Richard MacManus @aiDotEngineer CODE

“Software is gonna be so fucking back.” .@CompleteSkeptic is full of bangers and you will have to listen to his full talk at @aiDotEngineer, but for now, here is our top-10 of his pearls: 1“We’ve been announcing AGI three months away for two years now.” Meanwhile, go outside San Francisco and a lot of the world looks unchanged. Where the fuck is all the automation? 2“You get Einstein 95% of the time, but Mr. Bean 5% of the time.” And if you can’t tell which is which, how are you supposed to automate anything? 3“I do believe RLHF is part of the problem.” His complaint: we optimized models for assistance, with a human checking the result, and then expected them to reliably do work on their own. 4“The bitterest lesson is doing the right task.” Diogo thinks that compute matters more than algorithms, data matters more than compute, and choosing the right task matters most. You get what you optimize for. 5“I think the world still has LLM Stockholm Syndrome.” We keep designing around the limitations of today’s models. Why is the best we can come up with still the same software, cheaper to write, with a chatbot on the side? 6“What if we can program with common sense, with intention, with human understanding?” Very passionate talk! He suggests: put intelligence into the software’s inner loop. What could we build if understanding intent became a building block we could actually rely on? 7“Real fucking engineering by people who care a lot about the end result.” Break tasks down, build stages you can verify, and actually manage state. Why should every agent rediscover the same codebase patterns over and over? 8“There’s an asymmetric advantage for people who are, like, bad actors and don’t give a shit.” That’s his explanation for slop: unreliable output is much easier to tolerate when everyone else pays the cost of reading, checking, and filtering it. 9“I call this software research. That’s not a joke.” Explore what software could become, including weird things with no obvious business case. Build something because you can. Maybe one percent of those ideas leads to something awesome. There is going to be SaaSopalooza! (I don’t know how to write this word but you got me) 10“Software is gonna be so fucking back.” The future he wants is one where “can we automate this?” becomes “how much work will it take?”

Memory is what allows Claude to learn from experience. In a new Engineering Blog post, we share how “dreaming” helps Claude organize what it’s learned, correct its mistakes, and find what it needs more easily the next time. anthropic.com/research/compo…

So here it is — @ryolu_ 's talk at @aiDotEngineer 2026 Shanghai. I shot it handheld on a Xiaomi 15 Ultra, so there's some shake; I fixed as much of it as I could in CapCut. Handheld footage just isn't going to be sharp or steady. Still, it's the best talk I saw on day 1 of AIE — which is why I'm not posting a text summary. Watch for yourself. I missed the first minute or so. Ryo opens with the excitement of what AI makes possible, and how seeing what others are building can quickly turn that excitement into anxiety about falling behind.

The master biographer reflects at 91. The Robert Caro interview. 0:00:00 – How Caro gets people to talk 0:05:03 – Does America need a little more Moses today? 0:12:42 – Moses the young idealist 0:17:57 – Watching Moses lose power 0:24:01 – Did Moses realize he was changing? 0:27:53 – Building during the Great Depression 0:32:51 – The threats and promises of Lyndon Johnson 0:36:08 – Could Kennedy have passed Johnson’s laws? 0:41:00 – Getting a book down to one sentence 0:46:21 – All the material that never made it into the books 0:52:59 – Loneliness

A conversation between the founders of Cloudflare and Nous/Hermes about the emerging open agentic stack and why that's so important youtu.be/tX3DkdxAe5c?si=wbKL…

Last year we launched Tolan, inspired by a vision of AI that sees you and believes in you, not one that books restaurant reservations for you. Your Tolan shows up for you at 3am when you’re alone with your newborn. On your commute when you’re anxious about the day ahead. When you just finished a new show and none of your friends have watched it yet. The people who love Tolan are parents. Caregivers. Moms in Dallas and Dads in Atlanta. People who aren’t trying to optimize and be more productive, but who simply want to feel seen and supported in their aspirations. This month more than 250k people will spend time with their Tolan. Those users have exchanged billions of messages across more than 70m conversations over the last year. Today, we're announcing $30m in additional capital from @mignano and @usv, with @khoslaventures and @rabois doubling down, bringing our total capital raised to $60m. To celebrate, we made a short film celebrating some of the ways that Tolans show up :)