Adam MacBeth retweeted
has this been you? it's been me.
but it doesn't have to be this way.
I wrote about it in @colossusmag
The people of Silicon Valley are unwell.
If you work at a frontier lab or decacorn, you’ve got it bad. You haven’t seen your kids, your girlfriend’s annoyed, invites from friends to hang out are waning, even weddings are on hold. This is the time to make your mark and make your money, after all.
If you’re building a startup that’s trying to compete with or be one of these companies, you’ve got it bad. Maybe you passed up a job offer at one a couple years back, which means you left $100M on the table, you fucking idiot. Being an underdog isn't as fun as you thought.
If you’re working on a pre-AI startup, you’ve got it bad. Not too long ago you were the belle of the ball, but now your 30% year-on-year growth doesn’t feel like growth at all. It feels like death.
"Too many of my friends are spiraling," Brie Wolfson writes. "I don’t know how we’re supposed to live and work like this."
It’s all too much, too fast. Too much money, too much growth, too much power, too much change. Every month, a new frontier model is released. Every day, a new unicorn is minted. Seriously. 300 days into the year 2026, and 311 unicorns have been minted so far.
So what’s left for the sane ones? Brie went looking for teams playing a different game. She found one in Ottawa: a search infrastructure company that many of the AI darlings rely on.
It's growing fast, and its people are well.
Read @zebriez’s latest company dispatch from inside the sane asylum of turbopuffer.
colossus.com/article/sane-as…
Adam MacBeth retweeted
Elon is simply realizing what I’ve been talking about
It is not compute that is limiting
Adam MacBeth retweeted
CEO being the PM is exactly the kind of arrangement that works—big armies of PMs are unnecessary, and much of the PM work is best incorporated into other roles.
Adam MacBeth retweeted
PM is a role that mostly shouldn’t exist.
It’s an example of what I call a “horizontal layer.” Many understand that reducing vertical layers is important, but it’s equally important to reduce horizontal layers, meaning reducing the number of roles required to get a thing done.
Adam MacBeth retweeted
I have to admit, I enjoy listening to these hardcore Seattle liberals grapple with the fact that the new Washington State millionaires tax is having a serious impact not just on the local economy, but on their own livelihoods and jobs.
High-end architect:
"All my customers are leaving."
General contractor:
"They canceled the remodel. Asked if I work in Nevada."
Tech startup bro:
"Umm... where are all the investors?"
Real estate agent:
"No one moving here wants a condo."
Non-profit CEO:
"Where are all my donors going?"
Restaurant owner:
"Our best customers all moved to Las Vegas."
Personal trainer:
"I'm doing Zoom sessions until I find new clients."
Executive recruiter:
"The job is technically in Seattle. The executive is not."
Art gallery owner:
"They’re buying art for their new house in Austin."
High-end relocation company owner:
"Honestly, we're doing great."
Adam MacBeth retweeted
consider that the people who were wrong about nanobots, superpersuasion, ai psychosis, autonomous hacks, the grid going down, xml being the key tech for gofai to come back big, etc
might also be wrong about bioweapons
Adam MacBeth retweeted
This is truly getting tiresome. The effort to paint the very difficult immediate situation as without precedent and not “normal” ignores the waves of the security issues of the past.
I’m not downplaying this and just as tired of “no, this time is different.”
There’s just no escaping that every step function change in automated tools to find (security) holes/bugs that arose out of point experiences being generalized immediately created the type of “all hands” situation we face now.
Everything from floppy disk scanning to buffer over runs to uninitialized variables to off by one loops to automation hooks to script kiddies to xss to frames to social engineering saw incidents leading to generalized tools that scanned environments to find countless latent bugs that needed to be fixed urgently.
One day a product was ready to ship and then a tool ran and suddenly there were 10,000 new bugs for 500 engineers to investigate and fix and then test for what broke because well who knows what happens when you suddenly initialize a variable that wasn’t previously.
This sucks in a ton of ways. No one wants to stop what they are doing at what seems like the biggest opportunity and/or disruptive risk to business in a generation. No one wants to touch old code. No one likes to have work generated for them by automated tools finding issues that are obscure by definition.
But this is all good. These bugs were all there. Instead of cursing just realize how lucky your team is to find them now and not after the breach. Whenever we surfaced from these moments in the past we felt our code reached a new and better “steady state” and that will happen.
Adam MacBeth retweeted
It is a revelation to use GLM 5.3 for some tasks. Astra/Fable/Opus either explicitly or implicitly won't do surprising things. You don't even realize some of what the models won't try.
It’s so obvious this is fair use. As is distillation.
As a former big tech exec who has worked at a number of startups I agree. But many founders fall into the trap of thinking they need a leader who's "managed at scale" to help them "scale up". Unfortunately these are very different problems.
Other problems:
- Little experience with 0->1.
- Poor product sense.
- Like to add process / overhead (OKRs!).
- Are allergic to shrinking teams / firing.
- Don't know how to move fast.
- Will bring their culture / team with them (do you really want to become Amazon?)
Adam MacBeth retweeted
Former Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal on who’s responsible when an AI agent goes rogue:
“These are engineering problems. I think that each lab has a moral responsibility to make sure that it tests its systems in isolation.”
“I think it’s kind of weak sauce to be like, oh, my agent escaped, and it basically did a bunch of bad stuff... Figure out how to have better sandboxing.”
Adam MacBeth retweeted
Sources: Anthropic told investors that distillation accounts for 5% to 7% of revenue; its rapid but slowing revenue growth could weigh on its IPO valuation (@coryweinberg / The Information)
(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)
Adam MacBeth retweeted
I still don’t understand the point of a large institutional investor meeting while Anthropic is in confidential filing. If they wanted a TTW meeting, they should have held it with select institutional investors in their offices. That would have avoided a circus and limited leaks. Given their S-1 leaked to the news media (I’ve never seen another in my 26-year career), the company should have been more sensitive.
Adam MacBeth retweeted
The winners in consumer AI will be whoever solves the highlighted sections on this chart 👇
Privacy and trust concerns usually fade as people find products that add value to their lives
The primary battle right now is against apathy
Adam MacBeth retweeted
Mobile Use + Jev for audio = ULTRAFAST⚡️
10x faster and 20x cheaper than Gemini Live.
It's our Audio Action model, Thud.
Thud listens and then does. It has a pre-built list of actions it can take on every page and listens for that action.
It's 2026. We don't need to transcribe every voice command before spoon-feeding it to the AI. The AI is smart enough to just hear audio and do! It doesn't need text.
Adam MacBeth retweeted
This @WSJ piece on the UK's runaway disability benefits is something else. Great color from @MaximColch & @davidluhnow
Adam MacBeth retweeted
What @CompleteSkeptic says here is exactly what we're experiencing. When we use frontier intelligence to build systems with AI, it's fantastic. When we use it to *be* the system, it's expensive, slow, and unreliable.
Here's how we explain the architectural difference - swamp-club.com/behavior. It's no wonder that we started using Jev immediately, and are only using it more and more (as are our users).
was at a community event and was asked a somewhat sad question: should developers be afraid of the labs eating the new possibilities jev opens up?
with AI (system one) + software (system two):
1. there's no going back to a world without system one models
2. you control the software!
3. there's no way AI could beat the efficiency of this combo
4. you don't even send the model providers your whole program logic
I think the days of "wrapper" apps will be seen as some of the darkest in software because people essentially did all of their programming in a system message and sent it over to a third party who was incentivized to bake that behavior into their 1st party product...
keeping your logic in code and only asking AI for the minimum reverses that and keeps all of your logic yours. if you decompose enough, model providers can't even figure out what you're working on