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Every one of these projects, though, happened because I gave the AI an idea. Sometimes that was enough, but for the longer projects, my feedback along the way turned out to matter a lot.
One Useful Thing
General, often expert, and sometimes jagged
And yet, meetings occur regularly, with no measurable outputs. Few people do the reading or prep, and many show up late or uninformed. The room isn’t designed for the purpose it’s being used for, and no one is taking notes or sending out follow-up action requests.
Seth’s Blog
Seth Godin argues that organizations need better conditions for making decisions: prepared participants, purposeful meetings, measurable outcomes, and follow-through.
For many years, researchers and science fiction authors have forecast a future in which AI systems drastically increase the pace of overall scientific and technical progress, making things move so quickly that it is hard for humans to keep up.
They call this the singularity. I believe that this year we have gained convincing evidence that it has now begun.
Import AI
Jack Clark’s IMF lecture argues that AI-driven scientific progress signals the beginning of the singularity and explores how humanity can share its benefits.
Various surveys have tracked America’s social decline over the past few decades. Tracking data from the American Time Use Survey shows that Americans are spending more time alone and less time with friends than they were two decades ago. Perhaps most notably, the American Perspectives Survey has found that from 1990 to 2021, the percentage of Americans with five or more close friends dropped by 25 points, from 63% to 38%.
Data for Progress
Our survey finds significant, double-digit declines in Americans’ participation in key social activities from 1995 to 2026.
Here's something most people don't know: you should probably delete your skills and your AGENTS.md every couple of months. The models get better, so how do you know you're not de-tuning them? Unless you've invested in evals over all your traces (lab behavior, and a tiny minority of companies), you don't know whether you're going forward or backward.
Geoffrey Huntley
Josh Wulf and I talked loop engineering for four episodes. The models stopped being the constraint a long time ago; what's left is vision, verification and agency. Delete your skill packs, put the whole system under test, and revisit everything that used to be hard.
From the very beginning, software engineering has been about automating other people’s work. Every single commercial software program2 is valuable because it takes over some task you would have to pay a human to do. The engineer who built VisiCalc, one of the first pieces of personal commercial software, agonized over the potential of the spreadsheet to put bookkeepers out of work.
Sean Goedecke
Sean Goedecke argues that software engineers, whose work has automated other people’s jobs, cannot reasonably claim their own profession should be exempt from AI automation.
Irani’s lab is now working to extend these “mind-reading” methods to the decoding of auditory information as well. Video could be another frontier. “What remains especially challenging is decoding video – for example, during dreaming,” she explains. “Dozens of images change every second, while an fMRI scan takes about two seconds. If we overcome all these obstacles, it’s possible that in the future we may even be able to read dreams.”
Weizmann Canada
A new AI model, called Brain-IT, can “read” your brain activity and reconstruct what you see with striking speed and accuracy
Can LLMs just read the code for you? No, for the same reason: even if they make no mistakes, their technical values will not match yours or those of your company. You can still use LLMs to help you read code, but you have to carefully read and review that LLM output, and you should also be carefully reading the code itself.
Sean Goedecke
Read code in multiple passes: trace important execution paths, understand the structure, then review the details. LLMs can assist, but they cannot replace your own judgment.
If you are not familiar with Codemode, it’s basically just a way to issue tool calls from within some language, in our case JavaScript. That allows you to compose those calls without necessarily going through the LLM’s context. Credit for naming goes to our friends at Cloudflare who coined it.
Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings
If you just need bash, why do you need codemode?
The Bitter Lesson, the hard truth, learned over and over again, that things that we thought required elaborate human rules and thinking can be solved with the brute force of better machine learning systems and more AI. The Bitter Lesson is everywhere among AI startups and companies adopting AI. A huge amount of effort went into building elaborate computer systems to feed AIs the right information at the right time, but AI systems have learned to seek out information themselves.
One Useful Thing
Benefitting from the Bitter Lesson
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