In 2014, @alain and I dropped out of Stanford so we could run @getcognito full time. After almost a decade of hard work, I’m extremely excited to share that @Plaid has acquired Cognito for $252 million! tcrn.ch/3rCV2vS

AI coding tools today remind me of Betty Crocker introducing a "just add water" cake mix in the 1940s which didn't sell well until they tweaked it to "just add an egg," making consumers feel like they're still baking. Still in egg phase now, but it sure feels like "just add water" is right around the corner. Psychological toll this will have on builders will be profound.

I've been curious when AI will let us just hack ourselves into video games and rewrite the gameplay. The GPT 5.4 announcement has a lot on games, so I decided to give it a try. FIELD NOTES [Most impressive part] Codex was able to autonomously QA it's changes by setting up a browser-based Gameboy emulator and then interacting with it. After some trial and error it figured out how to generically QA the game. Followed the playwright-interactive imagegen codex skills OpenAI demos in their blog post - Some things worked perfectly with no guidance like the banner art at the top. - Other things were hilariously bad. It tried to make the AI lab logos just text of their name. No amount of steering addressed this, I had to give it the logos and say use these (then it did all the processing) Replacing characters (e.g. Prof Oak → @karpathy) worked one shot, but didn't look like them. Had to give it a reference image. A lot of this was actually sprite editing which Codex did a pretty good job consistently one-shotting which is tricky given resizing, greyscale, building sprites, etc. This was not a reverse engineering task. I just dropped Codex into the pret/pokered GH repo and gave high level instructions. More of a fun little art project by the end than anything, but feels pretty close to being able to just describe how you want to modify a game and letting an AI hack it together. A really fun future project would be to do something similar to hack yourself in as a character into Super Smash Bros.

I thought I had 10 more years with my Dad. He treated his CLL so effectively the last decade, sometimes I forgot he had cancer. An infection took his brain so quickly that by the time my red eye landed we could only have simple yes or no conversations. Within 48 hours, it was a coin flip whether he would be able to recognize me. A week later, our last flicker of hope went out and we said goodbye. There was no warning. No heads up to get some quality time in. Why didn’t I call him every week? Why didn’t I ask him to show me pictures of him from when he was my age and explain that phase of his life? Why don’t I have more photos of him? With him? I’m angry at myself for all those moments I wasn’t present with him. I’m angry at the world for how suddenly he was taken. So early. Six months before my wedding. Never able to meet my kids. To be able to call him “grandpa.” I couldn’t wait to give him that, and now I can’t. The last few weeks I’ve been desperate for control. I couldn’t control the bureaucracy that denied him a bed at the specialist hospital he donated to, even when we paid for a private medical plane to transport him. It hurts even more that, in the end, it wouldn’t have made a difference. I can’t control what happened to my Dad at this point, but I can control how I move forward. I won’t make the same mistakes again, Mom. I won’t let the family go without a strong leader they can rely on. I won’t let my kids grow up without knowing who you were, Dad. Your energy. Your overwhelming optimism. Determination. Work ethic. How your hard-driving intensity turned into a distinct tenderness in your later years. I will continue to make you proud with what I accomplish, even if I can’t experience the joy in seeing the pride in your eyes anymore. I’ll pass on the values we shared. I’ll give my kids everything, just like you did. Talk to your parents.

Love tuning into @cowenconvos to hear Tyler ask world experts why AI can't do their jobs lmao. Every other interview is like "Why can't AI do neurosurgery?" "Why can't o1-pro run the Fed?" "When will all state capacity of the Peruvian government be handled by AI?"

Taskrabbit is an amazing service that seamlessly connects you with a marketplace of people whose cars will all "break down" in the next 24 hours

Update: I moved back to San Francisco 🙃