Stephen Pendino 👾

🚀 for all mankind 🚀

@elonmusk Thank you, @elonmusk - the four of us glimpsed the red hues of Mars far in the distance as the sun slipped behind the Moon and there was zero doubt in our minds that the creative genius of our greatest minds will have us there very soon. LETS GO

I figured out why the Artemis stream felt so different It's because for the first time in decades, we collectively witnessed something that was untouched by politics, celebrities and influencers

As Artemis II continues its journey, it’s a good moment to recognize the army of a team behind that it takes to undertake such a mission. From the engineers and technicians who built the systems, to the launch team, Mission Control, and the recovery crews preparing for splashdown - and everyone behind this mission. Thank you to the workforce making this mission possible every single day.

This is a healing grid by Japanese artist Ryota Kanai. If you stare at the center, the irregularities start to heal themselves because your brain strongly prefers to see regular patterns.

🚨 NOW: As Artemis II reaches its final hours in space, @NASAAdmin Jared Isaacman PERSONALLY bought HUNDREDS of pizzas for the Mission Control team Isaacman REFUSES to use tax dollars to support his role as administrator—even declining to use government jets for official travel He pays his own way, and donates his salary to Space Camp for kids. There’s NEVER been an administrator who cares more about the mission than Administrator @rookisaacman. 📸 @spaceguy87

Feels like a periphery thing that could be solved through an agentic loop.. I haven’t had enough friction yet to “solve” it but something like a when gateway goes into some sort of crash, secondary openclaw agent gets called via webhook to spin up the acp, fix, loop until done.. same thing for your main open claw to watch the safety net openclaw. I also feel like I’m not smart enough to create a doom loop and burn through my anthropic max subscription…. Oh wait, canceled that because they booted us 🥺… Reality really is stranger than fiction, swapping to OpenAI because they embraced openclaw was not on my bingo card a few months ago when this all started.

Ssh'ing into my Mac Mini to start a claude code session to debug my openclaw gateway feels like it's maybe not the future.

The Big Rug Gooning is well covered in the Doom thesis. Elon's "Imagine" is digital crack cocaine being given out for free. So that's in progress. But, GPT5 shows us that enterprise / tool calls is where companies are converging This mirrors the rest of the economy. Consumer apps have to use ads or extractive loops (gambling/ porn/ DLC video games) to monetize at scale. Or you do Enterprise. Anthropic's CEO has indicated that companies pay up to 10x as much for better reasoning. And that training a model is positive unit economics t+12 months Which is the first time anyone is talking about unit economics. Which means the GPU costs of ppl just chatting away were getting gnarly. So today I'll write a bit about the Enterprise part of the Doom Thesis - which I call "The Big Rug" The core idea of the Big Rug is that everything you do in Claude Code, all the Vibe Coding you do, and even the work you do with AI that is covered by Terms of Service will end up getting completely stolen and monetized by AI research labs in order to justify their enormous valuations. The US economic system is not sustainable. There is a single chart below that shows this. US labor productivity is growing at 1.2% while Microsoft and other AI companies are reporting token consumption growth above 400%. Salesforce indicated that 30-40% of its code is written by AI but its cash flow from operations is up single digits along with its headcount. So -- if 100% of code was written by AI ... what would everyone do again? At the same time, AI very clearly is a thing. And there's huge demand. But the vast majority of companies are not using AI correctly. We can - in part, deduce this from basic common sense. VSCode and Copilot are terrible / borderline unusable if you use Claude Code/ Cursor. but they are in hyper growth nonetheless People are likely drastically increasing their technical debt. Because AI isn't good enough on default settings to really use to automate huge amounts of work. At least right now. Managers are saying "use AI". And employees are doing it. And doing it poorly. Because AI valuations are so high it's vibe coding and vaporware across corporate America. "We need an AI strategy" The most cynical VC I know just joined Cognition, selling 10s of thousands of seats to financial institutions. GPT5 isn't the Death Star. Productivity is growing at 1.5%. In boom times that can be 5-7%. We are definitively not in a productivity boom despite the hype. But then -- certainly this is not sustainable? If aggregate productivity is going 1.5% -- how is enterprise usage going to go sustainably at triple digits? Like -- the ROI is not going to be there. And then demand will go off an absolute cliff unless there is a fundamental non linear change in the cost of inference Indeed. Everyone knows this. Let's spell it out more specifically. 1. You are an enterprise agent company (whether that's openAI or Claude Code) 2. You see the slop generated by Vibe Coding 3. You see the same aggregate productivity statistics as everyone else namely that A. Margins are not expanding a ton B. Aggregate productivity is also not expanding 4. You know at some point an economic downturn results in massive cuts to token usage 5. Which makes your momo Q2 2025 into a hard comp and people start talking about a tech crash 6. But you just raised billions of dollars at a nosebleed valuation 7. You need to justify this valuation somehow or you're cooked Enter The Big Rug AI usage is a bit magical because you can't point to any single person or workflow that is responsible for training data. The training process, of compression, is a big jumble. We've already seen the implications of this in IP theft. Copyrighted material is fully known by ChatGPT. We don't know exactly how it ended up in the training dat,a bc the model weights aren't really intelligible. So it's hard to prove anyone did anything wrong. Even though the copyrights are there So if copyrights arent' enforceable. Trade secrets, methodologies, and non copyrighted user interfaces are *really not enforceable" This is an important point because many of the actions of closed source models explicitly break copyright and other laws, but they have such enormous financial legal firepower -- and the technical details are so hard to prove - that if you ask for Grok to render images from movies, it will. Or if you ask Chatgpt for the full plots of books - it will happily provide it. So there's already precedent for large scale non compliance with rules in the name of growth. And this non-enforceability is the nature of the big rug. Your employees don't really care about your enterprise IP and are more than happy to use closed source AI tools to help them be more efficient cogs. And then all this information and know how finds its way into the training data of AI research labs And then - when agents come out. It won't be enterprises tailoring agents to their use cases. It will be agents, essentially assembling apps that are FAR BETTER than anything those enterprises could do. With proprietary models that aren't for sale And because AI is completely portable, these agents could be spun off in offshore compliant jurisdictions likely with even less transparency. Or run through subsidiaries. Or even through crypto rails which are now getting supercharged by stablecoins So not only did you *not get an efficiency boost* because the Vibe coded apps were slop. But you also lost all your trade secrets, IP, and know how. And will be competing with an AI equivalent that will destroy your margins Welcome to the New Economy. It's essentially the largest vampire attack in corporate history. Everyone using closed sourced API models thinks they're going to be safe due to enterprise SLAs, or simply don't care (bc they're employees told to use Cursor or get fired). But they won't be safe. Once it's in the model. It's gone. So that's the Big Rug. And here's the funny thing. The Big Rug is actually necessary for this productivity chart to start going up. So before you get a massive acceleration in agentic workflows, the entirety of the people who formed the basis for those agentic workflows being created. Will be made completely obsolete / financially ruined. After the Big Rug - is when unemployment starts ticking up. Token growth will indeed go off a cliff but it won't matter bc we will be past the facade that for some reason AGI was going to be made accessible via API And if I were wrong, then these AI research labs wouldn't be worth what they are. And there wouldn't be animal spirits secondary demand for SPVs getting access to them at insane valuations. The writing is on the wall. You think you're vibe coding, but really you're contributing to the Agent that will drink your milkshake. The reason I haven't written about the Big Rug is that it's fairly far away. It will be a bit (maybe 12 months) before the research labs go mask off and launch agents directly instead of providing their models through APIs. Because as soon as this starts happening suddenly every company is going to lock down the usage of its coding tools. And presumably by then the ROI calculations won't make any sense Smart companies will adapt early on by using self-hosted API layers, and open source models even though they are worse. China will likely keep funding heavy open source development because it's a way to subtly promote the Chinese worldview -- so I guess the downside will be getting brainwashed by the CCP if you want to avoid the Big Rug. Once the Big Rug really kicks off, the enterprise software sector and any cloud player that hasn't hedged with their own AI research equity exposure will get completely shrekt. I've been a long time hater of Accenture and AI consulting plays, as they're basically in a 1-2 year white space of hope before the hammer drops pricing long term growth. Of course, the majority of cloud players have piled into the Labs for exactly this reason. If GPT5 were incredible -- I think we'd have a bit more time before this narrative kicks into gear. But now that the disappointment is there, the enterprise focus is there, the abrupt 'focus on unit economics' is appearing - the 2nd part of the doom thesis - the de-rating of everything non AI - should begin percolating. In crypto I am long Ambient to express this view - but it's a private holding with a minable test-net coming soon. My own network we're working to design to be more robust to the Big Rug (I think Google Docs, and Microsoft Word, and Github Gists are all basically going in the training data - so we are migrating to Proton Docs and using more encryption). In stonks it's genuinely terrible for the whole IT service sector (or anything in a software index that isn't heavily long OpenAI, Anthropic, or Deepmind). The white collar unemployment kick from the Big Rug should result in lower interest rates due to higher unemployment. The breach of trust/ economic shock should result in lower equity multiples. Other financial implications I'm still thinking through but just wanted to put this out here

We have reached an era where some people have not touched a steering wheel and have simply let their cars drive them around for a whole year, whereas others do not know this is possible at all.

@iruletheworldmo Not until the the folks that can pay the most got to try it ;) I do think though that the genie is very much out of the bottle and I love the competition forcing the releases. Please stop protecting us from ourselves.

openai will be launching a model just as capable as mythos next week. i’m a little shocked at the muted reaction to mythos if i’m honest. we’ve just seen the first sparks of asi. did you genuinely think you’d ever get to try it?

@chamath Can confirm, I play this role in professional life.

Manufacturing has SOPs, manuals, and systems. Knowledge work has… "Ask Steve, he knows how it works." That's not a process. That's a single point of failure wearing a lanyard. One of Software Factory’s key selling points is its ability to absorb tribal knowledge and give companies tools to manage its evolving knowledge and make it available to all of its employees.

To celebrate 3 million weekly codex users, we are resetting usage limits. We will do this every million users up to 10 million. Happy building!

not enough people are emotionally prepared for if it’s not a bubble

We don't have time for aliens right now

*there is no generate gameplay yet… I’d die to let loose on all the game ideas I have but the reality of generating consistent character models, visuals and physics is not yet as easy as it is to re make apps and basic UIs.. But make no mistake, this industry will be unbelievably better off when we can get consistency in graphics… going to be a wonderfully creative and fun future when we get there :)

notice how vibe coders never touch game dev because there’s no “generate gameplay” button you actually have to think

@bcherny @deanwball The only true solution is to simply enlighten the app / model to inherently understand what becomes possible as new releases come to be… users shouldn’t be focused on release notes but on whatever problem they’re solving… Is this possible ?

👋 Appreciate the feedback. Since we introduced Claude Code at Anthropic, engineering velocity has increased hundreds of %, and the rate at which it is increasing is itself accelerating. The velocity is very much not performative -- we're actively trying to figure out how to build effectively when all of the code is written by Claude. Claude has accelerated the pace at which we ship, and as a result we've been hitting all sorts of new bottlenecks: code review and regression prevention, CI and merge queues, source control reliability, etc. We're working through each of these as they come up, and now have good answers for a number of them. One of these bottlenecks is figuring out how to best communicate new features to our users. My pov is we need to be doing much better here. The problem isn't that we are releasing quickly, the problem is that we should design features in a way where you don't need to know about them to benefit from them. This is the case for much of what we build, and we need to make it the case for all of it. To share how we think about it, there's a few ways to approach it from a product design pov: - Make it so the model can do things for you (eg. enter plan mode, invoke skills, configure your settings) - Generalize features rather than create new parallel features - Make features opt-in until we do the above - Have Claude monitor feature usage and brainstorm/build ways to improve usage while simplifying the system We try to do all of the above, but as you said, it's not perfect yet, and this is something we're working through. If you prefer a lagging version, you can also use the Claude Code stable release (not latest). We're intentionally being open about what we're seeing, since our customers are seeing the same thing and at least part of our job is helping companies navigate this new way of doing engineering. Re: source code leak -- it was unintentional, but was also human error. There was a subtle bug that missed several rounds of manual review. We're working on how we can better catch it automatically next time.

I think the current state of the Claude and Claude Code *apps* crystallize this sentiment well. It feels as though Anthropic’s acceleration of release cadence to these apps is almost performative, like they are smirking at the camera and saying, “buckle up bucko: We Are Doing Recursive Self-Improvement And From Now On, Things Will Go *Fast* 😏” But the ones who seem like they need to buckle up are Anthropic themselves. They’re shipping largely half-baked features faster than users can digest them; I am a constant Claude Code user with pretty good information bandwidth and even I just ignore the release notes at this point. Even if I paid attention, there wouldn’t be enough time to get comfortable with the ergonomics of a new feature before they changed it, obsoleted it, or released some new but weirdly overlapping related feature. I just use the app the way I did before its developers started turning to the camera with the raised eyebrow and the smirk. Many others I know share this habit and sentiment. It is not in fact good for your car’s control panel to change and expand every 36 hours, even if it is in some sense impressive that it is now possible to effect change at that frequency. And what’s more, they leaked their source code! I know this wasn’t because of Claude Code per se, but surely it is indicative of a company and a team that is moving too fast for their own good. This is the most important product ever made, if you believe Anthropic’s thesis. Yet they do not especially act like it. It feels like performative acceleration, velocity for the sake of velocity.

Artemis II has reached its maximum distance from Earth. On the far side of the Moon, 252,756 miles away, Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy have now traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history and now begin their journey home. Before they left, they said they hoped this mission would be forgotten, but it will be remembered as the moment people started to believe that America can once again do the near-impossible and change the world. Congratulations to this incredible crew and the entire NASA team, our international and commercial partners, but this mission isn’t over until they’re under safe parachutes, splashing down into the Pacific.

New record🥇 The Artemis II astronauts are now farther from Earth than humans have ever been! At 1:57 p.m. EDT, they broke the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. Their journey around the far side of the Moon today will take them a maximum distance of 252,752 miles from Earth.

GPTEESUS HAS RISEN x.com/openclaw/statu…

All I feel is gratitude for this experience.