The Slow Confidence Drain: What LLM Reliance Is Actually Doing to Engineers There’s a version of the AI tooling debate that’s gotten boring fast. Will it take jobs? Will AGI arrive by 2030? (Demis Hassabis thinks maybe 2029, for what it’s worth.) Those questions matter, but they’re not the one keeping me up at night….
AGI Apparently Already Happened and Most People Missed It Marc Andreessen sat down with Joe Rogan for over three hours last week and said something I keep turning over in my head. His claim: AGI crossed a meaningful threshold about three months ago, with GPT-5.5, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3, and Grok 4.3. And the reason…
The Wrong Question About AI Agents Most developers I talk to are still asking “which model should I use?” It’s the wrong starting point. The model is almost irrelevant if the system around it is broken. I’ve watched teams spend weeks benchmarking GPT-4o against Claude 3.7 against Gemini, then hand the winner a vague task…
Andrej Karpathy Just Joined Anthropic. Pay Attention. There are moments in the AI industry that function as signals, not just news. Karpathy joining Anthropic is one of them. Not because he’s famous, though he is. Because he had every option available to him and chose this particular moment, at this particular lab, to get back…
The Bet Behind the Bet: What Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Portfolio Tells Engineers About AI’s Real Constraints Most people covering AI are watching the model benchmarks. Aschenbrenner watched the power grid. That difference in focus is what turned $225 million into roughly $5.5 billion by the end of 2025, and then into $13.67 billion by Q1 2026….
Jensen Huang Ate Noodles in a Hutong. That Tells You Everything. There’s a moment from the Trump trade delegation visit to Beijing in May 2026 that I keep coming back to. While diplomats and executives performed the usual theater of geopolitical trade talks, Jensen Huang, the CEO of the company that makes the chips powering…
Jensen Huang Ate Noodles While the Trade War Raged. He Was Right To. There’s a photo circulating from Beijing this week. Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s most valuable chip company, sitting in a hutong alleyway eating zhajiangmian from a place called Fangzhuan workshop. Not in a conference room. Not on a delegation panel. Not…
The Demo Worked Great. The Deployment Did Not. Every few weeks, a new AI agent demo drops and the timeline lights up. Someone ships a polished video, the agent breezes through a 12-step workflow in 90 seconds, and the replies fill with “this changes everything.” I get it. The demos are genuinely impressive sometimes. Then…
CLAUDE.md Is the Most Underrated File in Your Codebase I’ve spent a lot of time tuning prompts. System prompts, user prompts, few-shot examples, all of it. And I’ll tell you what most of that work produces: marginally better output that degrades the moment the conversation gets long or the task gets complicated. So when something…
Why Your Second Brain Is a Graveyard (And How to Fix It) Most engineers I know have built at least one elaborate knowledge system. Notion workspace with nested databases. An Obsidian vault with backlinks going nowhere. A bookmark folder containing 400 links they will never read again. They spent a weekend setting it up, felt…
