Justin McCarthy

I met today with the founder of Starcloud and I realized this is going to be one of the biggest engineering projects of our era. When you look at the tradeoffs, it seems inevitable that all the GPUs are going to live in space.

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

This feels directionally right. An agency comes in for a few weeks, maps how work actually flows, and installs claude skills/agents that handle reporting, follow-ups, checks, and coordination. That replaces work spread across a few roles that might cost $250k–$400k a year. The company pays once for the setup, keeps the system, and only brings the agency back when something needs tuning. Of course agencies don’t go away since human judgment is always needed, but a growing share of what clients pay for shifts toward skills and agents that run inside the business. I keep coming back to this idea and it keeps making more sense.

biotech needs its own david sacks in reflecting on this past year, one thing has become increasingly obvious to me: biotech desperately needs a public champion. someone who can translate scientific progress into policy, coordinate the industry’s scattered voices into a coherent agenda, and frame biotech as a strategic national priority rather than a niche technical field. this is perhaps the biggest structural weakness facing our industry. watching the policy momentum behind AI and crypto has been frustrating. these sectors have moved quickly not just because the technology is advancing, but because people like david sacks have created a central organizing force. they’ve built a coherent narrative, rallied founders and investors, and focused the tech industry’s efforts in washington. biotech has no equivalent. what makes this more frustrating is that the rationale driving urgency in AI policy applies almost word-for-word to biotech: competition with china. national security. domestic manufacturing capacity. strategic dependence on foreign supply chains. you could literally replace “AI” or “rare earths” with “biotech” in many of the recent executive orders, and the logic would hold perfectly. these should be obvious, bipartisan reasons to invest in and accelerate the biotech ecosystem. yet the case isn’t being made with the same clarity or force. part of the problem is a PR failure. most policymakers don’t understand that biotech ≠ pharma. biotech startups are the innovators; pharma is the innovation buyer. but in washington, these groups get conflated. early-stage biotech gets pulled into the same policy debates as multibillion-dollar incumbents, and the result is predictable: the people doing the actual innovation are not represented. another issue is fragmentation. AI and crypto accelerated because the community acted like a movement. there was a center of gravity pulling together founders, operators, investors, and policymakers. biotech, by contrast, is spread across academic labs, NIH, the FDA, startups, pharma, state governments, and a long tail of investors. large pharma and small biotech don't often have the same priorities and incentives. there is no unifying node that turns these pieces into a coherent whole. biotech doesn’t just need more innovation; it needs coordination. it needs someone who can articulate why this industry matters, make the geopolitical case, advocate for regulatory clarity, and translate between science and washington. it needs someone who can build a narrative around biotech as a strategic national asset rather than a niche technical field. biotech needs its david sacks: a movement builder, a policy champion, a narrative architect. until someone steps into that role, the industry will continue to produce world-class science while punching far below its weight in culture, policy, and national strategy.