Josh Brake

Install MacOS Tahoe (first mistake). 2022 M2 MBA running sluggishly. Annoyed. About to reinstall Sequoia (painful). Before I do, ask Claude. Me: "Hey Claude, why is my Mac so slow" Claude: "Here is this random piece of software that was installed and is not incompatible and constantly crashing." Me: "Great, remove it." Claude: "Ok, wrote you a script." Me: Reviews and runs script which deletes a bunch of things that should have been cleaned up by the uninstaller a long time ago. Sometimes it's the little things.

Cool thing in @conductor_build where you can submit a coding agent prompt to add a new feature to the app. Just submitted my first. What a cool way to democratize feature development.

Appreciate this essay from @kplikethebird, putting a lens on the way that working with AI often is creating more work for us instead of less. Not all bad, but it will be if we don't develop practices and disciplines to ground us.

“The problem is actually how to elicit curiosity in kids at scale.”

@signulll CC @BiltRewards let’s go for Palladium benefit, even if just a Bilt Cash redemption option.

when will credit cards start including free ai subscriptions as perk lmao?? it’s gotta be very soon no? the all the new amex ai card, now with claude included for the whole family.

Introducing the Google Workspace CLI: github.com/googleworkspac… - built for humans and agents. Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.

Making your work more efficient normally means you’ll have more of it, not less. This fact mostly gets lost in the discourse about the potential of AI to “save time.” Don’t use an AI tool to “save you time” unless you have a clear plan of how you’re going to prevent filling the vacuum created by increased efficiency.

The perfect trifecta: 1. Philosophical orientation 2. Computational thinking 3. Entrepreneurial chops

In education, there is no more important reframe than going from "have to" to "get to". Get that right and lots of other stuff just falls into place.

Education’s biggest question today is how to continue to cultivate this moral and intellectual capital.

Great analogy. We need to think about how to continue to build and retain this moral and intellectual capital in a world where the LLMs and tools built around them are eroding that very same capability. In many ways, this is the challenge for educators in our current moment.

LLMs are living off the moral and intellectual capital of a pre-AI world, just like Nietzsche said secular liberals live off Christianity. What happens when the inheritance runs out? Using LLMs well — knowing when to trust them, how to interrogate their outputs, what questions are worth asking — depends on capacities that are pre-LLM in origin: critical judgment, domain expertise, philosophical seriousness, taste. People who use LLMs well right now tend to be people formed by traditions of deep reading, argument, and intellectual discipline that were not themselves produced by or optimized for interaction with language models. The tool works for them because they bring something the tool cannot supply. Nietzsche thought secular liberals were coasting on the fumes of a Christian metaphysics they'd officially abandoned. The shadow of God lingering on the cave wall. The question is whether LLM-native thinking is the same kind of afterglow.

Questions are more important than answers.

Anthropic is running a masterclass in negotiation-as-marketing right now. The $200M Pentagon contract represents 1.4% of Anthropic’s $14 billion run rate, up 14x from $1 billion fourteen months ago. This is not a number worth compromising a brand over. Amodei knows this. The Pentagon knows this. So why is he personally publishing a detailed statement, point by point, timed for maximum news cycle impact? Because every headline that reads “AI company refuses Pentagon’s demands on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance” is worth more than the contract. Anthropic just bought the most expensive brand positioning in AI history, and the Pentagon is paying for it. The statement is surgically written. Amodei opens by affirming he believes in using AI to defend democracies. Lists every classified deployment Anthropic pioneered. Emphasizes they’ve never objected to specific military operations. Then draws two narrow lines: no mass surveillance of Americans, no fully autonomous weapons. The framing makes it almost impossible to argue against without sounding like you’re pro-surveillance. The Pentagon’s negotiator called Amodei a “liar” with a “God complex.” The Pentagon threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act and label Anthropic a supply chain risk simultaneously. Amodei pointed out those two threats are contradictory: one says Anthropic is dangerous, the other says Claude is essential. That line will be in every news story for the next 48 hours. It was designed to be. Sen. Tillis, a Republican not seeking reelection, broke with the administration on the record. Said the Pentagon was being “unprofessional” and that you should listen when a company turns down money out of concern for consequences. Anthropic didn’t have to lobby for that. The positioning did the work. Every enterprise buyer evaluating AI vendors just watched Anthropic publicly refuse to let a customer override their safety commitments. For a company selling to regulated industries, that demo is priceless. The 5:01pm Friday deadline is tomorrow. Anthropic will either keep the contract with safeguards intact or lose it and gain something more valuable: permanent differentiation in a market where every other lab said yes.

AI is amazing for small-TAM custom software. Indeed, the smaller the market, the more amazing it is. Because small markets typically don’t support the costs of software development.

Now I just need /remote-control for @conductor_build. Whatcha think @jacksondecampos?

@garrytan Always completely shocks me. We are so early.

I was on a plane yesterday vibe coding and the 20 something engineer sitting next to me asked me what I was doing. He had heard about these tools but don’t use them. I was blown away. These tools are like the holy grail for engineers! It’s Feb 2026 and you haven’t tried it yet?

@howietl Can’t wait to try this. The design template of skills to customize to your particular workflows is clutch.

I've been personally burning through billions of tokens a week for the past few months as a builder. Today I'm excited to announce Hyperagent, by Airtable. An agents platform where every session gets its own isolated, full computing environment in the cloud — no Mac Mini required. Real browser, code execution, image/video generation, data warehouse access, hundreds of integrations, and the ability to learn any new API as a skill. Deep domain expertise through skill learning. Teach the agent how your firm evaluates startups or how your team runs due diligence — now anyone on the team gets output that reflects your actual methodology, not a generic template. One-click deployment into Slack as intelligent coworkers. These aren't bots that wait to be @mentioned — they follow conversations, understand context, and act when relevant. And a command center to oversee and continuously improve your entire fleet of agents at scale. We're onboarding early users now. hyperagent.com

DB + skills is clutch here. Built a bespoke Slackbot AI agent with skills in a coordination layer that connects to Airtable this week. Can’t wait to try this out!

@neilsuperduper @conductor_build @superwhisper Yup, ditto. Pretty wild days.

was up til 3am last night building with @conductor_build and @superwhisper I have never had this much fun working on product before its addictive, like gambling spent $530 so far on one very ambitious project..