James Young

NEW EPISODE: @jack & @roelofbotha unpack @blocks 40% staff cut and rebuilding the entire company as a mini-AGI. This isn’t “use AI to make people more productive.” It’s making the company itself the intelligence. If you’re a founder or operator wondering what work looks like in the next 5 years… this is the episode. The evolution looks like: • Manager mode = Pyramid 🔺 (command & control) • Founder mode = Flat ➖(founders decide fast) • Dorsey mode = Circle 🔵 w/ AI at the center, humans at the edge, and decisions flow from customer inputs → AI → humans steering it I’ve tried killing org charts before. Brutally hard. But we never had these tools. This is rewriting the CEO playbook for the AI era. Buckle up. 00:00 Existential Dread & Hope 02:56 AI Replaces Hierarchy 07:22 Block’s New Three Roles 26:47 Flattening the Company, Fast 35:23 Getting the Board to Buy-In, Fast 36:50 Building a Great Board 41:29 Founder CEO Lessons 48:18 Second Acts & Conviction 56:22 Timeless CEO Traits

My self-sovereign / local / private / secure LLM setup, April 2026 vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/0…

My conversation with @jliemandt on why the future of education is better than you think. 0:00 The current education system 7:01 What makes Alpha School different 11:01 What are the results 23:20 Current classroom struggles 26:40 What does mastery mean? 35:37 Changing the education system 39:19 Teaching through AI 44:27 How do you solve motivation? 57:01 What makes a good teacher? 1:01:04 Coaching 1:05:17 What life skills matter? 1:08:18 Doing hard things 1:13:25 AI Monitoring 1:21:08 Effort vs. IQ 1:24:40 What happens after Alpha School? 1:38:21 The Genius of Jack Welch 1:45:49 Trilogy IPO: the choice to not go public 1:51:40 Physical vs. virtual learning 2:03:18 Does Paying Kids To Learn work? 2:11:01 What Is Success For You? (Includes paid partnerships)

I wanted to share a bunch of my favorite hidden and under-utilized features in Claude Code. I'll focus on the ones I use the most. Here goes.

Tip of the day for Hermes Agent users!

@Teknium 🫡 it works!

Our cryptographic researcher @alexand_belling revealed yesterday at @eth_proofs that Linea is moving to RISC-V. After 3 years of directly arithmetizing the EVM, producing a 1000+ page spec and one of the most rigorous proving system in production, we’re changing course. Here’s why 🧵

The Hermes Deep Dive. (The new hot AI agent harness). docs.google.com/document/d/1sZ… Hey @Teknium got anything to add?

- Drafted a blog post - Used an LLM to meticulously improve the argument over 4 hours. - Wow, feeling great, it’s so convincing! - Fun idea let’s ask it to argue the opposite. - LLM demolishes the entire argument and convinces me that the opposite is in fact true. - lol The LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.

A very special guest on this episode of the Lightcone! @bcherny, the creator of Claude Code, sits down to share the incredible journey of developing one of the most transformative coding tools of the AI era. 00:00 Intro 01:45 The most surprising moment in the rise of Claude Code 02:38 How Boris came up with the idea for Claude Code 05:38 The elegant simplicity of terminals 07:09 The first use cases 09:00 What’s in Boris’ CLAUDE.md? 11:29 How do you decide the terminal’s verbosity? 15:44 Beginner’s mindset is key as the models improve 18:56 Hyper specialists vs hyper generalists 21:51 The vision for Claude teams 23:48 Subagents 25:12 A world without plan mode? 28:38 Tips for founders to build for the future 30:07 How much life does the terminal still have? 30:57 Advice for dev tool founders 32:11 Claude Code and TypeScript parallels 35:34 Designing for the terminal was hard 37:36 Other advice for builders 40:31 Productivity per engineer 41:36 Why Boris chose to join Anthropic 44:46 How coding will change 46:22 Outro

We’re releasing SAM 3.1: a drop-in update to SAM 3 that introduces object multiplexing to significantly improve video processing efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. We’re sharing this update with the community to help make high-performance applications feasible on smaller, more accessible hardware. 🔗 Model Checkpoint: go.meta.me/8dd321 🔗 Codebase: go.meta.me/b0a9fb

Okay, @gdb is team CLI all the way. @garrytan thinks MCPs suck. So we hit the streets of SF to see if the city agreed. We posed a simple question: MCP or CLI? - Basically everyone under the age of 35 said CLI - One person said MCP was as bloated as Java - & unsurprisingly, numerous people told us to touch grass Final score- MCP: 3 vs CLI: 17 SF has spoken, and @composio listened. Our universal CLI is now live! Drop your best CLI vs MCP hot take in the comments and we'll send the best ones some very sick gear 👀 Link to try our CLI in the next thread ⬇️

E/ACC vs. D/ACC: THE DEBATE @VitalikButerin thinks slowing down AGI by four years is worth it. @beffjezos thinks that's exponential opportunity cost. They debated it live, moderated by @eddylazzarin and @shawmakesmagic. 00:00 Opening 07:02 Thermodynamics and first principles 16:04 Acceleration, entropy, and civilization 28:29 The core disagreement 32:42 Comparing and contrasting e/acc and d/acc 36:20 Open source, open hardware, and local intelligence 54:18 Should AI be slowed down? 1:02:35 Autonomous agents and artificial life 1:21:07 Crypto as the trust layer between humans and AI 1:35:37 Closing arguments

🤔Time to think... In "Social Aims," Emerson wrote, “What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.” These words suggest, at least to me, something interesting about the output of LLMs." psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-di…

The agent economy is growing fast, but identity, trust, and skills infrastructure are still siloed across every platform that builds it. We're partnering with @HashgraphOnline to change that. We'll be collaborating on open specifications for agent identity, trust scores, and skill evaluation.

Introducing TurboQuant: Our new compression algorithm that reduces LLM key-value cache memory by at least 6x and delivers up to 8x speedup, all with zero accuracy loss, redefining AI efficiency. Read the blog to learn how it achieves these results: goo.gle/4bsq2qI

📰 @Mastercard and @Google just launched Verifiable Intent — a cryptographic trust layer for AI agent transactions. This is a big moment. Here's why it matters for the future of identity. 🧵