Adam MacBeth retweeted
No, they really don’t. The problem here is the agent architecture we’ve been building throws frontier intelligence at the control plane. A software factory made up of skills, loops, and multi-agent/sub-agent flows is horrifically inefficient.
I’m not saying don’t spend money on tokens - I’m saying don’t do it in places where it doesn’t make any sense at all.
What we are seeing at @coderabbitai and elsewhere on this parabolic trajectory is that even larger seed rounds ($8M+) are no longer enough to build a software business. Software factories need quality tokens and large-scale compute to run CI, sandboxes, and other infrastructure to ship software at scale. At this point, smaller startups exist only to funnel ideas to larger startups with more tokens.
Adam MacBeth retweeted
The most bleak thing about this story is that there are kids out there who believe you get jobs by applying for them.
Shame on their parents.
This is such a bleak story about what it's like to try to land a job right now. nytimes.com/interactive/2026…
Adam MacBeth retweeted
GM to Pay $220 Million After Betraying Their Own Drivers’ Privacy
daringfireball.net/linked/20…
Adam MacBeth retweeted
This is INSANE. Cisco’s president Jeetu Patel has given a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to try to rewrite 98% of the company’s legacy code within 24 months, Fortune reports.
Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy thinks he can do it with a two-person team. He has just four weeks to prove the approach.
Adam MacBeth retweeted
hiring Chief Product Officer:
you are in NYC. no remote, work 24-7.
-care more about people/users than code
-understand finance/stocks
-have incredible product taste
-work will impact millions
-want to build something legendary
DM/email martin at dl dot software
Slightly/formerly technical people appear most susceptible: PMs, CEOs, VCs.
Adam MacBeth retweeted
Netscape originally thought they'd be the next Windows. But the web was a fundamentally different kind of thing that enabled all sorts of newness -- think: publishing a page for anyone in the world to read. AI will be the same.
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.”