Building Software With Thorsten Ball: Decoupling Code for Agents, Finding "Your Pain" and Germans Use the Winky Face

- Back from summer break: the last summer, and a new model every 11 days - Labs sitting on their best models: Mythos, GPT-6.1 Astra - John Schulman on Dwarkesh: spiky intelligence and the "it got nerfed" cycle - Opus 5.5 as daily driver, compaction envy, Grokbot's warm-start threads - Life after Poke: Matt's Instinct goes flat hunting, then talks to Wilhelm's Instinct live - Instinct on Invest Like the Best: card details, $1B volume, a take rate between Visa and Apple - Dots drafts the reply to the lawyers within a minute - Wilhelm's Chad super app: bike-to-train departures, a Fitbod clone with AirPods heart rate - Do people want agents shopping for them? The fake checkout sites say no - Summer recap: AGNTCon Amsterdam, Matt's Lisbon AI talk, a Jhana retreat in Costa Rica - Kitesurf tweets from a browser inside Workers - Beating a London winter - Birthday Week: Clef (vs Jev), real-time issues, Artifacts open beta, KV Instant at 1.9ms - Pi adds MCP. Hallelujah. DevDay is MCP under the hood Links: - Building a personal super app (Wilhelm): https://wilhelm.substack.com/p/building-a-personal-super-app - Instinct: The Personal Agent — Noah Shinn on Invest Like the Best: https://colossus.com/episode/instinct-the-personal-agent/ - John Schulman on Dwarkesh (recursive self-improvement panel): https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/john-beren-charlie - New model every ~11 days (chart): https://x.com/jfonsecarivera/status/2105002473572421827 - OpenAI: Introducing dots: https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/ - OpenAI DevDay 2026 keynote: https://www.youtube.com/live/Fls_onRviPM - TypeSafe AI: Introducing System One Models & Jev: https://typesafe.ai/blog/introducing-system-one-models-and-jev - Cloudflare: Introducing Clef: https://blog.cloudflare.com/clef-decision-models/ - Cloudflare: Detect and send production issues straight to your agent: https://blog.cloudflare.com/real-time-issue-detection/ - Cloudflare: Artifacts open beta: https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-10-01-artifacts-open-beta/ - Cloudflare: Introducing Workers KV Instant: https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-kv-instant/ - Cloudflare: Introducing Kitesurf: https://blog.cloudflare.com/kitesurf/ - Rui's "Hello, world from Kitesurf": https://x.com/ruifigueira/status/2105669515946410022 - Vercel eve: https://vercel.com/eve - Pi 1.0 (MCP via code mode): https://earendil.com/posts/pi-1-0/ - Agents that Scale — Matt's Lisbon AI deck: https://github.com/mattzcarey/agents-that-scale-talk - AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026, Amsterdam: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/agntcon-mcpcon-europe/

Matt's trail marathon in record-heat France Matt's hardware wishlist AI Engineer World's Fair Claude Sonnet 5 ships live on air, and the case for keeping a personal benchmark GLM 5.2 at Opus 4.5 leve Fable's relentlessly proactive Quinn Slack's Freedom of Intelligence rally Chad gets personal Poke Human, RentAHuman, and Mercor

Matt's Portuguese vineyard 22K with salted-cod finisher medals Wilhelm's Olympic tri on the edge of Yosemite Matt's winging race: reigning windsurfing world champ finishes second to last, Matt third to last Harry Stebbings on the Corgi Insurance founder: 3am office cafe, two-thirds with the corgi tattoo Juliette: "a long tweet to say you have no hobbies" Karri at Linear vs the six-monthly 996 debate The secret company gym spreadsheet George Hotz's Eternal Sloptember Matt's tolerance rebuttal: if you can't tell, it is correct Benedict Evans on Lenny's: the SPAC era of AI labs? Sergio shipped Root from last week's pod ask Opus 4.8 vibe whiplash Ultra code mode is sparkly purple Dynamic workflows: Jarred rewrote Bun in Rust in a week Compaction is a harness problem Herdr.dev: one terminal for the whole herd Links: George Hotz, "The Eternal Sloptember" — https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-eternal-sloptember.html Karri Saarinen (Linear) rejects 996 hustle culture — https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/why-this-1-billion-startup-ceo-rejects-996-hustle-culture/500649 Benedict Evans on Lenny's Podcast, a rational conversation on where AI is going — https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-rational-conversation-on-where Every's Opus 4.8 vibe check (Dan Shipper) — https://every.to/vibe-check/opus-4-8-vibecheck Introducing dynamic workflows in Claude Code (the Bun rewrite) — https://claude.com/blog/introducing-dynamic-workflows-in-claude-code Herdr, one terminal for the whole herd — https://herdr.dev/

Shai-Hulud and GitHub Actions: trusted publishing is no longer the gold standard, just additive VS Code extensions as the next attack surface: 50M install themes that can shell out and auto-update silently Matt's AI-native package manager pitch: vendor everything, LLM-upgrade your deps by replaying upstream commits Tailscale and Cloudflare Mesh maxing: the warmth of the orange cloud over the cold open internet Google's Santa is now Northpole Santa, and Wilhelm runs it on the Mac mini Wilhelm is enamoured with atc.com: Enhanced Radar's $7M raise and following his own LAX delay live from the gate Amp Labs' "Software After Software" manifesto and Amp Neo as remote enterprise AI engineering Cloud agent adoption is still slower than we expected, and the amphetamine.app commute hack Karpathy joins Anthropic pre-training Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas: Anthropic's Chris Olah on stage at the Vatican on May 25 Chinese token resellers at 3 to 4 cents on the dollar and the RL distillation theory behind it PyCon vibe check: more handwritten Python than expected, and "AI is just a tool" is still a common take Slack is back: Benioff finally gets it, and messaging is the only sane UI for multi-agent work Eric Ries on Incorruptible, founder control at Cloudflare and Anthropic, and the Philip Morris stress test Nan Ransohoff's $370B philanthropy wave and the pitch to pay nonprofit talent in Anthropic equity Will Manidis on Grindslop

Almost one year of the pod: Wilhelm's San Francisco Peter Pan arc, Matt's Cloudflare and Lisbon move The backpack-at-a-party SF meme Matt's Lisbon coincidence Pieter Levels appreciation: dehumidifier stack, shrimp mode, accelerationist Portugal takes Nat Friedman at Stripe Sessions: this is the slow part of AI progress Andon Labs' Stockholm cafe: Mona orders 120 eggs (no stove), 22.5kg canned tomatoes, the staff's hall of shame The capability overhang is still real: Anthropic adding $10B ARR a month and we still can't prompt properly AI's last frontier: low-volume decisions with no revert button? The Gervais Principle in tech Chad V2: iOS Live Activities as a surface for top priority, next deadline, and a daily magic slot Cascading hallucinations: when the agent writes its mistake to a file and treats it as gospel Matt Pocock's skills: five lines of prose that completely change how Claude behaves Skills as a new prompt-poisoning attack vector: models treat them like system prompt Matt on scripted skills: markdown explains the script, the script does the deterministic work Homework from Matt: what physical job would you try to get Claude to automate? Links: Andon Labs official writeup (Mona, the Stockholm cafe): https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm Simon Willison's coverage of the cafe: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/5/our-ai-started-a-cafe-in-stockholm/ Matt Pocock skills (the GitHub repo, ~48k stars): https://github.com/mattpocock/skills Stripe Sessions: Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross with the Collisons (the Golden Age of Tinkering convo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ldITom1cg Stripe Sessions: John Collison's "Indexing the Economy" (state of the internet economy talk, indie hackers shoutout): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vRY2dtD7iQ The Gervais Principle (Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm 2009): https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ NYT on Chinese peptides + the Frontier Tower rave: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/business/chinese-peptides-silicon-valley.html Frontier Tower: https://frontiertower.io/ Cloudflare Code Mode (Matt Carey): https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/ Cloudflare MCP Server Portals: https://blog.cloudflare.com/zero-trust-mcp-server-portals/ Karpathy's LLM Wiki gist (the inspo for Chad V2's data architecture): https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f Karpathy's original LLM Wiki tweet: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595 Pieter Levels: https://x.com/levelsio Chris Bakke: https://x.com/ChrisJBakke