kyle @ scrivium

The best AI engineers think evolution not automation. Maybe it's there RL DNA. The best founders do OODA loops, product improvement sprints, BML sprints, etc. Your epistemological bottlenecks are always 10x more important than your material ones. UNLOCK GOOD DECISIONS FIRST.

You can even tell your AI, "Good decisions are my bottleneck. Help unblock me!!" Once you make enough good decisions of the same type, you then automate (e.g., codify into a skill). But the quality of your decision loop will always be upstream of automation.

I've been thinking about AI productivity incorrectly. I focused on linear outputs: "how many worktrees can I handle," "how can my Mac Mini run all night" etc But the biggest unlocks aren't linear...

Emerson has a quote on this: "It is even true that there was less in [Napoleon and Caesar] on which they could reflect, than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow." That said I think "introspection" (spectere = to watch) is good; it's a means to hollow out. It's more "self-analysis" that's suspect.

@brian_armstrong Reminds me of an advaitan philosophy to scoop lightly in the river of your mind so as not to draw up silt.

For me the best way to think about this: snorkel, don’t scuba. Diving too deep is a bit dangerous, and people get lost down there. Take glances at what’s beneath (lots of pretty fish!) from near the surface, and then get back to work. Wherever your motivation comes from (revenge, fear, competition, love of the game, learning, impact) is fine - harness it and get moving. I personally do some journaling (appreciations, write out goals, figure out what I want to get done tomorrow, etc) but then stop procrastinating and get after it.

@pmarca "It is even true that there was less in [Napoleon and Caesar] on which they could reflect than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow." - Emerson

Introspection = neuroticism x narcissism x thumbsucking.

@andrewchen I wanna try *canon* where's that hosted? We're building scrivium (dot com) the interactive canon

Insane amount of random projects over the past few weeks So many are half built but so much fun… Reply and share yours! - *book-reader* — Kindle-like audiobook web app with word-by-word highlighting synced to audio - *calscan* — Calendar intelligence CLI for Andrew's two Google calendars - *canon* — Beautiful reading room web app for humanity's most important free texts - *canon-library* — Curated collection of foundational texts powering Canon - *chief* — Email triage daemon — classifies, drafts replies, tracks delegations - *copycat-agent* — Multi-agent PLAN.md + PRD generator for product emulation - *counterpoint* — Multi-agent epistemic arena CLI (LLMs debate big questions) - *deckard* — One-shot consulting-style slide deck generator with multi-stage pipeline - *one-liner* — Multi-agent system for generating provocative tech aphorisms - *pplradar* — Relationship radar — "who should I be thinking about right now?" - *sprayprd* — Generates radically different PRDs from a single one-line product concept - *techhist* — Multi-agent essays exploring historical metaphors for current tech trends Openclaw skills: - *autobio* — Search/update Andrew's 350-month life history autobiography (1.14M words) - *autobio-diary* — Daily diary interview — asks Andrew questions about his day - *autobio-sparky* — Parse/refresh autobio raw sources on DGX Spark via Ollama - *calfollow* — Find recent calendar contacts and resolve identity for X follow-backs - *calscan* — Forward-looking milestones + backward-looking time analysis across 5 horizons - *chief* — Inbox triage skill - *daily-idea* — Pitch 3-5 actionable ideas based on goals, calendar, and context - *find-andrew-location* — Locate Andrew via iCloud Find My + calendar cross-check - *fro-photo* — Generate AI photos of Fro the pug on wild adventures - *gm* — Daily morning briefing (weather, calendar, email, news) - *integrations-self-test* — Comprehensive self-test for all channels and services - *macos-audit* — Security audit for macOS (FileVault, SIP, firewall, etc.) - *meeting-prep* — Automated meeting briefings with attendee bios for external meetings - *nightly-security-audit* — Comprehensive security scan, runs nightly at 11 PM - *ppl* — Relationship radar — 17K events, 9.9K people, 71K interactions scored - *random-cron* — Schedule messages/prompts to fire at random times - *reflect* — End-of-session self-improvement logging and skill audit - *remind-me* — Natural language reminders via one-time cron jobs - *saveclaw* — Push all critical repos to GitHub for disaster recovery - *skill-improver* — Full custom-skills audit with improvement ideas - *sparky* — Access/control NVIDIA DGX Spark over Tailscale - *sparky-health* — Fast health checks and incident triage on DGX Spark - *sr-pulse* — Speedrun portfolio company news monitoring and digest - *techvip* — Top AI/tech founders/CEOs/VCs list cross-referenced with X relationships - *todo-tracker* — Persistent TODO scratch pad across sessions - *topic-radar* — Surface trending topics relevant to Andrew's interests - *travel-news* — Weekly digest of news from places Andrew has traveled - *uber* — Book Uber rides via browser automation - *weekly-cost* — Itemized weekly API cost reports - *weekly-review* — Weekly summary + preview (best on Sunday evenings) - *whoop* — Fetch and summarize WHOOP health/sleep/recovery data - *xradar* — Monitor X interactions + bookmark research briefs - *xreplyguy* — Find high-upside X posts to reply to

@neilkatz @aakashgupta Maybe the top 1%. Most influencers are feeling the squeeze too.

@aakashgupta The great irony of this era. Engineer value goes down. Influencer value goes up.

When building costs drop 90% but distribution costs stay flat, you get a gold rush where everyone digs and nobody sells. That’s what this chart actually shows. New websites up 40%. iOS apps up 50%. GitHub pushes up 35%. Everyone read “barrier to building disappeared” and heard opportunity. The correct read is that 557,000 new apps hit the App Store last year, a 24% spike, flooding a discovery channel that was already dead on arrival. 90% of senior mobile professionals surveyed said organic App Store discovery was effectively over before this wave even hit. Half of all App Store searches are just people typing in brands they already know. The supply side hockey-sticked. The demand side didn’t move. This is why tech layoffs doubled to 264,000 in 2025 while code output simultaneously exploded. Companies don’t need more builders. They need people who can get the thing in front of someone who’ll pay for it. Distribution, positioning, audience, brand. The functions that never got the AI productivity boost. Nicholas nails the conclusion that taste and knowing what to build are what matter now. But taste is only half of it. You also need the channel. The unsexy reality is that a mediocre app with 100,000 newsletter subscribers will outperform a beautiful app with zero distribution every single time. The apps winning in 2026 aren’t the best-built ones. They’re the ones attached to someone who already has an audience. Building software used to be the moat. Now building software is the commodity. Distribution is the new moat, and unlike code, it doesn’t get cheaper with AI.

@aakashgupta Distribution has a supply problem too. YouTubers are all talking about the "abundance issue." Ditto short form, ad creative, SEO, SDR automation, etc.

@Quan Yea can't help ourselves

This is a 3 on the Dad Joke Scale (1-5) <- yeah, I haven't done one in a while, sue me

@arealmofwonder 'About Time' is Camus's 'Myth of Sisyphus' without the melodrama. Change nothing yet overcome everything.

The secret formula for happiness from the film 'About Time'. (To quote Goethe: "I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather.")

@NaderLikeLadder @sfcompute @alecqfong That's coit an ascent

Working from @sfcompute today in Levi's Plaza Same location where @alecqfong and I first set up our office 6 years ago!!! Since then went thru YC, startup acquired by NVIDIA, got married, grew a mustache... and Alec's patagonia is still trucking along 😂🤙

@gaganbiyani What about mission-less/greed-less? Like how far would one go if they just stare at the edge of the water without even knowing why?

I used to think that founders need to have a pure mission driven focus, but after meeting hundreds of founders I've realized the opposite is true. Privately, deep down, so many wildly successful founders were motivated by greed, fame or sex.

@ruslanjabari Duolingo for the liberal arts: Scrivium.com

@ founders you’re underestimating your mvp it doesn’t have to be perfect it just needs to be useful / cool for a small group of nerds out there im one of them: drop ur mvp and ill use it + give feedback

@gaganbiyani @mecolalu 💯 like going to the gym, everyone’s gotta get intellectually buff. Meanwhile 10% self-learners can easily be half the market in consumer dollar terms.

@mecolalu 10% is still a massive market. But also eventually you can use that 10% to create cache so the 90% feel like they have to do it. Also who said it has to be self-learning? 😆

The dirty little secret of edtech: the biggest names don’t actually care if you learn anything. As co-founder of Udemy, it is something I reckon with every day… Duolingo - edtech’s only decacorn, worth $14B. Brilliant app, addictive product, and great for motivation. But let’s be honest: most users can’t hold a basic conversation in their chosen language. It’s a game, not an education. Masterclass - it’s called “edutainment” for a reason. Great brand and team. But not useful for serious learning. Udemy/Coursera opened access to millions, but video courses have a fatal flaw: they only work for the most motivated. 4-10% completion rates! I still get DMs about their positive impact, but still average person doesn’t view them as mainstream solutions to education. Kajabi/Teachable nailed creator monetization. But many (not all) creators don’t prioritize outcomes — just sales. Too many $5,000 “get rich quick” courses with spammy marketing. There are gems, of course, but still not enough quality for mainstream acceptance. Then there’s University of Phoenix, the worst offender. It proved you could tap federal student loans, deliver poor outcomes, and keep billions in revenue. Ironically, the best education models — coding bootcamps like App Academy, BloomTech, General Assembly, Galvanize — actually drove real outcomes. But they didn’t quite reach scale. In large part due to unfair (and immoral, imho) practices by the higher education cartel. Here’s the thing: everyone in this space starts with good intentions. I know the teams at Duolingo, Udemy, and others. They care. But the incentives of Edtech 1.0 pushed everyone toward engagement and monetization instead of real learning. Public investors eventually caught on. Consumer growth stalled, B2B slowed, and valuations dropped. Coursera/Udemy are each ~$700M (!!) in annual revenue, but trade at 1.5-2.5x multiples (!!). It is a hard time in edtech. We need Edtech 2.0. The next generation needs to deliver real learning outcomes AND high engagement. There’s a number of companies trying - of course I believe Maven is one of them. To build multiple $10B+ companies in education, we need to care deeply about whether people actually learn. American competitiveness is literally reliant on rebuilding our education system. AI is about to trigger the largest upskilling need in modern history. The opportunity is massive — and this time, we can get it right. It may not seem like it, but I’m optimistic. Out from the ashes of Edtech 1.0 will rise Edtech 2.0. The new generation is going to deliver value, and make people believe again.

@gaganbiyani Until recently it was hard to gamify fields with fuzzy answers and progressions and so a lot of edtech 1.0 (cohort/bootcamp aside) was either (a) gamified memorization or (b) passive consumption.

@charlierward Oof man, lots of love. That looks terrible, get better

🚨 trigger warning - broken bones 🚨 Story time... on Monday, in a freak (and slightly funny) accident, I smashed my left leg into pieces. (Seriously). Now I'm no radiographer, but that x-ray looks pretty bad to me. There goes the football career? I had quite a lot of plans (that involve being able to stand/walk) over the next few months, both personally and professionally. Going to weddings/festivals. Running Ramen Space. Moving house. Etc etc. So this feels pretty unfair and untimely. But when is breaking your leg ever fair and timely? And why shouldn't this happen to me? What makes me so special? It is what it is, and on the flipside, I've also seen the best side of humanity over the last few days. From the ambulance crew and nurses/doctors. To my girlfriend/family/friends and everyone else who's shown up for me since Monday. It's hugely appreciated and I won't forget it. The irony of being a 'Ward' in a hospital ward for the first time isn't lost on me, and I'm trying to make the most of the free time. So catching up on reading, a spot of vibe coding (Stoicism Chrome Extension for myself had to be done), this sweet dinosaur colouring book my sister got me, simply appreciating having a solid community around me, and that my health isn't worse than it is. Thank you for reading - I'll be back very soon! 😎

If the UK implements a 2% wealth tax on people with assets worth more than £10m, how do you predict this will play out for the economy long-term?