A lot of companies are making a big mistake. It’s becoming clear that AI makes people more capable than they were before. Let’s say, for this thought experiment, AI makes white collar workers twice as effective. Companies’ first decision is whether to do anything about this. The 0% option is to say, “No thank you”.…
Completion, Chat, Agent, Claw
I installed OpenClaw before it was cool. That was unwise. I could see it was a security nightmare: prompt injections from anywhere, connected to all my stuff. But I decided to give it a whirl, because who was going to take the time to craft a prompt injection for yet another random open source agent?…
The Genie and the Monkey’s Paw
Does your AI try to make your dreams come true? Or does it do what you asked for, no matter the cost? Today Anthropic shipped Opus 4.7. From the release notes: Opus 4.7 is substantially better at following instructions. Interestingly, this means that prompts written for earlier models can sometimes now produce unexpected results: where…
Putting AI on the Therapy Couch
Today, Anthropic dropped their newest, biggest model. Sort of. They published reams of information about Claude Mythos Preview, their largest and most capable model yet, but declined to actually release it – they found it was really, really good at finding bugs, and those bugs needed patching before the bad guys got a hold of…
The Overnight Webcam App
I’ve been working with teams on applying Dark Factory principles to build software with AI. There are a few tools to do this, but my favorite is trycycle.ai. It’s just a skill. You install it by telling your favorite agent: Read https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danshapiro/trycycle/main/README.md. Follow the installation instructions there. You use it by saying build the thing…
Dark Factories: Rise of the Trycycle
Companies are now producing Dark Factories – engines that turn specs into shipping software. The implementations can be complex and sometimes involve Mad Max metaphors. But they don’t have to be like that. If you want a 5 minute factory, jump to Trycycle at the bottom. The Engine in the Factory Deep in their souls,…
You Don’t Write the Code. You Don’t Read the Code Either.
A few months ago, I walked into Justin McCarthy’s office at StrongDM and noticed something wrong with his colleague Jay’s monitor. He had a Google Spreadsheet open. Columns, rows, formatting – it looked exactly like Sheets. Except the URL bar said localhost. That could not be so. Gsuite was not alone. Slack was there, Jira,…
The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory
In my last post, I wrote about technical deflation. We’re seeing the cost of code is dropping so fast that we need to change our tech debt payment plans. The smart teams are deferring payment on human hours today to pay them back with cheaper AI hours tomorrow. But how do you actually cash in…
This is a Time of Technical Deflation
Day over day, year over year, AI is driving down the cost of writing code. Economists have a word for what happens when stuff keeps getting cheaper: deflation. And you do things differently during deflation. Ward Cunningham coined the phrase “technical debt” in 1992. He was working on a financial application called WyCash and needed…
I made the XKCD impossible app without any words
I’ve been impressed with AI Studio’s Apps for prototyping. https://aistudio.google.com/apps So I decided to give it the ultimate challenge: I pasted in XKCD 1425, and nothing else. I’ll let you be the judge of the results. https://ai.studio/apps/drive/1p6eZxjBTl2xVAraXVNNBN8FxTTbfacNp