jasonyang365

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

Long skills are such a red flag to me - Hard to audit (and therefore, trust) - Hard to edit (more text, harder to maintain) - Expensive to run (more text, more tokens) The shorter the skill, the better IMO

Anthropic made a small update yesterday that most people missed, but it's a big deal in my opinion. You can now toggle remote control on by default for local sessions. This means I can now resume all my Claude Code chats from my phone, even the local ones, which is how I use my AgentOS. No more Dispatch or buggy Telegram plugin. All my chats are now synced to my phone.

很多模型厂商开始发现开源 Agent 框架和客户端的价值。 大家都开始要么补贴客户端本身，要么补贴客户端用户。 但是我觉得还有一个非常重要的盲点。 就是像藏师傅、宝玉、乔木、一泽这种头部的 Skills 开发者。他们的 Skills 装机量其实非常大，遍布各种 Agent。 无论是从数据、用户反馈，还是从打广告这种商业价值来说，潜力都非常大。 目前大家都没有把这条线重视起来，没有一个合适的合作方式给这些开源 Skills 开发者提供好的框架或商业化路径，去回馈这些开发者，并同时帮助自己的产品提高知名度。 我觉得这是非常可惜的。因为这些 Skills 的装机量远比各种 Agent 框架和客户端更大，而且它们的传播也更广。

姚顺宇的播客一定要自己亲自去听，再回来看其他人的感悟和总结，这是一期非常有意义的播客，任何对AI有兴趣或者从业者都应该去自己提炼它。我个人感受比较深的有两点，一，对于AI创业者，去找“性价比”低的场景，大公司不屑于占领的场景，会是一个更好的选择，不然你就要面对3个月后GPT/Claude可以直接干掉你的产品。二，AI时代问题在标准而不是生产力，死守严标准，狠狠得罪AI，才是正确的姿势。

Not enough people are talking about how much AI is impacting the role of data science. I was chatting with a DS friend, and he said that most of his team's work now is reviewing half-assed AI data analysis from PMs and engineers. And that 50% of the time, that analysis is wrong. The role is becoming less fun.

Forward deployed engineers, or equivalent, are about to become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech. And one of the most important functions for AI rollouts. Deploying agents is far more technical of a task than most people realize, often far more involved than deploying software. Software generally works the same way every time, and generally for the past few decades has been updated versions of an existing technology or concept (which basically means easier for the enterprise to update their workflows on a newer system). With agents, you’re actually deploying the equivalent of work output within the enterprise. The customer is effectively using you as a professional services provider for a task, which they expect to get solved nearly end-to-end now. This means you need to actually deeply understand the business process as a vendor, and get the customer from the current to the end state seamlessly. Companies need help figuring out which models will work best for their workflows, they need extensive evals setup often, they need change management support for workflows, they need to get their data setup for the agents, and constant tuning of the agentic system for their process. Massive role in tech now. And another example of the kind of highly technical work that AI is creating.

There will be no AI jobpocalypse. The story that AI will lead to massive unemployment is stoking unnecessary fear. AI — like any other technology — does affect jobs, but telling overblown stories of large-scale unemployment is irresponsible and damaging. Let’s put a stop to it. I’ve expressed skepticism about the jobpocalypse in previous posts. I’m glad to see that the popular press is now pushing back on this narrative. The image below features some recent headlines. Software engineering is the sector most affected by AI tools, as coding agents race ahead. Yet hiring of software engineers remains strong! So while there are examples of AI taking away jobs, the trends strongly suggest the net job creation is vastly greater than the job destruction — just like earlier waves of technology. Further, despite all the exciting progress in AI, the U.S. unemployment rate remains a healthy 4.3%. Why is the AI jobpocalypse narrative so popular? For one thing, frontier AI labs have a strong incentive to tell stories that make AI technology sound more powerful. At their most extreme, they promote science-fiction scenarios of AI “taking over” and causing human extinction. If a technology can replace many employees, surely that technology must be very valuable! Also, a lot of SaaS software companies charge around $100-$1000 per user/year. But if an AI company can replace an employee who makes $100,000 — or make them 50% more productive — then charging even $10,000 starts to look reasonable. By anchoring not to typical SaaS prices but to salaries of employees, AI companies can charge a lot more. Additionally, businesses have a strong incentive to talk about layoffs as if they were caused by AI. After all, talking about how they’re using AI to be far more productive with fewer staff makes them look smart. This is a better message than admitting they overhired during the pandemic when capital was abundant due to low interest rates and a massive government financial stimulus. To be clear, I recognize that AI is causing a lot of people’s work to change. This is hard. This is stressful. (And to some, it can be fun.) I empathize with everyone affected. At the same time, this is very different from predicting a collapse of the job market. Societies are capable of telling themselves stories for years that have little basis in reality and lead to poor society-wide decision making. For example, fears over nuclear plant safety led to under-investment in nuclear power. Fears of the “population bomb” in the 1960s led countries to implement harsh policies to reduce their populations. And worries about dietary fat led governments to promote unhealthy high-sugar diets for decades. Now that mainstream media is openly skeptical about the jobpocalypse, I hope these stories will start to lose their teeth (much like fears of AI-driven human extinction have). Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! AI will lead to a lot more good AI engineering jobs, and I’m also optimistic about the future of the overall job market. What AI engineers do will be different from traditional software engineering, and many of these jobs will be in businesses other than traditional large employers of developers. In non-AI roles, too, the skills needed will change because of AI. That makes this a good time to encourage more people to become proficient in AI, and make sure they’re ready for the different but plentiful jobs of the future! [Original text in The Batch newsletter.]

A flow I just tried and LOVED: 1. /grill-with-docs, talking about a new bit of UI 2. Asks me a question I can't answer unless I prototype 3. /prototype 4. Iterate on the prototype, burning tokens freely until we get a good spot 5. /rewind to the question, and select 'summarize' (Claude Code feature), saying 'summarize what we learned from prototyping' 6. Continue the grilling session, retaining the prototype Smoooooooth