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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%.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

That brings me back to the momentum Pai describes. First principles thinking makes working that way feel natural. When you truly understand what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s easier to take a small step, learn from it, and keep going. If you’re doing it right, working with agents lets that back-and-forth happen much faster. You get faster learning loops and more momentum, oriented around deep understanding. To me, that’s the new flow state.

There will probably come a day when I always get sensible answers to these questions that convince me the model knows what it’s doing. But today is not that day. About half the questions I ask get answers that convince me3 the model has made a mistake

The personal website is coming back because people are rediscovering something the early Web made obvious: the Internet is more interesting when individuals have places of their own. We spent roughly twenty years moving into a handful of very large apartment buildings. Some people are starting to build houses again.