Avni

✨What if the most radical thing AI can do for us is not DO the things for us, faster and ever efficient, but rather push us to choose what is most meaningful and then make the space for us to do it ourselves? ted.com/talks/avni_pat…

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka

A startup doesn't have to be your life's work, but if it is, you become much harder to defeat. You play the long game and you outlast everyone. Because practically everyone else is an opportunist by comparison.

I recently started a weekly ritutal of actually going through my bookmarks stash from the prior week and jotting down notes. 💡 five ideas from past week I think are worth spending some time with: 1. 🦾 A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age (@demishassabis) 2. 🎩 Normal is forgotten. Only weird survives. (@george__mack ) 3. 📝 A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird (@DKThomp) 4. 💼 You Just Hired a Million Bad Employees (@gsivulka) 5. 🏘️ The Future Worth Building is Human (@miramurati)

Mephisto, by Joaquín Espalter y Rull, 1872, 📸 by Dan Mullan

One of the more subtle pitfalls of starting a startup when you're too young is that you can't hire well, because you haven't had enough experience to be a good judge of people. You can judge technical ability but not character, so you end up hiring smart jerks.

This is such a brilliant ad for Waymo that shares an optimistic story of technology. 10/10.

😂 (also hitting too close to home 🫣)

this week's must read piece for me. it's reframed how I think about loops entirely and to see that the core hasn't changed: how to have a clear north star to drive the most impactful progress in as short a period of time - whether it's humans, or now tokens.

Refreshingly concrete proposal. I'm most interested in the benchmarks we'll need to develop to evaluate the capabilities. And how these benchmarks expand from verifiable domains into complex relational domains. But first, we have to begin. And this is a great place to start.

The new development cycle in one image.

ideal prompting technique is: - thin prompts - thick artifacts + context - thin skills

The irony of working with LLMs right now: It's easier than ever to tackle the most ambitious things you can imagine, even as it's getting harder to expend the effort of doing the individual things well.

A writing student asked me if it's okay to use AI to "structure" his ideas—not to "write" but "just to "structure." Very gently, but with all the passion in my heart, I said, "No." And then I spoke with him about why: Structuring a piece of writing *is* writing. Imagine if whatever made the Universe had said, "I just need something else to structure all this stuff." The act of structuring, of finding forms—whether it takes hours of inspiration or years of study (and it takes both)—is the unique chance to find out who you are, why you create, and what creation is. Don't take that away from yourself. If you do, soon there will be nothing in you—nothing unique, nothing ancient, nothing new—to structure at all.

As effective context management continues to grow in importance, I think we’ll see whole jobs where someone is responsible for constantly reviewing and improving the company level context. Making it as succinct and yet encompassing of what the org is about, realtime. A keeper of the history but also the future. Sort of like those special individuals in every early stage startup who are the “culture keepers”.

The biggest mistake young founders make is a variant of this: to build something you imagine people want, instead of studying them and figuring out what they actually do want. But the hack for beating this is to roll with your solipsism and make something for yourself.

Something I told 14 yo: People are going to stop reading books. I wish this wasn't so, but I fear it is. The silver lining in this cloud is that if you're one of the few people who still read, you'll have a huge advantage over everyone else.

If you want to start a startup, don't learn "entrepreneurship." Learn how to build things. The hard part of startups is not "entrepreneurship" but product: to know what to build, and to be able to build it.

odeio quando eles fazem bons memes kkkk

As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes: 1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship 2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra 3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance 4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit 5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS. A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product: - A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3 - A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5 - A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2 Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?