You've heard the complaints about AI slop. The generic LinkedIn posts. The Twitter threads that all sound the same. The flood of content that exists because it's now almost free to make. Everyone's pointing at the public version of this problem, the stuff strangers scroll past on their feeds. Nobody's talking about the slop we make for ourselves. Here's what I mean. The same thing that makes public AI slop so easy to produce (low effort, instant output, a little hit of delight every time) is...
4 days ago • 2 min read
Most of us ask AI to do the one thing it's worst at. We ask it to decide. "Which vendor should I pick?" "Is this a good hire?" "Should we raise prices?" And it answers instantly, confidently, in a clean paragraph. The problem is that the confident paragraph is often the shallow one. Here's how to fix that, and it takes about thirty extra seconds. First, the proof it matters. Researchers gave a top AI model a farmer's question: plant apples or grapefruit next year? The model saw that...
5 days ago • 2 min read
Yesterday a portfolio manager I work with sent me a link. "Free trial," she wrote. "Tell me what you think. Is this actually useful, or am I paying for ChatGPT in a trench coat?" She'd signed up for a new investment research platform. Pick a public company and you get a bull case, bear case, list of risks, questions for management, a multi-year financial story, earnings review, and relevant podcasts. All sourced from the standard stuff: EDGAR, earnings transcripts, proxies, podcasts. Her...
6 days ago • 2 min read
Last Friday at 5:21pm ET, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. By Saturday morning, the company's two most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, were offline everywhere in the world. Five days from launch to global shutdown. That's the headline. The actual story is messier, more interesting, and a lot more relevant to how you should plan your AI roadmap for the next twelve months. Let me start by clearing up what actually happened, because the early...
7 days ago • 3 min read
I was listening to an a16z podcast this week, two economists going back and forth on what AI does to an economy. The optimistic case goes like this. Productivity jumps, goods get cheaper, we do far more in far less time, and a lot of that surplus comes back to us as leisure. Jobs keep growing too, though they were honest that the transition will be rough, and nobody can tell you which jobs survive it and which ones get invented on the other side. Then one of them said something that stuck...
10 days ago • 2 min read
I spent last week building an investment deck for a client. The raw material was a pile of research reports. The output needed to be a branded PowerPoint that looked like it came from inside their firm, not from a random consultant with a Canva account. If you've ever tried to get an LLM to spit out a polished, branded deck, you know how this usually goes. The content is fine. The formatting is a disaster. Here's what I tried. Attempt 1. I worked in Claude, pointed it at the folder of...
11 days ago • 1 min read
Their names are Aaron Sorkin, Andy Sachs, Hemingway, Darwin, Ted Lasso, and Archivist. They're agents I built inside Claude. Each one has a role, a personality, a set of files they own, and a clear job. Aaron Sorkin is my chief of staff. He directs everything. When I throw something into the void at 11pm, he decides whether it's an Andy problem, a Hemingway problem, or something I actually need to handle myself. Andy Sachs runs operations. She tracks my Notion CRM, drafts invoices, watches my...
12 days ago • 1 min read
You ask for research. You get a confident-sounding wall of text. The numbers feel right. The framing is fine. But you cannot quite tell where any of it came from, and you would not bet a client meeting on it. I had that feeling one too many times this month, so I ran a small experiment. Same research brief, different tools. The question: what is it actually like to work at SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla? I wanted real numbers from Glassdoor, Indeed, and Blind. Ratings, work-life balance, culture,...
13 days ago • 2 min read
When Steve Jobs walked onstage in 2007 and held up the iPhone, nobody in that room could have pitched you Uber. The people in that room weren't short on imagination. The thing that made Uber possible (a supercomputer in your pocket that always knew where you were) was just so new that no one had lived with it long enough to see what it unlocked. The phone had to sit in our hands for a few years first. Then, in 2010, somebody asked a question that made no sense in 2007: what if a stranger's...
14 days ago • 2 min read