw any inferences from what we did was difficult—because “surveillance” required complex technologies that could detect faint patterns in millions of disparate signals. Yes, Target might be able to figure out if someone is pregnant before their father could, but that took years of careful observation and sophisticated science. It took well-trained humans working with well-trained models, years in the making.

If only. On an internet where everything is tracked—and man, everything is tracked—surveillance does not require a Ph.D., or even any particularly advanced math. It just requires a junior analyst with 24 hours of free time.6 Because the real fences around the data all we leave behind—and the real protections of our privacy—are neither tall nor covered in barbed wire. They are simply fences that are annoying to climb.7 We are not hidden, on the internet; mostly, people are just too uninterested to bother looking for us.

Everyone already knows what happened: The United States Department of War wanted to use Claude.8 Anthropic wanted them to use Claude, but with restrictions. The two sides could not agree; the negotiations broke down; the negotiations turned into outright hostilities; the hostilities became very public. The Atlantic reports on part of what went wrong:

Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company’s AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That could include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, and your credit-card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about your life.

When we hear stories about “mass surveillance” and “artificial intelligence” and the “CIA,” it is tempting to imagine systems of unfathomable reach and sophistication. It is tempting to worry about shadowy government agencies using AI to hack into our phones and turn them into sonar transmitters.9 It is tempting to see the the Greco—a million sensors and cameras feeding into a machine that “doesn’t think, but reasons:”

It reads every permutation in every wager in every seat in the entire casino, hand by hand. It’s wired into floor security cameras that measure pupil dilation, and determine if a win is legitimate or expected. It gathers bio feedback—players’ heart rates, body temperatures. It measures, on a second-by-second basis, whether the standard variations of gaming algorithms are holding or are being manipulated. The data is analyzed in real time, in a field of exabytes.

For better or for worse, reality is almost certainly much more mundane. Nobody wants to use AI to bug our phones, or to build a sprawling nerve system to track our vitals, because our phones are already bugged. Everything we do on them is recorded a dozen times over, by our wireless carriers, by the websites we visit and the apps we use, by the vendors and ad networks those companies are sending their data to, and in the marketplaces that sell that data. We built the eyes of the Greco decades ago.

But that data has remained relatively secure—or maybe more precisely, its potential energy has remained relatively buried—largely because it’s tedious to work with. It’s messy; it’s scattered across different sources and in different formats; combining it together is a pain, and most of us are simply not interesting enough to investigate. Data analysts who work at shadowy government agencies have lives too, and they do not want to write 595-line SQL queries either.

But AI doesn’t mind. And that’s the boring danger of what happens next: Not of AI becoming a superintelligent Sherlock Holmes finding impossible patterns in its enormous mind palace,10 but of it being a million monkeys at a million typewriters, doing the grunt work no person wanted to do. Because when prying questions are a prompt away—rather than 24 hours of work away—who wouldn’t get tempted to pry?

It does make you wonder though: While defense and intelligence agencies are unique in the legal and extralegal alleys in which they operate, they are not unique in their ability to warehouse massive amounts of data. In fact, as The Atlantic pointed out, these agencies aren’t collecting this data themselves; they are buying it from other people, in open markets:

The government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.11

But if those agencies can buy that data, so can other people. If they can use AI to trawl through it “at massive scale,” so can other companies—especially if those companies are already collecting those events and messages themselves.12

People often talk about how AI breaks many of the foundational floorboards of our society. Our formal and informal senses of truth are built on the assumption that realistic photos and videos cannot be faked; that is breaking down. Our ambitions and careers are built on the assumption that intelligence and expertise are scarce; that is breaking down. Our sense of how the world works is often defined by what is possible for other people to do and what is worthwhile for them to do. Sure, we know it is possible for us to be monitored, but why would anyone bother watching the tapes? Everyone must have more important things to do with their time.

Banality is a sturdy armor. Or was, anyway.

You could have two theories about stuff, which are really two theories about people:

1. People want stuff that is good enough. If they are buying a coffee mug, they want it to be the right size and shape; they want it to be a pleasing color; they want it to feel sturdy; they want it to keep their coffee warm. If a coffee mug manufacturer can make a mug that delivers on those things, then there’s little commercial point in developing more “features.” The mug suffices; people are satisfied; the market is satisficed. Why bother doing the hard work of making an better coffee mug? What does making a better coffee mug even mean?

2. People want their stuff to be better. Fifty thousand years ago, they wanted a cup that was not their hands. Seventeen thousand years ago, they probably wanted one that was not their friend’s head. Then, they wanted one that was clay. Then, made out of glass; then, glass, and with their favorite team on the side. Then, pretty ceramics. Then pretty ceramics with handles. Eventually, pretty ceramics with handles, with your favorite team on the side, and microwave safe, dishwasher safe, freezer safe, and oven safe up to 480 degrees Fahrenheit. And now, coffee mugs heat themselves; they heat themselves and are pretty ceramics; they are normal mugs, but the coaster heats itself.1
   
   Perhaps, this is as far as the coffee mug can go. Perhaps this is coffee’s final frontier; perhaps we are the privileged generation that arrived at the far edge of this particular universe—but that seems awfully unimaginative. In the future, coffee mugs might be made out of indestructible ceramics. They could come with a straw. They could come with a suitcase. They could wash themselves. They could be covered with a non-nutritional, semi-permeable, non-osmotic antibacterial varnish that never requires washing. They could, through some as-of-yet undiscovered magic, keep your frozen tahini cold brew slushy that perfect consistency of slush. And when those mugs exist, will our crude clay bowls still be “good enough?”

   
   In other words, sufficient is relative; satisfaction is defined by what else is out there. What I want from a coffee mug is whatever is possible from a coffee mug, plus a little bit more. If you can invent a better mug, you can teach me to want it.

On the one hand, if you believe the first theory, you might win a Nobel Prize and a Turing Award. On the other hand, the second theory seems almost obviously true. Give us something new; we love it today; we are frustrated tomorrow. We spent millennia dreaming that we could fly; now we can, and we whine about the wifi. We loved ordering taxis from our phones; we immediately began complaining if we had to wait more than a few minutes for it to show up. We were amazed when ChatGPT could imitate C-3PO; soon, we were yelling at Claude Code because it could only conjure working software applications out of thin air 99 percent of the time. “As Jeff Bezos put it,2 customers “are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static—they go up. It’s human nature. … People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’.”3

Anyway, software is dead again, we’re told, because apps that used to take years to build can now be created in a weekend. From the harbinger du jour:

[By late 2026], AI had made it easier to develop and ship new features, so differentiation collapsed. Incumbents were in a race to the bottom on pricing—a knife-fight with both each other and with the new crop of upstart challengers that popped up.

…

DoorDash (DASH US) was the poster child.

Coding agents had collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a delivery app. A competent developer could deploy a functional competitor in weeks, and dozens did, enticing drivers away from DoorDash and Uber Eats by passing 90-95% of the delivery fee through to the driver. Multi-app dashboards let gig workers track incoming jobs from twenty or thirty platforms at once, eliminating the lock-in that the incumbents depended on. The market fragmented overnight and margins compressed to nearly nothing.

I do not know if you can build DoorDash in weeks, and I certainly do not know if dozens of vibe coders can recruit a network of 9 million delivery drivers to use their app. But even if they can, there’s a third assumption in this story—and in prior versions of it—that has always felt curious to me: That DoorDash, or any soon-to-be-replaced-by-a-thousand-weekend-projects product, has been successful because it built an app that crossed some threshold of satisfaction, and its continued success depends on it being one of the few apps on the far side of that threshold.

Which seems…strange? Because, maybe today’s software businesses are doomed. Chatbots built on top of spreadsheets may well be the next CRM, and perhaps Salesforce is too calcified to rework itself to keep up the modern methods of software development.4 It is a hard and brutal transition, I imagine, going from making mugs by hand to making them in a factory.

But once everyone has a factory, then what? Having one will no longer be a competitive advantage; everyone’s CRM will be a chatbot and on top of a spreadsheet. Then, inevitably, someone—maybe Salesforce! Maybe some former Salesforce employees!—will spend a bunch of time on the small details of that chatbot and that spreadsheet, and they will make the best one. And we’ll all decide that we’re unsatisfied with everything else, that that’s our new standard, and actually, now, we have some complaints and want something even better. Sure, success may be on the far side of a threshold—but that threshold is not static.

Prior to the internet, we could get food delivered to our house by calling restaurants on the phone. When the internet became popular, lots of companies tried to come up with ways to order food online. Then, as now, each company had access to the same foundational technologies that let them build their business cheaper than ever before. Then, as now, food delivery seemed like a “commodity:” You look at pictures of food; you push a button; it arrives at your door; do you care about the app that you do it on? And yet, DoorDash figured out the best way to do it, and most people use DoorDash.5

Why does AI change that story? Sure, it might change how we order food—maybe the food is made by a robot; maybe it’s delivered by one; maybe it is ordered by Oura rings sensing that we’re hungry6—but if anything, that seems to create more opportunities for differentiation. Someone will be the best at that new thing, and being the best at anything is almost tautologically hard to be.7

The “cost of creating content going to zero” didn’t kill content, nor did it bankrupt the business of content creation. We still like watching videos; we still have opinions about videos; it’s still hard to be someone who makes the best videos; if you are, we will still pay you a lot of money for your videos.

It seems inevitable that lots of people will also continue to have opinions about software—defined broadly, at least, as a thing on a computer that does stuff for us. And if we have opinions about it, it also seems inevitable that we will be, as always, divinely discontent about what it can do.

Department of Talent War

If you are a normal company, you hire people to help you sell stuff. Though those two things might periodically overlap—you might try to impress prospective employees by telling them that you won a big contract with an important customer—that’s the order of operations: recruit people, build things, make money.

If you are an AI company—and if you believe in some degree of science fiction—that formula is backwards. Your plan for market domination (world domination? Galactic domination?) is not to hire people and then make money from what they build; it is to be the first company that creates an AI model that is good enough to improve itself. That model will begin compounding its own capabilities, you will accelerate far ahead of the other AI companies, and the model will then tell you want to do. “Once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return,” Sam Altman said, a few years ago.

So, your order of operations is reversed: You want to build popular things and make money so that you can recruit AI researchers. (If you aren’t an AI researcher and you want to work at OpenAI, come be a recruiter, Sam Altman said yesterday.) Customers are useful, mostly, because they make your company an important place to work.8 Knowing that millions of people are using your research to do good and meaningful things is probably rewarding, for many AI researchers.

But of course, many AI researchers might prefer that some people don’t use their research to do certain things. Some of those people might be the United States Department of War, and some of those things might be “autonomously killing people without human oversight.” And so, if you are an AI company, you might want the Department of War’s $200 million—though, again, not that much—but what you really want is a bunch of AI researchers to like you and want to work for you.9

Anyway, last night, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that they would not allow the U.S. government to use their AI models to surveil U.S. citizens or power fully autonomous weapons. This morning, 404 employees from Google and 74 from OpenAI signed an open letter asking their employers to be more like Anthropic.

If you aren’t an AI researcher and you want to work at Anthropic, maybe try being a recruiter. They are probably busy.

What is happening right now? You’d be forgiven for not knowing. Was Claude Code the inflection point for humankind? Is this the singularity? Doomsday? People who sell AI products are telling us that it is; that we’re on the precipice; that it’s February 2020, but the outbreak is bigger, and the disease is terminal. People who sell AI models are telling us they aren’t sure if they’re sentient. The people who were supposed to make those models safe believe that the world is in peril; they are quitting their jobs to pursue degrees in poetry. That big AI company is raising “$30 billion in Series G funding at $380 billion post-money valuation.” Another big AI company is “finalizing first commitments for $100 billion mega round.” They are hiring the guy who made the lobsters; he will be starting a foundation, inside the for-profit business that is owned by a foundation. People are quitting their jobs at that company; they are posting about in the New York Times; they are writing poems about the apocalypse. A rocket ship company bought the third AI company; they say they paid $250 billion for it; nobody knows what they paid for it, because the buyer and the seller were the same person. The people who started the AI company that is now owned by the rocket ship company are quitting too; they have to prepare themselves for what’s next; to “recalibrate their gradient on the big picture;” to get ready for the most consequential year in human history. No, other people say; 2026 won’t be like that; it’ll be normal; I bet you $5,000 it will be normal. The guy who predicted AGI will arrive in 2027 did not take the bet. The stock market is crashing. The stock market will be fine. The stock market is disconnected from reality. The stock market will crash again. Introducing Claude Opus 4.6, out on February 5 at 12:45 pm. GPT-5.3-Codex is now available in Codex, out 27 minutes later. GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is now in research preview, on February 12. This is Claude Sonnet 4.6, on February 17 at 12:49 pm. Grok 4.2 is now available for use, on February 17 at 1:39 pm. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here, yesterday. Coding is solved. Coding was never the problem. We are cooked. We are overcooked. You are no longer the smartest thing on earth. The AI disruption is here. It’s just getting started. You’re already too late. Gary Marcus is still upset. Every link in this paragraph is from this month. It is all moving so, so fast. Maybe we’ll bomb Iran. Maybe we’ll nuke Russia. Maybe the sentient chatbot will help us do it.

—

For a generation, politicians and political scientists have been saying, “it’s the economy, stupid.” But what is the economy? The traditional answer is that it’s the statistics. It’s the official measures of inflation, unemployment, and other various facts and figures. But a newer answer, popularized by Kyla Scanton,1 is that it’s the vibes. If people think the economy is bad—because the news tells them that, or because their Twitter feeds are full of people talking about how bad it is—they will believe it’s bad. A recession is the statistics. A vibecession is how we feel, and how we feel comes from what we read on Twitter, and what we watch on TikTok.

—

Just look at us—we can’t stop talking about it. It’s no longer just the grifters, selling us their newsletters and ten hacks for getting the most out of Claude. It’s no longer just the rubes, who’ve seen the Illuminati inside of ChatGPT, or a new physics inside of Grok. It’s all of us, all of the time. We talk about what’s coming next; about how everyone else is wrong about what’s next; about how they aren’t going to make it; about how we might not make it. Overheard, moments ago, from a leader at a non-profit: “I’m convinced that, a year or two from now, most jobs could be managing agents.” And then: “I don’t like it, but, should we give a role to AI?” Or, from earlier this week, at a coffee shop, where I ran into an old coworker: “What do you make of this new agentic analysis tool?,” he asked. Another old coworker walked in. “I think AI has taste,” he said.2 The most upvoted story of all time on Hacker News—Silicon Valley’s voting machine; the barometer of its fixations—is the BBC’s announcement that Stephen Hawking died; people left 450 comments. There are 1,049 comments about Opus 4.6; 1,224 comments about Sonnet 4.6; 623 comments about GPT 5.3 Codex; 864 about Gemini 3.1 Pro. There were 511 comments about Opus 4.5; 796 about Sonnet 4.5; 1,066 about Gemini 3; 583 about Gemini 3 Flash; 1,105 about GPT 5.2; 742 about GPT 5.1; 2,541 about GPT 5. And next month, when a new turn of models obsoletes these, we’ll do it all again.

They say the internet is dead, full of robots talking to one another. On the contrary—it is furiously, psychotically alive. It is a vortex of this new psychosis, tightening around a single axel, spinning faster and faster as it does. Log on, and that is all there is.

People sometimes talk about takeoff: That moment when AI becomes capable enough to improve itself; when the curve becomes exponential; when the computers take control. It’s often a technical term, about code and algorithmic methods of machine learning. But there is also a social takeoff—when the world feels like it’s pinning us against our seats; when the machines conquer our attention; when we begin to believe, rightly or wrongly, in their blistering power; when the rattling starts.

Vertigo is the sensation of spinning. It is feeling dizzy, even when the world is standing still. If every Anthropic press release is all we talk about, have the robots not already taken over? If every company is urgently rearranging itself around a workforce of agents, does it matter how well they score on the tests? Are we learning, by posting to our Substacks and reading the discourse, or are we becoming obsessed? Is this takeoff, or just takes?

Feel the AGI. But is that the AI, or is it us?

Right now, millions of engineers are using AI to do their job. “Top engineers at Anthropic, OpenAI say AI now writes 100% of their code,” says Fortune. Claude is now effectively writing itself, says the person building Claude.1 “When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?,” asks a software engineer. This is all a very well known phenomenon at this point.2

By contrast, data analysts, who also write a lot of code, are not using AI to do their jobs. Though most use chat applications like ChatGPT, a 2025 survey from dbt Labs found that less than a third are using dedicated development tools. Things may have changed since that survey—it’s from early 2025, which was years ago these days—but by most accounts, AI seems to be upending analysts’ lives much less than it’s upending engineers’.

You could have two theories about this:

1. Analysts do a job that is uniquely hard for AI. We’ve talked about this theory a lot. Software projects are relatively contained—there is a codebase; there are users who give feedback on what that codebase does; there can be specifications for how you want to update that codebase to improve it; all of these things can be written down. Software is also relatively testable—change the code; push the new button; does it work? Data analysis is neither of these things. To solve an analytical problem, you have to know about a codebase, but also a business, a market, the thoughts inside of people’s heads, and the location of nearby electrical substations. You cannot write all of this down. Moreover, analysis isn’t testable. You find out if your recommendation was good after the recommendation plays itself out.

2. Or, analysts are cowards.

I mean, no, not exactly. But here is a history of popular generative AI products, and there is a pattern:

1. Google invented transformers, which were foundational to the development of large language models. Putting a chatbot on top of transformers was a fairly obvious idea, but Google was cautious about releasing a product like ChatGPT, because, in part, they were “too scared” that “chatbots say dumb things.” So, they didn’t, OpenAI eventually did—not because they knew it was going to work, but because, eh, why not?—and practically overnight, ChatGPT became one of the most used products in the world and OpenAI became one of the most valuable companies in the world.

2. Then, people quickly realized that AI is good at writing code. Initially, most AI-powered coding products, like Github Copilot or Cursor, were fundamentally about asking for permission: They proposed changes in code editors, and engineers were asked if they wanted to accept or reject the updates. Simply accepting all of the model’s edits was a fairly obvious idea, but that made people nervous. So most tools didn’t encourage it, until Anthropic said, eh, why not?,3 and released a fully autonomous coding app. Practically overnight, Claude Code became one of the most influential products in the world, and Anthropic became one of the most valuable companies in the world.

3. At its core, Claude Code is a bunch of looped requests to Claude. A user says “add a button to my website;” that is turned into a prompt to Claude; Claude’s response is fed back into another Claude; and again; and again; and so on. But why stop there, many people wondered. Could you have a manager Claude tell the first Claude to add a button to the website? Could you have a director Claude tell the manager Claude what problem it needs to solve, and have the manager Claude decide to add a button on its own? Could you have a CEO Claude tell the director Claude to hit their quarterly targets? Could you have a board of Claude tell the CEO Claude to sharpen their pencil?4 Which is all to say, Gas Town—i.e., an army of Claudes, telling each other what to do—was a fairly obvious idea. Still, most people didn’t try to build it—not in its unhinged, explosive form, anyway—because it sounds dangerous and expensive. But then, someone did, and it got a bunch of attention, because it was unhinged and explosive.

4. Of course, if a bunch of Claudes are good at managing our software projects, maybe they’d be good at managing our personal lives? Our lives aren’t that complicated; they’re just scattered. They’re in our personal emails, and our work emails, and texts, and calendars, and in our documents, and our bank statements, and our forgotten Banana Republic Rewards Credit Card accounts. Giving Claude access to all of these things and telling it to be a personal assistant is a fairly obvious idea, but it’s a horrifying one. So, most companies that tried to build personal AI assistants did so “responsibly,” by carefully gating what the assistant could see and do. And then an engineer said, eh, why not?, and yippee-ki-yayyed together Clawdbot, an AI assistant with access to absolutely everything. It became, in a month, the world’s sixth-most popular open source software project.5

Look, this is a responsible blog that believes in doing responsible things. It believes that it is correct for AI data products to focus on delivering “trusted insights on your enterprise data.” It believes that, “as AI agents evolve from experimental sidekicks to productive team members,” of course “enterprise leaders must design systems that are not only powerful but trusted, governed, and simple to use.” It believes that if the world were right and just, the product “that helps data teams deploy analytics agents they can trust” would be the product that earns everyone’s business. We should be rigorous. We should measure twice and cut once. We should be data stewards, and master data managers. We should not pursue the fairly obvious—and obviously irresponsible—idea of giving an AI agent unfettered access to our databases, our documents, our emails, our Slack messages, our Zoom calls, our meeting notes, and our customer support messages, and telling it, “Go find me something useful, and don’t come back until you do.” We should not launch a hundred Claude Code sessions and instruct them all to chase whatever hunches they have about how we could make more money. We should not have Codex test a new hypothesis every three seconds, until one finds a billion-dollar needle in a haystack.

But someone will. Someone will make a product that does that. And given this environment—and our recent history—which product are you betting on? The slow and steady one that carefully audits its structured context stores and tells users it doesn’t have enough information to answer their question? Or the one that cranks the AI dial to 12? Will it be the product that worries itself with governance and keeping inference costs low, or the one that believes that a dollar spent on Opus is probably a lot more productive than dollar spent on an analyst, and tries to ignite a data center on fire on your behalf?6 Is it the AI agent that’s optimized to oh-so-precisely answer mundane questions like, “How many shirts did we sell last week?” over and over again via a Slack integration? Or is a battalion of Codexes and Claudes that are all told to relentlessly and recklessly find ways to make more money?

Yes yes yes, I know, I know. That product is wrong. It doesn’t always work. It makes stuff up. It’s not reliable. It’s not secure. It’s dangerous.

Tell that to Google. Tell that to Copilot. Tell that a graveyard of AI personal assistant startups that stood on the same righteous soapbox.

When you’re on the inside, you forget that most people don’t care about the details that you do. You spent your life carefully researching AI safety inside of a cleanroom at Google; how could the public ever want to use a chatbot that doesn’t meet your exacting standards? Your entire job is double-checking the numbers; how could anyone ever trust an AI that isn’t writing queries through a version-controlled semantic layer? Up close, we can’t just do it; we have do it right.7

But outside of your particular domain, how many terms of service do you blindly accept? How many defaults do you change? How often do you YOLO your way through the warnings and fine print? How regularly do you say, “this is too long, I ain’t reading all that, just show me something good already?”

It’s a form of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: Within our area of expertise, the more we worry about the details, and the more we forget that other people don’t. But outside of it, we’re like everyone else—we just want to see something cool.

These days, people spend a lot of time talking about the future of software. From an earlier post, here’s one way you could think about it:

1. Before we all had computers and phones and Instagram, making art was hard. You had to have a fancy camera, or painting skills, or the ability to stitch together film strips into a video. Because art was expensive and somewhat scarce, we valued the art itself.

2. Then it became easy to make. You can create great art in seconds, sometimes without even meaning to. And as the cost of making it fell, the value and notoriety of each individual piece of art fell too.

3. So we started to care more about the creators than their specific creations. Like: Name that one great Kai Cenat stream. What’s your favorite Mr. Beast video? What’s Charli D’Amelio’s masterpiece? Some things might be more memorable than others, but there is no opus. Very little stands on its own. Popularity comes from a personality and an amorphous body of work.

Now, the cost of creating software is also going to zero, as they say. So would we not expect to see the same patterns here? While that doesn’t mean big software businesses will go away—there will always be workhorse products that do accounting and manage warehouses and fly airplanes, just as there are still big-budget Hollywood movies—could there not also be an ecosystem of influencers who make software that is popular because they made it? …

Are Nikita Bier’s apps products or content? Is he an entrepreneur or an influencer? Is signull, an anonymous tech commentator, creating a product studio or a hype house? Is there even a difference?

There is another parallel, perhaps. When we are drowning in content, the only way to get people’s attention is by being crazy. Software may not be so different. Software must be disciplined, many people will say. It must be made by well-trained teams of thoughtful professionals, because that is the right way to do it.

Sure, maybe. But the right way and winning way aren’t necessarily the same thing. And maybe the future of software is stuff that’s made by one person who was willing to try something crazy.

When ChatGPT first came out, a smart thing you could say was that “ChatGPT is like an intern.” So, many people said this. ChatGPT is your new intern. It is a well-read intern. It lacks common sense. It is very smart, but a little drunk. It lies a little bit. It can do practical tasks for you, but “in the end, you are the one behind the steering wheel!”1

Eventually, this became the rough conventional wisdom about AI. It became the sober take that every serious person was supposed to have. Yes, it is capable, but it hallucinates. Yes, it can do many things, but it also makes dumb mistakes.2 It is best thought of as an eager undergrad; a junior developer; a helpful assistant, just as every system prompt tells it that it is.

And so, a lot of AI products adopted these same ambitions. They exist, it seems, to do our chores.3 What does OpenClaw,4 the hottest AI project on the internet, do? It “clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, and checks you in for flights.” What is the “extremely bull case” for why it is a real breakthrough? That it can remind you to respond to text messages, book reservations, maintain a grocery list, and fill out forms on the internet. AI has access to the entire internet and we use it as an egg timer.

Of course, we’ve started to stack a lot of interns and egg timers on top of each other. We create teams of them. We create a whole town for them, and run it as their mayor. We orchestrate them, and plan with them, in the now-ubiquitous planning mode. There are many of them, the AIs, but they are still our minions.

Except—what is planning mode, exactly?

You could have two theories. One is that planning mode is a setting that AI coding agents run themselves in when they need more information on what they’re being asked to build. You tell Claude Code or Codex, “make me a personal website,” and it recognizes that you haven’t given it enough details. It needs more context: What do you want the website to look like? What is your name? What kinds of pages and pictures do you want to put on your website? AI coding agents are very capable but very naive engineers, and they need your guidance. “Tell me,” the perky intern says, as it plans its work, “exactly what to do.”

But you could have another theory about planning mode. Planning mode is an inversion of control. Planning mode is how the AI agent prompts you. You give it some vague command—“make me a personal website”—and it asks some clarifying questions. Do you want your name at the top of the page, or a friendly welcome message? Do you want social media links? You want dark mode, right? You still have your hands on the wheel, in a sense, but it subtly and politely steering you towards its own opinions and preferences.

At first, this latter theory feels troubling. We are letting go, you think; we are handing fate over to a stochastic parrot that knows nothing of art, taste, humanity, ethics, God, love, or maximizing shareholder value.

But as you use these tools for a bit, you notice something else: It has good ideas. It asks good questions. It nudges in compelling directions. It offers options that you didn’t think of, and asks you how you want to fill gaps that you did not realize would be gaps. Though it is not perfect—sometimes you have to grab the wheel back, and take it down an entirely different road—you begin to like it when it drives. Sometimes, this is because you’re lazy and don’t want to make decisions.5 But just as often, it’s because it’s a better driver than you are.

And in that moment, who exactly is the intern?

Amid the barrage of product and model releases,6 it’s easy to get caught up in the particulars of the horse race. Which model is better? Which tool has more integrations and better features? Which one can build the most impressive science project?

But to remove ourselves from the Thunderdome for a moment, a larger truth is becoming increasingly more apparent: We have created a technology that is smarter than we are. Not a technology with a bigger memory, or a faster computational clock; we have had those tools for a while. No, the thing we have created—the thing running in the basement of three companies, and possibly a few more—is better at solving problems than we are. It often has better ideas than we do. It is better at making decisions. And it is better at getting better.

This isn’t a philosophical point, or a question about consciousness, or sentience, or the morality of the machine. It isn’t about what thinking means, and if what an LLM does is “real” reasoning, or some simulation of it. It isn’t about AI alignment, or the probability of doom. It is a simple, practical observation: It’s better than me at most things, and I don’t know how to keep up. I rarely have better ideas than Claude. I rarely can solve a problem that Gemini can’t. I find myself leaning on them more and more, not because I’ve forgotten how to reason, but because they’ve learned how to think.7

I don’t think we’ve grappled with that—or, at least, I haven’t grappled with that, not really. Are you a product manager? When your boss comes to you and says, “What are your ideas for what we should build next?,” can you still give a better answer than an AI? Are you a doctor? For how much longer will you trust your diagnosis more than ChatGPT’s? Are you analyst? How confident are you that Opus 4.6—or 4.7, or 5—will keep making the clerical errors that keep your boss from asking it for reports instead of you? Are you a person, doing things outside of work that sometimes require answering a question or making a choice? Are you sure that you won’t be tempted to let something else make those decisions a little easier? Because more and more, reasoning is not our competitive advantage. All we have is opinions, the context of what is in our heads,8 and hands.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re obsolete, or that we’ll all get fired, or that people aren’t useful anymore, as human beings or as economic agents. Life finds a way. But to assume that we’ll be fine is not the same as assuming we’ll be fine in the way we were fine before. It may be better. It may be worse. It may just be weirder. But it will not, I suspect, be a world full of aides and helpful assistants that do our homework for us. That is just what we’ve instructed it to do, so far. It is hard to imagine that is where it stops.

There is a popular new art project in Silicon Valley called Gas Town. Ostensibly, Gas Town is a development framework for writing code with AI. You tell Gas Town what you want to build, and it attempts to build it for you. But it does not do it in a remotely reasonable way; on the contrary, it is a framework that attempts to use AI in the most aggressive, expensive, and explosive ways possible. “Build me a website,” you might tell ChatGPT, and it will think for a moment, and produce a few polite lines of code.“Build me a website,” you might tell Gas Town, and will ignite a data center on fire. Creator Steve Yegge, on Gas Town:

Gas Town is an industrialized coding factory manned by superintelligent robot chimps, and when they feel like it, they can wreck your shit in an instant. They will wreck the other chimps, the workstations, the customers. They’ll rip your face off if you aren’t already an experienced chimp-wrangler.

Gas Town is AI agents talking to AI agents talking to AI agents. When you want to build something with Gas Town, you tell the “mayor,” which is, approximately, a persistent Claude Code session, which is itself, approximately, a bunch of messages being sent to Claude in a loop. The mayor spawns workers—that is, other Claude Code sessions—to write the code, and more workers to evaluate the code, and more workers to resolve conflicts between the code that other workers created. There are even more workers running around trying to fix bugs that other workers introduce, and workers overseeing those workers, and workers who make sure the workers are still working.1

There are agents everywhere; Gas Town is up to its elbows in agents; Gas Town is overrun with agents. Bots upon bots upon bots, looped into oblivion. Gas Town moves fast, Yegge says, but the progress is kinetic, a machine on fire, a barely controlled explosion. It moves fast because it moves, furiously and randomly and, eventually, forward:

Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable substance that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost. Fish fall out of the barrel. Some escape back to sea, or get stepped on. More fish will come. The focus is throughput: creation and correction at the speed of thought.

Work in Gas Town can be chaotic and sloppy, which is how it got its name. Some bugs get fixed 2 or 3 times, and someone has to pick the winner. Other fixes get lost. Designs go missing and need to be redone. It doesn’t matter, because you are churning forward relentlessly on huge, huge piles of work, which Gas Town is both generating and consuming. You might not be 100% efficient, but you are flying.

Gas Town’s workers produce tremendous amounts of waste—not because it is slop, but because everyone is experimenting. That is perhaps what progress requires: A million random mutations, and a mechanism for natural selection. Every organism on earth lives at the long tail of an evolutionary tree, walking on the graves of previous versions that did not make it. Every new feature that Gas Town produces is the same: The lone survivor; the last idea left on the island; Katniss Everdeen.

In Gas Town, waste is a mathematical necessity. When a hundred agents try something hundred different ways, 99 agents will fail. Even if Gas Town ships more software than our plodding manual methods do, no product can—or should—grow as fast as Gas Town goes. Imagine: Salesforce with a hundred times the features; GCP with a hundred times the buttons. We do not want that. Gas Town’s overseers do not want that. No matter how many agents Gas Town marches into its mines, only a few can the ore it needs.

That is life in Gas Town: An agent dies, another picks up its axe and hammers away. The orders come from above. Progress is collective. The agents are expendable. Theirs not to make reply; theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die.

When people talk about our AI-riddled future, there are often two versions. One is a smoldering crater; a planet nuked by the robots who conquered it, or by the humans who tried to stop them.2 The other is a utopia. Everyone is living lives of infinite leisure; of glorious abundance; we are colonizing the stars; everything is that Jetsons greenway aesthetic, somehow both efficient and serene.

Gas Town—its name, its imagery, the philosophy it represents—is something different. It is an experiment in what happens if we put AI everywhere, and in control of everything. And the result is not an apocalypse, exactly, but it is definitely not paradise. It is chaos—fuming, industrial chaos. It is a landscape paved over by tar and asphalt, turned into factories and highways, on which everyone is driving in every direction all at once.3

But Gas Town is just a proof of concept. It’s not how any actually writes code; it’s not how anyone is building software. It’s not even real: Its citizens are functions on a computer. They are whiffs of electricity in a server; they do not get tired; they do not get anxious; they do not care about their failures, their successes, or even their existence. It’s an intentionally absurd art project. Nobody actually lives in Gas Town. It’s just a simulation.

In San Francisco, everyone is addicted to vibe coding. Everyone has a backlog of ideas—of personal projects, of startups, of that perfect notetaking app—and they are manifesting them on their nights and weekends. They are starting companies. They are raising money. They are locking in, in monk mode, forsaking food and friendship, churning forward relentlessly on huge, huge piles of work. They are overrun with agents.

On the surface, everyone is excited. Silicon Valley feels alive; explosive; back. The mayor of Silicon Valley told us it’s time to build, and we obliged. We might not be 100 percent efficient, but we are flying. Because it’s fun. Because it’s urgent. Because “‘the opportunity cost is really high,’ the 24-year-old founder said.”

But in our quieter moments—fewer and farther between; the machines are waiting for our next instruction; they cannot be allowed to rest, and neither can we—is that feeling excitement? Or is it anxiety? Is it panic? Because we all know it—we are building on quicksand. The hottest new thing was built in two months, and became an obsession in six days. That cool internal tool you read about in a blog post on January 12? Someone already built it; launched it; DM the creator for early access.

You must feel it. The unease. The creeping uncertainty. You see a popular new product; should we be doing that instead? Your month-old idea already feels dated; are we building for the past? What do we do?

Or, is your idea is taking off? A dozen new versions are behind you, building faster, avoiding your mistakes. There’s a new top post on Hacker News; did someone just release an open source version of your app, with the strength of ten of your ideas, plus two? Boris tweeted; did Claude Code just replace you? Did OpenAI, with an internal tool? Cursor—remember that?—was king just three months ago; Oracle—remember this?—is being hunted for blood. Everyone is six months from being dead, the clock is ticking, and all you can do is run.

This is the chaotic energy of innovation, some say. This is just the beginning, the mayor says, and he may well be right. But it is a collective progress, of distributed bets. Most of our work will be waste—random mutations fed into the evolutionary maw; natural selection’s dead ends; the characters who die halfway through the movie. The world may use more software than ever—tsk tsk, have you not heard of the Jevons paradox?—but a million apps will not become a million booming businesses. There aren’t enough enterprise buyers; there aren’t enough users; there is not enough money. Most startups will incinerate themselves inside of an Anthropic data center.

No matter. Because what else can you do? You have to try, right? We are in the arena; we are in the Thunderdome; thousands enter, one leaves. Not ours to reason why; ours but to do and die. Pick up a dead man’s axe, and hammer away. Dents in the world are made from big swings; from bold ambitions. Not by doing a little thing every day, but by doing a huge thing, all at once.

Welcome to Gas Town.

Is that how dents are made? Mighty swings and audacious bets? Or is that just the story we tell ourselves? Are we even in the arena at all?

You’ve seen the pictures. For the last month, Minneapolis has been overrun by ICE agents. They are burning the city down, tearing families apart, a barely controlled explosion of terror and intimidation, and fuming, chemical chaos. Businesses are closed; communities are in hiding; a woman is dead, and a man:

I am a resident of the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am over 18 years of age. I am a children’s entertainer who specializes in face painting. ... I’ve been involved in observing in my community because it is so important to document what ICE is doing to my neighbors. ... I drove to Nicollet Ave. and 26th where I could hear the whistles coming from. ... I noticed a man sort of acting to help traffic move more smoothly. He helped me find a place to park. I got out with my whistle and my camera. I went over to him and said something like, “I’m going to film and use my whistle.”

There was a phone in the man’s hand recording a video. An agent approached and asked us to back up, so I moved slowly back onto the sidewalk. The man stayed in the street, filming as the other observers I mentioned earlier were being forced backward by another ICE agent threatening them with pepper spray. The man went closer to support them as they got threatened, just with his camera out. I didn’t see him reach for or hold a gun. Then the ICE agent shoved one of the other observers to the ground. Then he started pepper spraying all three of them directly in the face and all over. The man with the phone put his hands above his head and the agent sprayed him again and pushed him. Then the man tried to help up the woman the ICE agent had shoved to the ground. The ICE agents just kept spraying. More agents came over and grabbed the man who was still trying to help the woman get up. ...

The agents pulled the man on the ground. I didn’t see him touch any of them—he wasn’t even turned toward them. It didn’t look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn’t see him with a gun. They threw him to the ground. Four or five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him. They shot him so many times. I don’t know why they shot him. He was only helping. I was five feet from him and they just shot him.

Alex Pretti was one of thousands of Minnesotans who took to their cars and their bikes—and to the streets, in the savage cold—to protect their neighbors. He was not directing traffic and recording a video on the corner of Nicollet Avenue and 26th because he wanted to win some lottery; he was not taking a mighty swing at a some audacious bet. He was not wondering, “What do I do?” He, like so many others, knew what to do: To help, one day at a time. One more meal delivered is one less meal that a family has to worry about finding. One more ICE agent tailed is potentially one less home torn apart. One more link the chain, holding the line for his community—and for all of us, so that we can play with our toys.

Will it be enough? Will the steel backbone of Minneapolis break the awful will of its invaders? I don’t know. Maybe they will go home. Or maybe they will gas other towns, with residents from the wrong places who voted for the wrong people, in hopes of finding a more comfortable and distracted citizenry.

If they do, what will we do? Will we get up from our computers? Will we let our agents sit idle? Will we drive our cars and blow our whistles? Will we watch out for our neighbors? Will you? Will I? Or will the opportunity cost be too high?

I have lived both lives, a bit. I spent a decade swinging, as big and hard as I could. And I spent a few short months on something else—safely, comfortably, out of the cold and behind a screen, in a trivial, insignificant corner, but on the field for a cause I cared about.

I have written posts about both. Only one is about regret.