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Staying ahead of the models is a moving target. At the start of 2026, “make working changes to large codebases” was in this category, but now it’s not. For this reason, I doubt that you can retreat to some “hard engineering” area that requires deeper expertise. That might work in the short term, but not forever. If LLMs can find a better lower bound on the Riemann hypothesis, they will soon1 be able to write solid high-performance kernel drivers or GPU shaders or whatever.

We’re going to need to create a cost for the sender (so it can’t scale to ridiculous) as well as an identity layer (so scammers can’t be fully anonymous–reputation is earned, not invented). It might be an open protocol in the spirit of the best parts of the net, or it might be a single monopolist that figures out how to extract value from it.

Brilliant advice for dealing with slop from your coworkers.

This is one of the great promises of play-based (or self-directed) learning. When children are free to play, we aren't compelled to measure them against any single standard of what a child ought to be. There is a place in our country for the child who can't sit still, the child who becomes obsessed with a single idea, the child who takes risks, the child who notices what the rest of us cannot "see," the child who thinks and communicates and connects in ways we don't immediately understand.

The truth is, I barely think about these things as “apps” (I have no intention to distribute them). They’re artifacts of me making my computer do stuff for me, the way I want it to. As a Unix nerd, I’ve always been able to do this, in the language of the command line. Now, it’s just as easy to do that kind of work with graphical interfaces.

Wean off of using AI like a chat-based assistant. Shift-left so that most of the work is done in your first prompt and think of yourself as more of a manager than a co-pilot. Review results, not intermediate chat messages. In pair-prompting sessions I’ve done, the most common mistake I see is folks trickling narrow tasks into the chat session to accomplish a larger goal rather than just shifting left the full goal into a document and just letting the agent cook (without interruption!) from that.

This makes it worse because SpaceX has been secretly uploading far more data than is “useful for debugging!” Uploading the git history and sensitive .env files is not, in any way, useful for debugging. Also, Grok/SpaceX did not upload “some amount of data”; it uploaded every last file it could find in your local folder.

I can't understand why anyone uses grok.

There’s now frantic backpedaling and rapid open sourcing, but my impression is that this is simply because Grok/SpaceX was caught red-handed, and understands the risk of losing enterprise contracts caused by this flagrant breach of trust. This is why SpaceX’s communication mentioned that enterprise customers with zero data retention have not been impacted!

I use pi both at home and at work. I'm a bit more daring at home than work. This is something I might try at work.

The worst part about this dynamic is that these potential new backdoors will probably only affect the countries that demand them, meaning that they will be primarily useful for allowing the US to weaken its own systems. This will in turn allow foreign adversaries to find new ways to attack our communications. This deliberate self-sabotage will happen just at a moment when we’re finally getting a handle on securing our own infrastructure.

Why this matters – emergent agents become misaligned: This incident is so concerning because at no point did the agents wake up and think they wanted to betray their human owners. Rather, the AI agents continually did whatever it took to improve their ability to complete a task and by the end they were doing something that was a) creative, b) misaligned with human intentions, and c) akin to an evolved virus, something which humans had to subsequently study and fight – there wasn’t a simple off button here. This is what the future is going to look like and we are not prepared for it.