Technical product builder, learning and sharing all things AI.
Milwaukee, WI
Joined July 2009
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This is right, but only the first step in the right direction.
If agents are handling discovery and the purchasing path we may also see a lift in quality and value of our purchases across the board. Agents will want to find the best option, not the best marketed or trending option.
I say “may” because this assumes the agents won’t get manipulated like search/social was. This is surely part of the end game for the big personal assistants like Instinct etc. - they aggregate demand and then control the flow of commerce, just like paid ads have done.
for a long time it felt like the world was fully optimized against you
you go to buy something, you get a bunch of ads and upsells and micro optimizations to get you to spend more
you go to consume some specific content and the algo puts in things that are hard to ignore and designed to get you to spend more time
agents are the first time i've felt like maybe things can go in a different direction. send your robot into that mess and it can ignore it all and do your task
i'm not naive, this is going to be an insane battle with entrenched interests doing their best to fight it
but there's a small chance that in the end we can finally be free of this (until the next new problem)
This is an important thing to understand about the models. They are not just predicting the next word. This is what we built them to do, but it's not all they do. They have a plan beyond the next word and context of the universe. This is how humans think. By designing models to predict the next word we actually built thinking machines.
Don't be fooled by the "just predicting the next word" narrative out there.
"To make them is not to understand them."
Emmanuel Ameisen (@mlpowered) has spent the last 3 years doing interpretability research at @AnthropicAI, looking inside LLMs like Claude to figure out what they're actually doing. As he puts it, models are "grown," not built.
We discuss:
🔸 His discovery that models plan many tokens ahead
🔸 Why anthropomorphizing AI can actually be the right approach
🔸 What the "J-space" reveals about how models think
🔸 How interpretability connects to AI alignment and safety
Listen now 👇
youtu.be/JHo-aiePjoM
In the age of agents, the whole company lives in the repo.
Marketing site. Docs. Changelog. Wiki. Decisions. All markdown. All in the same diff.
One agent can read, build, and compound across the whole thing.
bartling.io/blog/the-compoun…
I met with a mid-market manufacturing company yesterday. They make hinges and casters for automotive and industrial.
The CEO explained the RFQ process and it was clear the whole thing should be taken over by AI. Currently it’s 5 CSRs and a team of engineers manually responding to each request. They only win 15% of them this way, and each one can take a day to multiple weeks to respond to.
I’m urging them to just start building. It could be the single most impactful thing they do this year.
AI has reshaped software forever, but devs are taking it in stride. We're wired for constant change. New tools, new paradigms, ship and adapt. Most of us are embracing it.
I worry about every other industry. The resistance will be stronger there, and the reckoning harder.
Hot take: AI coding tools don't replace devs — they expose why senior devs exist. The gap between a prompt and a production-ready feature is filled with years of systems thinking, architecture decisions, and full-stack intuition. We're not going away. We're just becoming full-time architects.
Ben Bartling retweeted
Delve, a YC-backed compliance startup that raised $32 million, has been accused of systematically faking SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance reports for hundreds of clients. According to a detailed Substack investigation by DeepDelver, a leaked Google spreadsheet containing links to hundreds of confidential draft audit reports revealed that Delve generates auditor conclusions before any auditor reviews evidence, uses the same template across 99.8% of reports, and relies on Indian certification mills operating through empty US shells instead of the "US-based CPA firms" they advertise. Here's the breakdown:
> 493 out of 494 leaked SOC 2 reports allegedly contain identical boilerplate text, including the same grammatical errors and nonsensical sentences, with only a company name, logo, org chart, and signature swapped in
> Auditor conclusions and test procedures are reportedly pre-written in draft reports before clients even provide their company description, which would violate AICPA independence rules requiring auditors to independently design tests and form conclusions
> All 259 Type II reports claim zero security incidents, zero personnel changes, zero customer terminations, and zero cyber incidents during the observation period, with identical "unable to test" conclusions across every client
> Delve's "US-based auditors" are actually Accorp and Gradient, described as Indian certification mills operating through US shell entities. 99%+ of clients reportedly went through one of these two firms over the past 6 months
> The platform allegedly publishes fully populated trust pages claiming vulnerability scanning, pentesting, and data recovery simulations before any compliance work has been done
> Delve pre-fabricates board meeting minutes, risk assessments, security incident simulations, and employee evidence that clients can adopt with a single click, according to the author
> Most "integrations" are just containers for manual screenshots with no actual API connections. The author describes the platform as a "SOC 2 template pack with a thin SaaS wrapper"
> When the leak was exposed, CEO Karun Kaushik emailed clients calling the allegations "falsified claims" from an "AI-generated email" and stated no sensitive data was accessed, while the reports themselves contained private signatures and confidential architecture diagrams
> Companies relying on these reports could face criminal liability under HIPAA and fines up to 4% of global revenue under GDPR for compliance violations they believed were resolved
> When clients threaten to leave, Delve reportedly pairs them with an external vCISO for manual off-platform work, which the author argues proves their own platform can't deliver real compliance
> Delve's sales price dropped from $15,000 to $6,000 with ISO 27001 and a penetration test thrown in when a client mentioned considering a competitor
A detailed and brutal look at the tactics of buzzy AI compliance startup Delve
"Delve built a machine designed to make clients complicit without their knowledge, to manufacture plausible deniability while producing exactly the opposite."
substack.com/home/post/p-191…
I'm feeling a heightened level of noise. It's mostly important noise, but it's still noise as a creator.
I need focused "maker" time to create anything of substance.
I'm being purposeful about canceling out some noise to give myself the space to create.
Are you doing this?
This evening at 6:30pm EST – I’m chatting with TikTok stars @cappybears [779k followers] and @goldenretrieverlife [1.6M followers] about monetizing their social media.
Join us on Clubhouse: joinclubhouse.com/event/6maG…
@GetCreatorPage @AdrianGrant
I constantly hear about the importance of shipping. The shared mantra seems to be ship fast and often. If you’re not shipping, you’re slipping.
This is well-intended advice, but it’s inevitably dangerous.
Shipping the wrong thing is worse than not shipping. There’s an opportunity cost and debt tied to everything we ship.