Byrnison 🏹

Now in research preview: routines in Claude Code. Configure a routine once (a prompt, a repo, and your connectors), and it can run on a schedule, from an API call, or in response to an event. Routines run on our web infrastructure, so you don't have to keep your laptop open.

Macrohard or Digital Optimus is a joint xAI-Tesla project, coming as part of Tesla’s investment agreement with xAI. Grok is the master conductor/navigator with deep understanding of the world to direct digital Optimus, which is processing and actioning the past 5 secs of real-time computer screen video and keyboard/mouse actions. Grok is like a much more advanced and sophisticated version of turn-by-turn navigation software. You can think of it as Digital Optimus AI being System 1 (instinctive part of the mind) and Grok being System 2. (thinking part of the mind). This will run very competitively on the super low cost Tesla AI4 ($650) paired with relatively frugal use of the much more expensive xAI Nvidia hardware. And it will be the only real-time smart AI system. This is a big deal. In principle, it is capable of emulating the function of entire companies. That is why the program is called MACROHARD, a funny reference to Microsoft. No other company can yet do this.

I've talked to a lot of people working in AI with agents, Claude Code, etc One thing I keep hearing that nobody has written about is that many builders have stopped going to the gym The reason is always the same: the perceived opportunity cost of stepping away from their projects feels too high I've noticed it in myself too It's hard to break away when we're all building such cool stuff But I'm typing this from the gym right now And I'll tell you that it feels great You should go exercise if you haven't lately You'll have better energy and better focus Less prompting and more lifting!!

stop what you're doing and look at this image. each dot is 3.2 million people. 2,500 dots = 8.1 billion humans. the grey? 6.8 billion people who have never used AI. the green? 1.3 billion free chatbot users. the yellow? 15-35 million who pay for it. the red? that tiny sliver is us. you think the AI space is crowded because you're in an echo chamber of the 0.06%. the real world hasn't even started. wrote a full breakdown on the data, the opportunity, and 7 businesses you can build from this gap today:

Everyone who agrees with this read it on the device that’s causing the problem. And you’ll keep scrolling after you like it. That’s the mechanism he’s missing. Let me explain what’s actually happening at the level of neural circuits, because until you understand the mechanism, you cannot intervene. Your phone operates on what’s called a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. Same reward pattern that makes slot machines the most addictive form of gambling on earth. Every scroll, every pull-to-refresh is a randomized reward delivery. And your nucleus accumbens doesn’t fire dopamine when you find something good. It fires in anticipation of something good. That anticipation is what keeps you scrolling past content you don’t even enjoy. You’re chasing the prediction, not the reward. Here’s the key thing about dopamine that most people get wrong. It operates on a peak-and-baseline system. Every spike is followed by a trough that drops below your previous baseline. Your phone delivers hundreds of micro-peaks per hour. Each one produces a compensatory dip. Over weeks and months of this, your tonic baseline dopamine, the resting level that determines how motivated and focused you feel just sitting there, drops progressively lower. A novel delivers one slow dopamine arc over 6-8 hours. Your phone delivers 300 variable-ratio hits in 6-8 minutes. Once your baseline has been ratcheted down by chronic overstimulation, the book registers as aversive. The book hasn’t changed. Your neurochemistry has. The structural imaging data is clear on this. Heavy smartphone users show reduced gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex and orbitofrontal cortex, the exact regions your brain uses for sustained attention and impulse control. Your brain remodels around whatever input pattern dominates. Feed it rapid-switching variable-ratio reinforcement for 4-6 hours a day and the architecture for sustained linear focus literally atrophies. The loop runs like this: boredom → low-grade anxiety → reach for phone → dopamine spike from novelty → rapid habituation → scroll for next hit → baseline drops further → phone down → boredom now feels worse than before → reach for phone again. Each cycle deepens the trough. Now here’s where the point about kids becomes really important and I want to be precise about why. Synaptic pruning, where the brain eliminates unused neural connections, runs aggressively through about age 25. Circuits you use get strengthened. Circuits you don’t use get cut. A child raised on variable-ratio reinforcement from birth is building attentional architecture optimized for rapid context-switching, not sustained linear focus. In adults, you can reverse dopamine dysregulation in roughly 30 days through deliberate protocol. In children whose pruning window is still open, the architecture itself is forming around the stimulus pattern. That’s a fundamentally different problem with a much smaller intervention window. The protocol for adults: morning sunlight, 10 minutes minimum within the first hour of waking, to anchor circadian dopamine production through the melanopsin ganglion cells. Deliberate cold exposure, 1-3 minutes at uncomfortable but safe temperatures, which increases baseline dopamine roughly 2.5x for up to 3 hours. Non-sleep deep rest protocols for 20 minutes to restore tonic dopamine. And the most important one that nobody wants to do: scheduled boredom. Sit with zero input. Train your prefrontal cortex to tolerate low-stimulation states without reaching for the phone. Walsh is right that something has gone wrong. Where it needs to go further is the mechanism. Telling people to put the phone down without addressing the underlying dopaminergic dysregulation is like telling someone with chronic insomnia to just close their eyes. The nervous system runs on protocols, not willpower.