Things I read this week

Comfy Router is live One API for frontier image, video, 3D, and audio models. Same model string. Same arguments. No new SDK, no new key, no redeploy. What Comfy Router gives you: → Explicit routing. You name the provider, we call that provider. It's down? The request fails there. No silent fallback. → Every job returns the provider that ran it. Log it, bill it, debug it. → Async. submit() returns a request ID immediately. The queue retries 429s and transient errors until a slot opens. subscribe() submits and polls to completion. → Batch-friendly. Queue a few hundred jobs, hold the IDs, pull results as they land. Nothing blocking on a 5-min video render. → 24h retention on inputs and outputs, then deleted. → Comfy credits. No sub, no Router fee. Providers at launch: Comfy. Runware, Wavespeed, Fal, Higgsfield. Multi-provider where the model supports it. Get Your API Key with the link below. ⬇️

Getting the size of the market right doesn’t tell you who captures the most value. Introducing AI Perez: our attempt to make sense of shifting bottlenecks, and who benefits, through Carlota Perez’s framework. ai-perez-curve.vercel.app

Introducing Cline Desktop - a native interface for working with open weights models. Use with ClinePass and all our free models like DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, Musespark-1.3, or BYOK with any provider!

Periodically, I try to share my favorite corners of the internet. This round, I’ve learned how North America went from 144 time zones to 4, LEGO games' realistic environments, and what if every election went the other way.

Josh's insight here is unique because he's had the best seat in the house for years. The browser is both a utility and a leisure tool, and the team at @browsercompany has seen exactly how people use it. Consumers want their leisure amplified. They don't want productivity! Productivity has to be found, and finding it is *work*. Education is work. DIY is work. And an agent asking you a question is really the agent handing you a microtask. Very few people want to manage and even fewer want to be interrupted in order to do it. It's the same reason notifications have such a narrow band where they help before they annoy. Meanwhile the For You page is the most successful consumer agent ever built and yet no one calls it one. It runs inference on your behalf constantly, makes thousands of decisions a session, and asks you for absolutely nothing. That's where consumer is headed. Companies using AI to spoonfeed people more of the leisure they already want, not doling out microtasks.

We've been asked why Cline works better with open weights models like DeepSeek than other harnesses and want to share some detail (more in our blog below). Our internal evals show that many open weights models like DeepSeek, GLM, and Kimi are RL trained to spend more tokens verifying their work: run tests, check the build, re-read diffs before completing. We believe this is how they were able to close the gap with closed model performance. Meanwhile closed models and their harnesses tend to optimize for efficiency and fewer tokens (which makes sense when massively subsidizing subscription plans). So we've been intentional in building the Cline harness to let the model work however it was trained to work. At open weights pricing, the baked-in paranoia burning extra tokens verifying work gets significantly better results for less money. In our benchmark runs, we've seen ~20% gains over competing harnesses just from changes that let the model lean into its RL training.

We are making the updated DeepSeek V4-Flash 0731 free in Cline. This is the first flash model we've found performs at SOTA levels, and are excited for you to feel the new frontier. 1. npm i -g cline 2. Open /settings > Cline provider 3. Select deepseek-v4-flash

visions of a perfect summer party @PaceCap

Frontier docs.google.com/document/d/1…

Dialectic 52: @jackconte! Jack is not an entrepreneur who makes art on the side. He is a lifelong artist and musician who became the unlikely founder and CEO of @patreon, the only company he has ever worked for. At his (musical) peak, Jack was releasing 100 music videos a year between his bands @pomplamoose and @scarypockets while building one of the few enduring creator platforms on the web. He started Patreon to solve his own problem as a full-time YouTuber: he wanted fans to pay him directly for his work rather than accepting a dashboard that told him 3 million views were worth $18. Patreon is rare amongst its peers: it's a platform built first and foremost for creators, not consumers. It makes money when creators get paid. Jack believes that incentive alignment has helped Patreon earn creators’ long-term trust, and will help it endure as mediums, technology, and platforms evolve. I talked to Jack about all of this and more: - creative endurance and becoming “post-chaos” - why Silicon Valley undervalues art, brand, and storytelling - why art isn't content and getting paid isn’t selling out - creator-first incentives, trust, and 100 years of Patreon - why Jack is still the right CEO after 13 years - leadership: ambition, obsession, self-reflection, and learning from people better than you - Charlie Kaufman, authenticity, and making fans - lucid dreaming and taking more risks Timestamps: (0:00) - Opening Highlights (1:38) - Intro to Jack & Thanks to Notion (3:44) - Start: Prolific Output, Energy, Juggling, Endurance, and Becoming Post-Chaos (22:04) - Combining Creativity and Business and Art vs. Content (33:21) - Advertising vs. Membership & Patronage vs. Patreon (44:06) - Jack’s First and Only Job, and Silicon Valley’s Undervaluing of Creativity, Brand, and Storytelling (and Patreon) (55:17) - Building for Creators First, Incentive Alignment, Trust, 100 Years of Patreon, and Why Jack Is the Right CEO for Now (1:04:49) - Leadership: Types of Ambition, Obsession, Self-Reflection, Bias to Action, and Learning from Others (1:12:59) - Talent vs. Enthusiasm, Being Proud of What You Make, Making Fans and Being True, Managing Parasociality, and Community (1:28:30) - Filmmaking, Labels and Collectives vs. Individuals, Breaking Patterns, Creative Intimacy, Music, Patreon’s Origin, Persistence, Lucid Dreaming, and Taking Risks (1:49:26) - Thanks Again to Notion @dialecticpod Ep. 52: Jack Conte - Draw the Next Page - is out now, below and on all platforms.

Introducing AI Game Theory: An interactive sandbox that explores power and leverage between players in the AI economy. Every CEO or investor you meet has a built-in bias shaped by their vantage point. The goal of this project is to make those incentives more legible.

We believe the future is many models, many harnesses, local AND cloud. Beyond excited to partner with one of my favorite products to build the future of open AI @ollama 💫

Big day for Ollama! When we started, open models and the open source AI ecosystem were in their early days with few believers. Our belief in open source has never wavered. With today's fundraising announcement and our 9M+ active builders, we’re ready to scale open models into AI that you can own. All aboard open models! 🧵

We just launched Comfy MCP in public beta, the first MCP built for production pipelines. Connect Claude, Codex, Cursor, or Hermes to the entire ComfyUI ecosystem. → Run any workflow in natural language → Search models, nodes, and templates → Share a workflow URL - your agent picks it up → Re-run saved workflows on new inputs without touching a single node → Hundreds of pre-built workflows. Always auto-updated 20 product-placement images for your brand ads. Character design for your game art. Script-to-shot ideation at scale and so on! Your agent is now a creative technologist.

Annual NYC summer party, presented by @PaceCap. This year's theme is: SUMMER HALLUCINATIONS, an antidote to AI psychosis. Tools will be provided for a return to reality. DM for invite.

AI has two timelines