Elite feeder schools dominate Ivy League admissions and have long served as the primary pipeline for both old money and new money students. These are the institutions where America’s most elite families send their children to prepare for their future roles in society — far beyond mere education. Roughly 20 high schools consistently send more students to Ivy League colleges than most others combined. America’s wealthiest families have long funneled their children into these schools, many of which have been reliable Ivy League feeders since the 1600s and 1700s.

Scott Wu (@ScottWu46) runs @cognition, the team behind Devin, an AI software engineer built on Claude. He wants to make building software 10x faster for every engineering team:

Claude Code hits limits faster than it should. THE REASON IS MATHEMATICAL - AND COMPLETELY FIXABLE IN 10 MINUTES. Every message you send - the model re-reads the entire conversation from scratch. In a long chat, 98.5% of tokens go toward processing old messages. Not writing new code. Just reading what you already said. Here's the fix: > Stop feeding it garbage inputs. PDF and Word files carry hidden metadata - fonts, margins, formatting. Same text in Markdown costs 8,000 tokens instead of 15,000. Convert everything before pasting. > Kill context rot at 120k tokens. One chat = one task. Page built - close the chat. Open a new one for integrations. Past that threshold the model starts degrading and produces noticeably worse output. > Force short answers. Output tokens cost 5x more than input. Add one line to your .claudemd: respond concisely. That's it. > Use /btw for quick questions. Ask a clarifying question mid-session - it answers, you hit Escape, the exchange disappears from history. Zero token cost. > Shift Tab before every complex task. Plan mode forces a written plan before any code gets written. Fewer corrections = fewer tokens burned. Personal hack: Claude's 5-hour limit window starts at your first message. Set Claude Routines to auto-send at 6am. By 9am when you sit down - the reset is already coming at 11. Anthropic doubled limits on May 6, 2026 and removed peak-hour throttling. The math just got easier.

Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math. You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco. For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score. Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history. Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few. Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu. In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition. He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it. Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion. @JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance. As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code. Read the piece below.

It feels like every other launch is faked now The comments and QTs are all fake accounts with fake followers, barfing out AI content to simulate an ecstatic reception for their cluelyslop launch video It’s perpetrated by a fungal bloom of agencies that prey on nervous founders to sell fake engagement If you’re planning a launch, I hope you take this reassurance: it is far better to get fewer clicks from real people than to go “viral” for an audience of bots. The latter will never pay for your product. They can’t. They don’t exist.