👨💻 applied ai engineer ✨ making healthcare cheaper @goodbill ✋ detroiter 🎣 fly fisherman 🐶 english setter lover
Detroit, MI
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So I know Cognition doesn’t care about Little Ole’ Me, and this is just my story, so take it with a grain of salt, but here’s why I don’t think all these crazy scaling revenue numbers by coding agents are going to stick:
We’ve been happy Devin users for a while. Really like the product, and like the company. Still do! This isn’t shade at Cognition, and I’m not upset with them, just a sample of why I worry about the competitive landscape for these cos.
Anyway, our usage grew to >$100k run rate or so. I think one or two of our users even received an email congratulating them for being Top 200 users of Devin.
As usage grew, we added more capabilities and needed a BAA (layman’s terms: an agreement that says they are HIPAA compliant). This required an Enterprise contract (why a piece of paper requires extra money is a topic for another discussion, but it’s very normal…) so we started talking to their sales team.
Basically, we were going to ~1.5x our spend in order to get the BAA. Honestly, that was fine with us. We like Devin!
Our only request was to pay quarterly (already a big concession from our existing monthly payments, given our relatively small size). They declined, unless we committed to EVEN MORE usage.
Before responding, I decided to see how difficult it would be to set up Hermes to do the equivalent work as Devin, and to see what the costs were. I’d host it in our infrastructure and only use providers we already have a BAA with.
Two days.
That’s it. It’s functionally 100% equivalent. Maybe slightly better in some ways, slightly worse in others. We spend a little bit of time futzing with it, but we did that with Devin, too.
The cost is roughly 25% of Devin.
So, two days for $100k or so per year savings. All because they didn’t want us to pay quarterly.
At some point, other companies are going to catch onto this, too. So congrats on this milestone, but keep finding more ways to provide value and keep customers happy. It’s hard to compete.
Cognition has crossed $1B in annualized revenue run rate.
This milestone belongs to our customers. Here's how a few of them are building with Devin.
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This could go down in history as one of the dumbest decisions for America— and humanity.
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.
Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.
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Colleges are turning into healthcare. Expect it to get uglier before it gets better.
Net college prices have been falling, but price discrimination is getting more extreme, so sticker prices keep climbing.
For low-income families, tuition at these colleges are cheaper than ever…personalized pricing we accept with almost no pushback.
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I am in an entire row of empty treadmills by myself.
A guy just came and took the treadmill next to me.
Do we not abide by urinal rules on treadmills anymore?!
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GrokBot is really well done. Has a lot of the polish I have been wanting out of my personal agent.
But (a) I just don't trust it enough, and (b) just won't be locked into a model.
Hermes wins, still.
@Teknium, pls take some notes from Bot on the UI for desktop/mobile.
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Paper Route #219 — 47 moves
🚲 +2 over par
📰📰📰📰📰📰📰📰📰📰
paperroute.fun/
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Fable one-shotted a new game based on just three or four sentences.
Let me know what you think!
paperroute.fun
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Then a guy reads 1,300 years of Discord arguments and ships the Mac production docs.
Then another guy ports those docs to Windows.
Me explaining the Talmud to Zoomers:
“Well, it’s basically a Discord log from 1,800 years ago. Then another Discord log from about 1,500 years ago arguing over every message in the first one. Then a guy about 1,000 years ago writes the most legendary blog post explaining both. Oh, and there are also Slack logs from 1,800 years ago… and that’s how we figure out how to light the Hanukkah candles.”
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Using capitalism to make money while incorrectly disparaging capitalism.
A tale as old as time.
piped.video/watch?v=vS6HEes8…
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Increasingly convinced BYOA is the new BYOD.
Prior to the iPhone, everyone carried around 2+ phones. A dumb phone for personal and a BlackBerry for work. Then the smartphone enabled BYOD.
I think we are going to see the similar rise of BYOA (bring your own agent) in the workplace. Individuals choose whether they want an OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude Cowork, Codex, etc. Choose your preferred workflows and personalities. The company provides access to approved models and data/context, much the same as approved messaging and VPN in BYOD.
Obvious security nightmares abound, just like BYOD in 2008.
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Haley has been an exceptionally effective congresswoman for me. She is awkward, no doubt. But she is, indeed, authentic.
Proud to support her against an anti-Semite who justified a terrorist attack against Jewish preschoolers.
TMZ
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thanks to startup sdrs, there's gonna be no more 650 area code numbers left to call me soon.
block block block block block block block block block block block block block
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I want to hire Goodbill's Last Engineering Hire. The person whose sole responsibility is to build the Goodbill software factory: the infrastructure that will ultimately build the Goodbill product.
Who lives on the fringes of AI that I should be talking to?
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So many dumb vanity metrics that need to die.
Outputmaxxing > tokenmaxxing
Tokens/second data centers > GW data centers
LLM answer speed > LLM runtime
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this is the way for remote cos
We're killing the DM at @Zapier. Starting with the executive team.
We've long held Default to Transparency as a value. That value has largely encouraged communication in public channels. But as the company grew, DMs are a hard habit to resist and break.
But every DM is a gap in our Shared Brain. It's context that is lost for humans and AIs. As a result the cost of DMs keeps going up.
So earlier this year I posted about our exec transparency leaderboard. The leaderboard has become quite the competition internally…
I'm 3rd today. My co-founder @BryanHelmig has held the top spot as long as I can remember…
It sets a standard for the rest of the company. In fact, since last year we’ve seen the % of Slack messages in public channels go from 33% to 46%.
What the leaderboard measures
Transparency is a team sport, and a disinfectant. Every month we track what percentage of our execs' Slack messages happen in public channels versus private DMs.
When your CEO debates strategy in a DM, that decision is invisible to every agent and every team that needs to know what was decided and why. The decision happens but the reasoning vanishes.
When that conversation happens in a channel, it stays. New hires can search it, agents can read and verify it, etc. Your Shared Brain knows what's true now: ask it a question and the answer reflects the latest reality.
Taking It to the Next Level
Reducing DMs are one way to increase transparency and open up context for humans and AI, but there are other mechanisms that help too. Three things beyond the leaderboard:
1. Meetings get recorded, transcribed, and become queryable
2. We run a shared skills library. Anyone on the team can encode a workflow they've figured out into a skill and share with the team
3. And we keep score. It's a silly scoreboard, but it subtly drives positive behaviors
Raising Your Ambition
In order to get the most of AI in your company, the AIs need context. So making your context queryable is one of the most practical moves you can make to improve the effectiveness of your AI agents.
P.S. I’m coming for #1, Bryan...
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