Sairee Chahal

There's a chain in Japan called Yoshinoya. You walk in. You sit down. You say "gyudon nami." Thirty seconds later, there's a bowl of beef and rice in front of you. Three bucks. I moved to Tokyo at 18. Some months, after rent, I had nothing. Yoshinoya kept me alive. One bowl. That was dinner. That was enough. Three days before payday, if I had three bucks on me, I knew I'd be fine. The counter was always the same kind of crowd. A salaryman with his tie pulled loose. A guy in work boots, still covered in dust. A student who missed the last train. Sometimes a man who clearly had nowhere to be. Nobody spoke. Nobody looked up. Everyone just ate. It was strange, but the place felt safe. No winners. No losers. Just people eating the same bowl, at the same counter, for the same price. Yoshinoya opened in 1899, inside the old Tokyo fish market. The guys working those pre-dawn shifts needed something hot, fast, and cheap. That's what Yoshinoya gave them. It's been doing it for 127 years. There's a Japanese phrase: umai, yasui, hayai. Tasty, cheap, fast. Used to be the Yoshinoya slogan. Most places can pull off one. Maybe two. Yoshinoya's done all three for 127 years. Three bucks. One bowl. Kept someone alive every night for 127 years.

Live from Code with Claude: we're launching dreaming in Claude Managed Agents as a research preview. Outcomes, multiagent orchestration, and webhooks are now in public beta.

Coinbase is now testing 1 person teams + AI agents and announced laying off 700 employees. Other companies doing this (layoffs + AI): 1. Shopify: No new headcount unless you prove AI can’t do the job. 2. Block: Cutting ~4,000 roles (~40%); Dorsey says AI lets much smaller teams do more. 3. Klarna: Its AI assistant now does work equivalent to about 700 support roles. 4. Duolingo: Went “AI‑first,” telling teams to rebuild workflows around AI before hiring. 5. Salesforce: Paused new engineering hires after AI tools boosted dev productivity ~30%. 6. Amazon: Cutting about 16,000 corporate jobs this year in an efficiency/automation push. 7. Meta: Cutting ~10% of staff and freezing thousands of open roles as it doubles down on AI. 882 jobs per day disappearing in tech. This is the pace right now. And I think that's going to accelerate and move beyond tech. My POV: Every single one of these companies is telling you the same thing: one person with AI can do what used to take a team. They're literally saying it with their org charts. If you're employed, build a 1 person team on the side. If you're laid off, build one today. The tools that made your role redundant are the same tools that let you build your own company. The biggest wave of new startups is going to come from people who got restructured out of exactly these announcements.

Turbine Products and Industrial Bottleneck The reason turbines are increasingly becoming an industrial bottleneck is because the only turbine technology that is in mass production today is the hyper-car class of turbine technology, imagine the only car your buy was a Lamborghini, a Bugatti, or a McLaren… that’s where the power turbine market is. Nobody is mass producing the Toyota and Honda class of turbine technology. All turbine product specifications currently in mass production are maximally efficient, and maximally thermodynamically performant. The products available in the market are simply not designed for rapidly scalable production. It’s all single crystalline metallurgy, refractory ceramic coatings and laser drilling. Yes, this stuff is hard to make. No it doesn’t need to be this way. Nobody is still mass producing your grandfather’s turbine. As demand balloons, order books swell, prices surge and lead times are now blowing out to 60 months!… That is more than enough time for a new entrant to come in with a basic, low cost, short lead time mass produced offering that enters the market and quickly captures 40% market share, just by keeping product specs simple enough to scale production capacity horizontally with low lead accessible plant equipment. This is an ironic example of the highest tech sectors needing some low tech solutions. If you see things holistically and you genuinely know what you’re looking at, the world looks different and the solutions to the biggest problems are kind of obvious to you, but this type of observation is just not that common. The real bottleneck in the world is that not many people see the world this way. I guess because it’s such a hard won perspective.