John Erik Metcalf

Chatting with @Ruemic about The Bitter Lesson in AI software production (1/100)

Nerdy Show & Tell @KentonVarda’s 🤓

AI doesn’t have a body, and it won’t for a while, until we have an abundance of robots (specifically humanoid ones). So who is building the interface to allow AI to control humans?

@kevintwohy did they kill it?

Throwback to that time I spent a year of my life working on a vegan robotic restaurant system. The sandwich was truly great no further questions.

When your Kindle goes with you and your iPhone stays behind. Now it feels like a vacation.

Agreed! Everyone’s trying to replace humans on the knowledge work side. Now is the time to get people outside using their hands. When I talk to my younger cousins, they say they don’t wanna stare at glowing screens. They don’t want to feel the stress of AI taking their job if they don’t perform. At the same time, they want to work at a cool brand / be associated with something changing the world. Money feels secondary, stability and purpose feels like first priority. A brand and a movement that gets people excited, brings them together and generally romanticizes the trades/being outdoors feels like the way. Earn on referrals, financing and placement, like @bpiatt said.

@davidu @pronounced_kyle Agree skilled trades are underrated, but I’m not sure building schools (which need to be in person and with expensive hardware) and monetizing on outcomes is a model I’d like to fund. Maybe you work with existing trade schools, do student acquisition, financing, placement?

My hot take of the day is that a Lambda School for electricians, CNC machinists, and other advanced manufacturing roles would do very well for the next 20+ years. Maybe longer.

@thatadammiller @davidu How’s it going? Where can we learn more? That’s super cool

@davidu Building this now. Launched the 1st cohort last month. Free trades accelerator, candidates get hired with full benefits. Started with HVAC, more trades coming.

visits sites he hasn’t heard of …😳

@Teslaconomics Already roaming the streets of Austin

I plan on owning my own Tesla Robotaxi fleet one day. And the more I run the numbers, the more I realize this new business could become one of the most powerful income opportunities I've ever seen. This is how I'm thinking about it. Based on many analyst models and Tesla’s long-term vision, a reasonable base case assumption is about ~$30,000 per year in net profit per Robotaxi to the owner. This is after things like Tesla’s platform fee, charging, tires, maintenance, insurance, and cleaning. Of course, the network is still early and Tesla is just beginning to roll this out in pilot programs in a few cities, so there’s no official real-world owner earnings yet... but using reasonable assumptions around utilization, pricing per mile, and operating costs, the math starts to get really interesting. If one Robotaxi can earn around $30,000 per year, here’s what a fleet might look like: • $100,000 per year → about 4 Robotaxis • $500,000 per year → about 17 Robotaxis • $1,000,000 per year → about 34 Robotaxis It may sound a bit crazy at first, but when you break it down, it starts to make more sense. These vehicles could potentially drive 50,000 to 100,000+ miles per year in high demand areas. If the economics land somewhere around $0.25-$0.50 profit per mile after all costs, you end up right around that ~$30k per vehicle per year range. And remember, the Tesla’s Robotaxi network is going to work a lot like Airbnb for cars. You add your vehicle to the network, Tesla handles the software, routing, payments, and rider experience, and they take a platform fee (often modeled around 25-35%). The owner keeps the rest after operating costs. Another thing that makes this interesting is the expected cost of the vehicles themselves. Tesla has talked about the purpose-built Cybercabs costing roughly $25k-$30k and Elon told me production is starting in 1 month! If that’s even close to reality, a fleet capable of generating around $1 million per year could theoretically cost somewhere around $850k-$1M in vehicles. That ROI is pretty freakin good! Now to be clear, none of this is guaranteed. I'm just thinking out loud and sharing it with you... a lot still depends on regulations, how fast unsupervised FSD scales, demand in each city, insurance costs, and how Tesla structures the network. But if the system works the way Elon has described it for years, owning a Robotaxi fleet could become one of the most powerful forms of passive income I've ever seen. And I plan on sharing the numbers with everyone on 𝕏 when the day comes. Personally, that’s why I’m paying such close attention. Bc one day, owning a fleet of autonomous Teslas working for me 24/7 might be the modern version of owning a rental property, except instead of tenants, you’ve got robots driving people around all day while you sleep. This next book of Tesla is going to be so exciting!

@tejgw Chronicle

Cursor for Slides is finally here Watch the first 47 seconds. Then try going back to your old deck tool Reply "Chronicle" + RT to get two months of Pro for free. Make sure you follow so I can DM you asap.

please dont be the new failwhale

For non-technical people, “Agents” are no code tools with human names that turn your rambling thoughts/needs into (mostly) deterministic code

@joshmatz @gregisenberg Good example— agentmail.to

@gregisenberg Do you have any live examples of this? Having a hard time visualizing what this means other than having APIs, which we already have 🤔 Something I think is missing: agent identification. But this is a systemic problem, not a particular platform problem.

build startups for agents over the next 10 years, you'll have a market of billions of customers (agents) with millions of wallets that want to use your services go look at every saas tool you use. notion, slack, stripe etc now ask: "what's the version of this that's built purely for agents?" agent-native payments, agent-native communication, agent-native memory etc every single category gets rebuilt (for agents) we're entering the machine-to-machine economy and almost nobody is building for it yet.

@matthew_d_green @grok what's the take away and what should individuals do?

This seems bad for WiFi encryption: arstechnica.com/security/2026/…

@kevintwohy Kevin Twohy -- retired human in the loop

Heavy eyelids in the rearview make me very talkative ...as a survival strategy. If I can't get a Waymo, I'd pay extra for a driver running FSD

OpenClaw gives us a glimpse into a future where AI proactively takes actions for us, because it can actually operate your entire computer. It's like putting Optimus robots into a factory designed for humans. Instead of rebuilding the factory, the robot just stands in the same place, uses the same tools. OpenClaw does the same thing with your entire machine: the keyboard, mouse, file system, terminal, browser, all of it.

@BrettFromDJ It's not

I’d be willing to bet $1m that the line “Spotify developers haven’t written a single line of code since December” is a flat out lie. This is why I can’t stand AI hype, and why you must question everything you read about it.

@Gavmn @OpenAI Showed in my notifications and I thought it said Gavin Newsom 😅

Excited to join the @OpenAI design team today