"I Want Your Product to Enable My Agent" - Ep 01

Recorded September 21, 2026. Sunil and Rhys join the Jevolution. Sunil explains the Senior Engineer Death Spiral, the blog post that blew up his DMs (and annoyed capital-E Engineers on Hacker News). Rhys looks back on YC and shows off his latest workflow. And we definitely do not talk about AI safety.

Recorded August 24, 2026. Special guest Michelle Chen answers our questions about inference. The AI industry lights money on fire. Sunil plans his LLM prepper era. Rhys takes the week off, preparing for YC Demo Day! LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER Executor (Rhys's company) https://executor.sh Y Combinator Demo Day https://www.ycombinator.com/demoday Michelle Chen on X https://x.com/michellechen Love Island S8 villa tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2gjF5NFQng Cloudflare Workers AI https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-ai/ Cloudflare AI Gateway https://www.cloudflare.com/products/ai-gateway/ Cloudflare AI Search https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-search/ Models on Workers AI https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/models/ Cloudflare/NVIDIA GPU blog post (2021) https://blog.cloudflare.com/bringing-ai-to-the-edge/ Dane Knecht, Cloudflare CTO on X https://x.com/dok2001 Birthday week https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/birthday-week/ Unifying Workers AI and AI Gateway https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-ai-gateway-unification/ Z.ai / Zhipu (GLM) https://z.ai Hugging Face https://huggingface.co Cloudflare R2 https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ SGLang https://x.com/sgl_project vLLM https://docs.vllm.ai OpenRouter model discounts https://openrouter.ai/models?discount=true DeepSeek https://www.deepseek.com Moonshot AI (Kimi) https://www.moonshot.ai Moondream https://moondream.ai OpenAI io (Jony Ive) https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ SlopCodeBench (aka "SlopBench") https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents/blob/main/benchmarking-opus-5-on-slop-code-bench.md The Next Token Ep 03 (AI psychosis) https://youtu.be/2bE93tynluk Ox Alpha/GLM-5.3 Flash https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2092616204787626030 The subreddit for Sunil https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ Solarpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk AMD Instinct https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct.html Jensen Huang was once a Denny's waiter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-billionaire-ceo-went-denny-145530671.html CUDA https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit Wafer (GPUSteve's company) https://www.wafer.ai/ NVIDIA Blackwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_(microarchitecture) NVIDIA Hopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_(microarchitecture) Black Forest Labs Flux.1-dev https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev NVIDIA Vera Rubin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_(microarchitecture) ZIRP era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy Q-commerce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-commerce Cloudflare Durable Objects https://developers.cloudflare.com/durable-objects/ Kenton Varda continues to be right 6 months ago https://x.com/kentonvarda Sparkles emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkles_emoji Community, the Greendale flag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEjIzKZ4wOA Sunil's new role https://x.com/threepointone/status/2088272607804039274 Sunil's builder-in-residence role https://sunilpai.dev/posts/the-task-isnt-the-job/ Sunil on software factories https://x.com/threepointone/status/2091167009669075314 Max Kreminski https://mkremins.github.io/ SUBSCRIBE Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts GUEST Michelle Chen - https://x.com/michellechen - https://blog.cloudflare.com/author/michelle/ HOSTS Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/ Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/ The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/

Recorded August 7, 2026. We explore AI alignment & safety, Rhys demos his workflow, and we end up mentioning a lot of books.

Recorded August 3, 2026. We discuss burnout, Claudeisms sneaking into regular speech, chip butties, how to watch movies, and what brings us joy. LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER A VESSEL FOR CLAUDE Rhys "vessel for Claude" tweet - https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2072968219741278582 Dolly/zoom shot from "Jaws" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_mAvHu9E4 /bro https://github.com/backnotprop/bro "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlön,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-Tl%C3%B6n-Uqbar-Orbius-Tertius.pdf Ficciones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones Empirical evidence of Large Language Model's influence on human spoken communication https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754 Bill Oliver's likely-LLM-generated speech https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/bill-oliver-ai-legislature-reaction-9.7296118

Recorded July 17, 2026. We settle the model-access bet. We talk about how the labs talk to us, plus extend an open invite for OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Thinking Machines to come on the show and be specific about their best-case scenarios about how AI makes the world better. Thinking Machines ships an American open-weight model. And then Dillon fires the slop cannon, walking us through his agentic workflow, while a package he technically did not order shows up. LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER NEWS & DISCUSSION Rhys on his first weeks with the model (X) https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2076353287507562728?s=20 OpenAI comms example (Thomas Sottiaux) https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2075641131002700120?s=20 Anthropic / Claude Developers post https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2077603834453770467?s=20 Anthropic's July 15 "reset" note https://x.com/claudeai/status/2075271759289303522?s=20 Introducing Inkling (Thinking Machines) https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/ Xiaoyin Qu's Thinking Machines thesis (X) https://x.com/quxiaoyin/status/2077799672886792578?s=46 Cloudflare's Workers AI https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-ai/ "The Future Worth Building Is Human" (Thinking Machines manifesto) https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/the-future-worth-building-is-human/ "The Use of Knowledge in Society," Friedrich Hayek https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html "The Bitter Lesson," Rich Sutton http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html Ramp's PorTAL fine-tuning https://x.com/RampLabs/status/2072383318516187380 The A-Team (not five Mr. T's) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A-Team Hawaii Five-O (maybe what Sunil was thinking of when he said Miami Five-O, but really meant The A-Team…it happens) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Five-O_(1968_TV_series) John's of Bleecker Street pizza https://johnsofbleecker.com/ Local First Conf 2026 https://www.localfirstconf.com/ Dan Ingalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ingalls