Elijah Popowitz

We achieved SOTA on Terminal Bench 2.1 using a DeepSeek v4.1 Flash model. 92.2% at $0.08 cost per task. Previously Opus 5.5 was the leader at 87.6% at $0.50 cost per task (vals.ai/benchmarks/terminal-…). Now the obvious question is how did we do it? How can you possibly improve a Flash model to beat frontier models like Opus, Fable, and Astra? The truth is, we over-obsess about models when they are only half of the equation. The other half is the code that wraps around the model. In fact all of the most revolutionary products (Instinct, Muse, Claude Code, OpenClaw, etc.) are all just harnesses optimizations. Rather than try to build a new model or fine-tune, we built a harness that would make: Flash Models —> Frontier Results Frontier Models —> Beyond Frontier Results Did I mention it’s also ~6x faster than Claude Code? And we’re now live. Go Check it out! Trymidas.io

Midas is now available on windows trymidas.io/docs/quickstart

Thank you everyone for the support! Since this post reached 50k views, next 50 people whose first deposit is >$10 get 50% bonus credits (Up to $50 bonus credits) Sign up with this link: trymidas.io/r/LAUNCH50 or In Dashboard, go to Billing Code: LAUNCH50 $10 deposit = $15 in credits ... $100 deposit = $150 in credits

We also achieved SOTA on @CommandCodeAI's Frontier Token Efficiency eval. This benchmark measures read and shell tool calling token-efficiency and we crushed. Read more: trymidas.io/benchmarks/token… (Yes we will run TB4 in the next couple weeks) Since this post went viral, next 50 people whose first deposit is >$10 get 50% bonus credits up to $50. $10 deposit = $15 in credits ... $100 deposit = $150 in credits In Dashboard, go to Billing Code: LAUNCH50

My perspective on groupthink and consensus. View article

The Knowledge Fallacy The knowledge fallacy is an anecdote about questioning what you hear and being more curious. This essay is not politically driven but rather a broader theme that I’ve witnessed play out over the past few years. As humanity’s access to information has grown, we have become innately less curious. This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s real and not necessarily for the reasons you might think. Attention: We have a limited amount of attention, and in the digital age we are overstimulated by a constant influx of information. Whether it be war, famine, tragedy, what our political leaders recently said, or the most recent AI scare, we are unable to give the appropriate amount of attention to any topic because there is always something new to distract us. Our brains are not designed to be this stimulated. Before the internet, our perception of the world was merely what we experienced in our lives (basically what happened in front of us and whatever was on satellite TV). In the digital age, however, we are always just one notification or one swipe away from a new message, oftentimes someone trying to persuade us or sell us something. The Result: 1. We only read headlines and take them at face value, which leads to clickbait and the spreading of misinformation. 2. Every company and creator is fighting for the same finite attention, benefiting from short-form content that has rotted our attention spans. 3. We seek stimulation and amazement like the prestige at a magic show. Everything has to be bold or outlandish to deserve our attention. 4. The short-term beneficiaries of this phenomenon are what pop culture now calls “larpers.” They attract attention by showing some outlandish demonstration but if you were to look deeper, there is little to no substance behind their claim. Everything is about misdirection and fooling the consumer. This is only accentuated by the emergence of AI, which has decreased the amount of effort that it takes to produce content or a product, allowing the release of endless “slop” into the world. Consumers recognize this and resort to “trusted sources” or “experts,” but this is where it gets particularly dangerous. The Danger: Industry leaders and public figures who are deemed trusted sources have an inherent responsibility to not mislead the public. The issue with that is people with large enough audiences have enough influence to sway public opinion and will oftentimes do so to perpetuate their own agendas. Their messages create a level of groupthink that hasn’t been present since the days where information was restricted. Groupthink is possibly the most dangerous outcome of all. People will adopt opinions from experts that are not their own and parrot them to others to demonstrate their own intelligence. The worst part is they don’t even know they’re doing it. We live in a world that rewards perception or appearance above all else and that’s why people will make claims or have opinions about subjects they know nothing about. This goes for politics, the perception of a startup, an industry, a person, or whatever else. My Own Experience with Groupthink: I am a startup founder, building in a space that I’ve been told a million times is too crowded, that the market saturated, and that my competitors have too much talent density that I can’t possibly win (whatever the fuck that means). The truth is that most of the people telling me these things have never used a product in my space. They haven’t done real research, they don’t understand the intricacies of what these products do, and they’ve fallen for groupthink because they read a headline. Maybe that headline was a revenue number or a big financing round, and that signalmade them so confident that the market has already been won, that they didn’t do their own research and come up with their own conclusion. We were able to close a 7-figure pilot in our first week. My ambitions aside, this is a dangerous reality we’re seeing a lot in Silicon Valley for founders and investors alike. An industry leader will make claims such as: Software is dead. Companies will build their own SaaS. Coding is solved. A vocal minority will adopt their opinions and these ideas will spread. I use these examples because all three were claimed and disproven in the past year. But this goes back to my initial point about clickbait and why we shouldn’t blindly listen to leaders, because they aren’t always right. What Should You Take Away From This? Continue to respect the opinions of others who are knowledgeable but do not treat their words as gospel. Make sure that you do your own research and come to your own conclusions before blindly adopting the opinions of people who are trying to persuade you. Take back your sense of individuality and try to discern what is real and what is noise. See how I just convinced you? My point exactly.

The craziest part about the 76ers is that they have 5-6 guys who can average 25+. The only thing stopping them from dropping 150 points a game is that there’s only one ball

Who wants free AI credits?

I’m looking for beta testers

At what stage do startups move from subscription to usage based for Codex/Claude?

I built my own coding agent... And then I cancelled my Claude & Codex subscriptions

How long do you think it will take the general public to adopt AI the same way tech/Silicon Valley have?