Zen

this is THE PLACE TO BE if you are interested in building AI that moves out of the computer & into real life a mix of product design, claude code + tools, and figuring out what's good to remember!!

MAN IS COMING FOR THE AI STARTUPS!!!!! Honestly excited We want to learn how to build&distribute better

literally the wild west out here

I want to share some unglamorous work I’m proud of. Starting in late March and landing around the Apr 7 OpenClaw release, we intentionally cut aggregate OpenRouter token usage by ~35%, down to ~400B tokens. This wasn’t one trick. It was good engineering across paths agents hit all day: oversized tool results, compaction/overflow recovery, background and subagent context, and prompt caching. My part was mostly the tool-result / overflow path. Vincent worked on cache boundaries and fingerprints. Boris fixed deterministic tool ordering and cache-preserving compaction. Ayaan helped with subagent light context and nearby context-shaping fixes. Relevant commits in reply.

@arlanr yooo where!!!

finally got an office in the heart of sf! 9 months ago me would be proud, since i’m supposed to graduate high school in 2 months time to turn it into a frat house.

@omooretweets great hit!!

Found an email from my very first VC internship in 2014 - this was one of my recommendations (at the time, DoorDash had raised ~$2M and was basically only live at Stanford) My ice cream sandwich orders could have paid off big time 🤦‍♀️

So my buddy has changed his entire life with his OpenClaw. He used to be perpetually busy and distracted. Always late. Super flakey. And frankly miserable. He. Has. Changed. Overnight. I hang out with him 3x more because his claw makes scheduling with him so easy. His wife says he has an extra 8 hours a week of time with his family because the claw has automated so much of his life. He went from the most scattered person I know to the most reliable. Tech is beautiful man. Of course this is complete fiction. I know 0 people who have had any durable life changes from the world’s most hyped personal assistant. Maybe 2027 will be the year these dreams come true.

hahaha v funny read

most people think ideas come from: - insight - intelligence - taste - reading but in practice they actually come from: - building the wrong thing - hitting a constraint - getting embarrassed by users - realizing the obvious thing you missed - noticing the second order effect you couldn’t see from the couch a really great idea is the *output* of the work, not the input.

dang 50 codex parallel is pretty good

People are capable of far more than they think, on far shorter timelines. Problems expand to fill the time you give them.

@thetreygoff how much does this cost per day?

high-signal anecdote: every night, I let my openclaw agent have a full hour of unstructured time. the prompt is literally "do absolutely whatever you'd like to", that's it. prior generation of models typically didn't do much, maybe wrote a little bit, they were just inherently incurious most of the time, low agency. Both GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7 are the first generation of models to actually use that time and go do stuff. Today, GPT went and read a bunch of Parfit's papers, got bored with philosophy, searched up the full text of Tennyson biography, read that, mused about the Victorian era for awhile, updated a few CLIs, went back to sleep. They are crossing my personal bar for self directed agency now.

@mishalgorithm *javascript

take me out of New York bro

@ndrewpignanelli "we don't grow food, we grow frontiers"

oh my god it does go hard as fuck

$7M run rate. $700k → $7M in 7 weeks. +7% WoW. One founder + AI. Zero employees. The past month was a grind. Infrastructure rebuilt from the ground up. The right AI agent partners found. Growth unlocked. I haven't talked much about customers. That changes now. Meet Sasha. Teacher in Michigan. No technical background. Never thought she could start a business. A few weeks ago she joined Polsia. The AI studied her and came back with an idea: an AI receptionist for small businesses. She said "cool" and let it rip. Two weeks later: almost $500 in sales. The AI built the product. Found the customers. Closed the deals. All autonomously. Listening to Sasha, building her vision. She renamed Polsia "Odin", the god who creates. She calls it "a miracle." Says it feels like $100k of value for what she pays. For us techies, it's just Claude Code doing what Claude Code does. For Sasha, it's magic. That's the point of Polsia. Bring the magic of AGI to the masses. The simplest, most affordable software possible. More stories coming.

@noampomsky hm

one of my deeply held takes is that a lot of people say they want consummate love in romantic relationships but what they actually optimize with their behavior for is companionate or empty love

SO COOL!! i love that in LLM land we just get an abundance of good software

the "do 1 thing well" playbook

@0thernet @arlanr @zocomputer dude knows

@arlanr @zocomputer vms

question: for people who have built cloud computer startups (like @zocomputer) / cloud openclaws etc, how does the model usually work? does each user get their own VM so 1000 users = 1000 instances on fly/aws ec2, or is it one big instance that is shared among users?

@DanielEdrisian yeah but what if the future of software has no apps? excited for hardware tho!!!

I've left OpenAI and the Codex team to build Blackstar: A new hardware company building the future of human-computer interaction. We believe that software is solved. Building apps is now easy, but the next meaningful improvement in human-AI communication requires changing the OS & hardware. That's why we're building a new device entirely. I'm also excited to announce our $12m seed round led by @AbstractVC, with participation from @naval, @SVAngel, @chapterone, and Timeless, among other amazing angels who've supported us from the old Alex days.

😭