More AI-generated code doesn't make your team faster. It might actually slow you down.

you just need $9.99 weekly subscription and 125 Americans with really bad memory

i still think about this specialization is for insects

Agentic coding is more addictive than gaming

Clubbing is dead and has been replaced by fitness & wellness. Ppl used to party to socialize and date but now they do things like HYROX, bathhouses, and running raves. The death of clubbing is something to be studied: — US has lost 12% of its nightclubs in the last 24 months — 25% of US adults didn’t drink at all last year — Gen Z drinks 30% less than Millennials did at the same age On the flip side: — According to Strava, the number of running clubs recorded on the platform increased 3.5x in 2025 — 72% of Gen Z go to run clubs to meet new people — Sauna and spa market: $11.8B → $22.4B by 2034 The post-alcohol economy is gonna be a massive category.

Massive output uptick due to agentic AI. Complete flat adoption.

BREAKING: Google is planning to release 32 million mosquitoes across Florida and California. The company has asked the EPA for permission to proceed, with the public given until June 5 to respond. The mosquitoes are infected with Wolbachia bacteria, which stops them from reproducing and slowly collapses the wild population from within. Google's previous Debug Project trial in California's Central Valley nearly eliminated mosquitoes from three test sites entirely. A separate trial in Singapore cut dengue cases by 70% within 12 months. Google has now released over 1 billion mosquitoes across four continents. This new proposal is the largest deployment in US history.

This problem will naturally tend to go away as companies are grown from the start using AI. Then you don't need to extract any domain knowledge from people's heads; it will never have been in people's heads.

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED. I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires. My takeaways: 1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices. 2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha. 3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda) 4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general. 5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million 6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works. 7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead. 8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one. 9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders. 10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time. 11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now. 12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly. 13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS. 14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here.... 15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all. 16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol. 17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet. It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED. But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building. We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real. What an incredible time to be building.

Be honest, Why is every software engineer’s backup plan always farming?

Fork your dependencies, trim them to only your use case, never update unless it breaks for your users. I’ve been vocal about this for 10 years. I’ve always said that updating is way riskier than latent bugs (which can be tracked and CVEs monitored). If you are updating a dependency, it’s on you to analyze every single commit in the full transitive set of dependencies. If you dont see anything compelling, dont update! I remember at HashiCorp once in awhile an engineer would try to update a dep or replace a DIY lib with an external one and id always ask “show me the commit we need.” Dont update for the sake of it. Feeling pretty swell about this mentality with all the supply chain attacks happening.

Everyone is obsessed with AI making a 10x engineer a 1000x engineer. The recent reductions at CloudFlare and Click have me me realize the plot is equally about the inverse: AI amplifies the *negative* impacts of poor performers. If a person with poor taste, who makes mediocore judgement calls, and doesn't properly build things customers love is able to produce 10x more work - does a company want that? Hell no! Productivity isn't just about as many people as possible tokenmaxxing. AI is a double edged sword, especially when it's used to produce net new work. If you give a bad artist a pen that can draw 100x as fast, you're going to pile up with a lot of junky artwork very quickly. And since it happens so quickly leaders are now able to see quickly who is Picasso and who is not and adjust accordingly.