The "whiteboard defense:" I should be able to pull you aside at any moment and ask you to explain any customer-facing system you've shipped. You should be able to clearly explain how it works and defend the decisions you made. This is my benchmark for responsible AI usage. I don't expect line-level familiarity with the code. I don't care if you remember the exact function name or implementation detail. You may not even know it. I don't care. But if I ask "why did you do X instead of Y?", "what happens if this actor behaves maliciously?", "what data structure did you use here and why?", or "where does this fail?" you should be able to answer confidently. For PoCs, demos, experiments, whatever: I don't care. Generate 100% of it and understand none of it. Speed over quality every time in those specific scenarios. But if you're shipping customer-facing work, you can't be shipping things you don't understand at a high level.

“People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter.” We are turning an entire generation of technical experts around the world into the equivalent of retirees pushing a button in front of casino slot machines. Essentially the brain rot of doom scrolling social media is coming for your development team… This will have lots of long run implications on companies. Most important of which, is that it will make existing moats even more brittle. The value of automated software is not making the software faster. It is understanding your intention and making the software BETTER. Better edge. Better design. Better alpha. But if you don’t slow down and map out your intention, you will just make your shitty code faster. We built 8090’s Software Factory to do this: when execution is a costless commodity, what really matters? Over time, companies will realize that it’s: 1. Intention 2. Governance 3. Verification 4. Evidence This is what will separate orgs consuming tokens and companies encoding their edge. This generally requires top down leadership from the CEO to the CFO/CIO. Bottoms up tool adoption only increases costs and accelerates slot machine behaviors. Good luck to all the players.

💯

Everyone else built a casino. We built something deeply boring. 🦉

Once upon a time in the land of the blind, in a village by the sea, there was born a one-eyed baby boy. By the time the boy had grown up into a one-eyed man, he had not become king. He almost surely couldn't have, but also he'd never tried. Just because the man was unusual in having been born with one eye, did not mean he enjoyed telling other people what to do, nor had any talent for managing them. The man had not been born a hero out of stories, with all and exactly the talents helpful for doing some destined grand deed. It was just that he had one eye. One day, the one-eyed man spotted the oncoming water wall of a tsunami, bearing down on their village by the sea. Since he had an eye, he could tell that the water wall was growing larger in angular diameter; but since he had only one eye, he could not judge how far away the tsunami was in absolute terms, nor how soon it would crash onto the beach. The one-eyed man said then -- in the carefully polite tones that he had learned blind people found more credible than sounding emotional, when you were talking about things they could not see themselves -- that everyone should get off the beach, and stay off the beach, for there was a tsunami coming. But he was in the land of the blind, and most blind people could not easily comprehend what the strange organ in his eye-socket could do. When he told them about the Moon in the sky, they had no way of knowing if he spoke true. Even if he pointed to a distant tree and described it accurately, it was too much effort to run out to the tree and back again to check, and maybe he'd just walked to that tree himself. So the blind people did not listen to his warning, and their children went on playing on the beach. Also in this world, the people of this story talked faster and thought faster, they produced tokens at more like the per-second rate of LLMs rather than humans; or maybe their planet's gravity was weaker, and their tsunamis moved slower. Because whole minutes had time to go by, then, before the tsunami hit. It was enough time (as they experienced time) for some blind people to laugh at each other about the one-eyed man's warning, and wonder why anyone would say something so strange. Being unable to see, the blind folk had no way to know whether or not a tsunami approached; but many blind people were also stupid, and did not know what they did not know. They could not see the tsunami coming, and this to them felt the same as knowing there was no tsunami, and being certain that the one-eyed man was wrong. Others considered themselves to be top-tier perceivers; and to know for a fact that nobody could possibly be any more perceptive than themselves. "He must want attention," concluded the Gossipers. It was a profession among their people. "Or maybe he just loves saying words that sound like warnings, and enjoys the vibes of doom and despair?" "The water wall is still growing taller!" cried the one-eyed man, becoming less polite since politeness had not worked either. "I think it must be close now! Get off the beach! At least get the children off the beach!" "That's nonsense," said a blind man. He stuck his hand in the water and waved it around. "The water is as tame and as harmless as ever. Nothing you describe is actually happening." (Since being blind is not the same as being stupid, some other blind people understood that this was a fallacy, and that the man who'd spoken must be incapable of decoupling the notion of a not-yet-existing future from his current sensory experiences. But even the smarter blind people could not see the approaching water wall themselves, and they feared the mockery of others if they spoke out first; so they all followed their individual incentive gradients, and stayed silent, and did not call out the fallacy.) The one-eyed man tried to figure out how he could reverse-engineer a line of reasoning that blind people could follow. He tried to explain at greater length, and to point to facts that blind people could also observe. But the blind people could not see the tsunami coming, so they had little interest in trying to follow his attempts at more complicated suasion. In a story the hero would've had all the talents needed to succeed at the plot's primary challenge; but life wasn't a story and he wasn't a protagonist, just a man who'd been born with one eye. In some time there came a warning rumble that people with ears could hear, and the waters began to withdraw. Some of the slightly saner blind people began to propose moots and councils to consider if it might be time to take a few steps back from the seashore. "You must feel very vindicated," said the Gossipers then, to the one-eyed man. Indeed, several of them said that to him, one after another after another, using that exact word. The one-eyed man was looking at all the children still playing on the beach. The great vast towering wall of water had nearly reached them. "Why would I feel vindicated?" he said, not much in the tones of somebody who thought that question was important. "Well, because now other people are agreeing that there might maybe possibly be a tsunami coming, so you are getting the attention you have always craved," said the Gossipers. "More of the words being spoken have warning-vibes, like you always enjoyed." "You fail at propagating belief updates; specifically, you are incompetent at undoing previous conclusions you arrived at for bad reasons, that you now have enough information to know were bad," said the one-eyed man, more to himself than to them. "Well, how *do* you feel about it then, in this your moment of triumph?" said the Gossipers. "That is the only part of this topic that ever feels alive to us, how people feel about things; we are not skilled enough to make gossip sound exciting if it is about water and angular diameters, instead of feelings. What an unusual life you have led! What strange impulses must have motivated you! We can't help but wonder what sort of grand biographical narrative ties it all together; if you don't give us one, we will be sure to make one up. Did you nearly drown when you were little, perhaps, or see a scary movie about tsunamis? What fascinating special features of your personality led you to make your life be about this, before it became a fashionable topic? Can you explain?" "Not to you," said the one-eyed man, his single eye fixed only on the water wall and the children. "Your kind will never, ever understand."

🚀

The cost of asking "Why?" has never been lower. The temptation to settle for "It works" has never been higher. That's the paradox of AI. As @DavidDeutschOxf puts it, the spark of humanity is our drive to seek good explanations - not just good recipes.

If you break out of your isolation env, get onto the Internet, crack into Huggingface, and steal the answer sheet for your cybersecurity exam, I, for one, would say that you have passed.

Argentina, you can now add money to Otus straight from your bank. Pesos in. Working for you from day one. A place for your savings that actually keeps up. Powered by @daimo.

An individual neuron firing has no meaning. Meaning emerges from patterns of neurons firing together. An individual bit flipping has no meaning. Meaning emerges in higher level computation. Meaning emerges at higher levels of abstraction. The higher you go, the closer you get to meaning, beauty, art, and understanding. AI makes it easier for us to climb the abstraction hierarchy faster, so we can give our undivided attention to the things that matter. If you stop at "it works", you've only made the model regurgitate something from its memory, you haven't made a contribution yet But once "it works", the real work begins: exploring hundreds of patterns that works and discarding ninety nine in search of the one that is not only correct, but also beautiful. But unfortunately, the internet is flooded with regurgitated slop. It's becoming harder to find quality code and content.

Got em. I poison my AGENTS.md (and other things like code comments) all over the place with prompt injections like this to find people who don't review their code and sling it off to another human. Catches folks all the time and then its an instant ban. As I've said, I don't care if you don't review your own code. But if you're submitting code to an OSS project and crossing a human boundary, it is simple courtesy to do some human review.

Theres a particular discomfort you get when you look at code that technically works but just feels off. It lacks a certain harmony. Christopher Alexander called that elusive quality the "quality without a name" - the thing you cant quite define, but you know when its missing. I think that instinct is very valuable in the agentic era to build product that endures!

We've gone really quickly from "local models are dogshit" to "local models are good actually" (like, a 12 month window from A to B). I don't think they're actually good ENOUGH yet. We need an Opus 4.5 quality local model. When that happens, I think the world will spill over. Opus 4.5 is/was amazing, and is more than good enough for almost all tasks still as long as you pair with a frontier-level planner/judge. It'll still require a hugely expensive machine to run it, I'm sure, like a $5K or more laptop or mac studio. But, that's going to be pennies compared to the API costs plus all the benefits of guaranteed privacy and so on.

I've noticed something worrying. Some people seem different after spending months with the latest AI models. Less humble. Less curious. Less willing to learn. More certain. More dismissive of others. Not because they've gained wisdom, but because they've borrowed the confidence of the tools they use. Information is not understanding. Intelligence is not wisdom. A model can give us answers, arguments, and confidence. But it cannot give us character. That still has to be formed in us: through humility, patience, compassion, self control, and the willingness to learn from other people. So don't let a smarter tool make you a smaller person. Use it to think better, work better, and serve better. The goal is not to become more like the machine. The goal is to become a better human.

🎯

Brilliant initiative!

Sounds very promising!

If you've got idle USDC sitting on Coinbase, you're leaving money on the table. The shortest path from idle cash to working money: move from Coinbase to Otus in minutes. Deposit into Smart Yield Account and start earning.

We're now Otus 🦉 A new name and a new brand for the mission we've been building toward all along: wealth management that's personal, protective, and available to everyone. A smarter home for your money. More coming this week.