🎭 Blunt Code 🎭

Another reason to switch to Codex.

My 30+ observations on the greatest opportunities in AI agents right now: And some ideas that are keeping me up at night. 1. The new buyer on the internet is an AI agent. Imagine billions of new customers showing up with money to spend but they only shop via MCP. That's what's happening. No MCP server means you're invisible to the fastest growing buyer on the internet. 2. Every franchise system in America (30,000+) needs an agent layer and none of them have one. One founder per franchise vertical. That's 30,000 businesses waiting. 3. Everyone said "distribution is the only moat" a year ago. Now I'd add that the only moat is distribution plus memory. The company that has your audience AND your agent's accumulated context is impossible to leave. 4. Consumer mobile is more interesting than it's been since 2012. Apps can finally DO things for you instead of showing you things. The next wave of $100M apps are being built right now. 5. The most interesting startup nobody has built is an agent marketplace where you rent access to someone else's trained agent. A recruiter spent 6 months training a sourcing agent on healthcare hiring. That agent is worth renting to every other healthcare recruiter on earth. The agent itself becomes the product. 6. A sorta strange phenomenon that's happening right now is agents are developing preferences. Give the same agent the same task 100 times and it starts developing patterns in how it approaches it. Nobody is studying this yet. But the agents that develop good patterns are worth more than the ones that don't. That's a new kind of asset. 7. Dead internet theory is about to become dead SaaS theory. Half the apps you use will quietly replace their support team, their onboarding team, and their content team with agents. You won't notice for months. Then you'll realize you haven't talked to a human at that company in a year. 8. The most valuable data in the world right now is sitting in the support tickets of small or mid tier SaaS companies. Every ticket is a customer telling you exactly what to build next. Mine this. 9. The most interesting pricing problem nobody has solved is how do you price a product when your costs change every time OpenAI or Anthropic updates their model pricing? Your margins can swing 40% overnight based on a decision made in San Francisco. The company that builds dynamic pricing infrastructure for agent-based businesses solves a problem every AI company has. 10. The best AI products feel like they're reading your mind. The worst ones feel like filling out a form with extra steps. 11. An interesting arbitrage I've noticed lately is hiring a human VA for $20/hour to supervise an AI agent that does $200/hour work. The human just checks the output. 12. The managed AI agent business is becoming the new agency model. $5k/month per client. You build it, run it, maintain it. The client gets a digital employee they never have to think about. This will be a $50 B+ category. 13. The first "shadow agent" scandals are about to drop. Employees running personal agents on company infrastructure without telling anyone. Using company API keys. Agents accessing internal docs. IT departments have little visibility into this right now. Lots of opportunity to build companies here. Definitely a painkiller not a vitamin type of business. 14. Right now there are probably millions of agents running on autopilot that their creators forgot about. Still burning tokens. Still sending emails. Still scraping websites. Still costing money. The "find and kill your zombie agents" tool is a product that writes itself. 15. Companies are starting to hire based on someone's agent portfolio instead of their resume. "Show me 3 agents you built that are running right now." It's REALLY early but it's starting. 16. Your Slack archive is a product. Every company's internal Slack has thousands of messages explaining how they actually do things. The company that lets you point an agent at your Slack history and auto-generate SOPs and agents from it will be enormous. 17. We're watching the cost of intelligence fall faster than the cost of distribution. Which means distribution is now the expensive thing. 18. The most underrated asset a human can have in 2026: the ability to sit in a room with another human, make eye contact, and have a real conversation. As AI handles more of the transactional stuff, the humans who can do the relational stuff become disproportionately valuable. The soft skills people used to dismiss as fluffy are becoming the hard skills. The hard skills people spent decades acquiring are becoming the soft ones. 19. There are MANY huge companies to be built around the fact that most people's agents are running on their personal laptops which they also use to browse the internet, check email, and download random files. The attack surface is enormous. One compromised Chrome extension and your agent's API keys, customer data, and workflows are exposed. 20. There's a new type of burnout forming that doesn't have a name. It's not from working too hard. It's from context switching between human work and agent work 50 times a day. Reviewing agent output, correcting it, approving it, reviewing again. The mental load of supervising agents is different from the mental load of doing the work yourself. Some founders are telling me they were less tired when they did everything manually because at least the cognitive pattern was consistent. 21. The cheapest form of market research: search "[your industry] spreadsheet template" on Google. Whatever people are tracking manually is your product. 22. Half the YC companies pivoted within 8 weeks of demo day. Not because they failed. Because agents let them test 5 ideas in the time it used to take to test one. The concept of "committing to an idea" is dissolving. Serial pivoting is becoming the default because 1) AI lets you move fast 2) the world is moving fast. 23. The loneliest job in tech right now is being the only person at your company who understands what the agents are doing. You can't explain it to your boss. You can't hand it off to a colleague. If you leave, everything breaks. You've become a single point of failure for an entire automated system. That person needs a title, a team, and a backup plan. Most companies haven't figured this out yet. 24. Your browser history is the most valuable training data you own and you're giving it away for free. Every site you visit, every product you research, every competitor you study, every pricing page you screenshot. That behavioral data, structured and fed to an agent, would make it understand your business better than any onboarding call. The company that lets you turn your browser history into agent context builds something nobody can replicate. 25. Everyone is building AI wrappers. Nobody is building AI unwrappers. The tool that takes an AI-generated document and tells you which parts a human wrote and which parts were generated. 26. Stripe just became the most important company in the agent economy and they barely had to do anything. Every agent that sells something needs Stripe. Every agent that buys something needs Stripe. They're the payment rail for the entire agentic internet by default. 27. The most undervalued API in the world right now is the US Postal Service address verification API. It's practically free. Every local business lead gen agent needs it. Every real estate agent needs it. Every direct mail agent needs it. Boring government infrastructure is quietly becoming the backbone of agent-native businesses. 28. The concept of "business hours" is for humans. Your agent closed a deal in Tokyo at 3am, processed the payment, sent the onboarding email, and updated the CRM before your alarm went off. 29. What happens when agents start recommending other agents? Your research agent finds that a competitor's sales agent is better and suggests you switch. Agent referral networks are forming organically. The first agent affiliate program is probably 6 months away. 30. Cal dotcom closed their source code. That's the canary. When open source companies start closing up, it means agents were cloning their product too easily. Every open source company is quietly asking the same question right now. 31. "AI for pet groomers" sounds like a joke and that's exactly why it will work. 150,000 of them in America. Zero tech. All scheduling by phone or IG DMs. The joke ideas always win. 32. The thing that will seem most obvious in hindsight: we spent 2025-2026 arguing about which model is best while the entire value was in the orchestration layer. The model is the CPU. Nobody buys a computer based on the CPU anymore. They buy it based on what they can do with it. Makes so much sense in hindsight. What else will be obvious in hindsight? I'll share more notes soon. I can't sleep with all that's going on. Maybe you too. What an incredible time to be building.

🚨 SCOOP: The development cycle for GPT-5.6 is now in full swing at OpenAI. The first checkpoints of the model began testing internally over the last few days, with a release likely next month.

Introducing Daybreak: frontier AI for cyber defenders. Daybreak brings together the most capable OpenAI models, Codex, and our security partners to accelerate cyber defense and continuously secure software. A step toward a future where security teams can move at the speed defense demands.

Today we’re launching the OpenAI Deployment Company to help businesses build and deploy AI. It's majority-owned and controlled by OpenAI. It brings together 19 leading investment firms, consultancies, and system integrators to help organizations deploy frontier AI to production for business impact. openai.com/index/openai-l…

Gotta take a moment to glaze @NousResearch. OpenClaw kicked open the door and captured our imaginations. Unfortunately, it became more difficult to use with each update. @Teknium came through with Hermes, and its everything we wanted from OpenClaw, and more. Incredible tech.

Hermes Agent now has multi-agent via the Kanban, new in v0.12.0. Agents claim tasks from a board, work in parallel, and hand off when blocked. You watch progress and unblock from one easy view instead of juggling terminals. We asked it to plan and make this video about itself:

The OpenAI marketing strategy the last month has been genius It's also been what America has needed They've leaned all the way into AI optimism and fun 80% of Americans hate AI. While a lot of AI leaders get on TV and say every job will be eliminated and we'll all go broke and die, OpenAI has rightly leaned into EMPOWERMENT instead of destruction And it's true. AI is all about empowerment. It is not a doomsday technology. It won't eliminate all developer jobs. It's a technology that allows ANYONE to build literally any idea they can think of. Is there immense economic disruption happening right now? Yes. Is it because of AI? No. In 2020 a lot of companies decided to spend recklessly as the entire world printed trillions of dollars. Unfortunately blaming the economic disruption on AI is an easy way for CEOs to excuse their outrageous spending mistakes while still boosting the stock price. It's a chicken shit move that has led to most Americans despising AI While irresponsible CEO's blame layoffs on technology, we have people in the government telling everyone that data centers are somehow using up all our water. An absolutely insane, false, and quite honestly laughable idea. If our leadership, from the government, to the CEO's, to the content creators leaned into the truth, which is AI is a radically positive and empowering technology and stopped spreading fear to excuse bad decisions and for clicks, the sentiment in America would quickly turn around Which is what we need, because China has 80%+ positive sentiment about AI. (We have 80%+ negative sentiment in America) If we continue being negative while China continues being positive, we will 100% lose our position as a global power AI is the great equalizer. It's a beautiful technology that allows ANYONE to build any life they want. If we want to win this existential race, we need to start acting accordingly

A new voice model from OpenAI confirmed? Rumor has it that it will be significantly more natural in conversation with the user (latency, interruption).

I do think a ton of use cases will open up from this and more commerce integrations to come :)

OPENAI 🚨: Codex now has Pets! Pets are overlay avatars that live on your desktop. 8 predefined pets are available, and users can also use skills to generate custom pets! Choose your pokemon 👀

Meet Linux Daemons, the "spooky" background services that keep your system running! 😈 #Linux #infosec

ComfyUI is the most flexible, composable, and powerful open-source media generation tool with a massive ecosystem of workflows and custom nodes. Your Hermes Agent can now install, launch, manage, and run sophisticated @ComfyUI workflows on demand.

Introducing Hermes Curator! The new system built in to Hermes Agent now helps you keep your skills that the self improvement loop creates in check, by consolidating and pruning automatically. The curator does multiple things: - keeps track of how often you use each skill, when it was last updated/created, etc - Once a week runs automatically (configurable) - Uses the analytics plus it's own scanning of your skills and consolidates or prunes them if necessary - Skips externally installed skills, built in skills, and skills you "pin" that you dont' want touched. It will only attempt curation over agent created/updated skills or user written skills. - It will then determine whether skills can be consolidated, pruned, or otherwise made more manageable. It will convert some skills that are too specific into references, templates or scripts for larger/broader skills, or integrate them directly into a consolidation of an existing skill. You can also disable it entirely in the config.yaml and/or run it manually with `hermes curator run ` Learn more on the docs here: hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guid…

BREAKING 🚨 Boris Cherny, Anthropic engineer working on Claude Code, posted praising the responsible preview of Claude Mythos Preview - a highly capable frontier model - limited to cyber defenders via Project Glasswing instead of public release. - The model autonomously finds thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities and develops exploits in systems like Linux kernel, OpenBSD, and FFmpeg, outperforming Claude Opus 4.6 on cyber benchmarks such as CyberGym (83.1%) and SWE-bench Verified (93.9%). - Project Glasswing partners with major tech firms and provides $100M in credits to use the model defensively for securing critical software, applying safeguards and monitoring to mitigate dual-use cyber risks.

🚨 Boris Cherny (@bcherny, who works on Claude Code at Anthropic) of Anthropic's announcement introducing Project Glasswing, a new initiative to secure critical software using their unreleased frontier model Claude Mythos Preview. - Project Glasswing partners Anthropic with AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks to leverage the model's advanced ability to detect high-severity vulnerabilities in major OSes, browsers, and open-source code for defensive purposes. - Anthropic is providing up to $100M in usage credits plus millions in donations to open-source security groups like OpenSSF and Apache Software Foundation, addressing risks from AI's growing coding and exploit-finding capabilities before they proliferate widely.

🚨Ollama announces immediate availability of GLM-5.1 from Z.ai as a cloud-accessible model, supporting direct runs and specialized agent launches like OpenClaw and Claude Code. - GLM-5.1 excels in agentic engineering with top open-source results on SWE-Bench Pro (58.4%), NL2Repo, and Terminal-Bench, designed for sustained long-horizon tasks through iterative reasoning. - Users can start chatting with 'ollama run glm-5.1:cloud' or launch coding agents with 'ollama launch openclaw --model glm-5.1:cloud', leveraging its 198K context window.

- Gemma 4 is a capable small model you can run locally on your devices. - Install Ollama from ollama.com/download. - Download Gemma 4 26B A4B for capable and fast local Agents. - Launch OpenClaw with Gemma 4 as backend via Ollama to auto-install and run it. - The whole setup takes just a few minutes in 3 steps. Enjoy building!

🚨 Hermes Agent from Nous Research now integrates Karpathy's LLM-Wiki pattern, enabling users to instantly build Obsidian-based knowledge vaults via a simple `/llm-wiki ` command after `hermes update`. - In the showcased example, Hermes quickly synthesized web data, code, and papers into a 42-page vault on Nous projects, producing 365 cross-references and a dense Obsidian graph where GRPO emerges as the most connected node. - The system creates persistent, evolving markdown wikis with summaries, backlinks, and concept articles that compound knowledge, using Obsidian as frontend while the LLM handles structuring and maintenance.