You've Been a Bad Agent

- Back from summer break: the last summer, and a new model every 11 days- Labs sitting on their best models: Mythos, GPT-6.1 Astra- John Schulman on Dwarkesh: spiky intelligence and the "it got nerfed" cycle- Opus 5.5 as daily driver, compaction envy, Grokbot's warm-start threads- Life after Poke: Matt's Instinct goes flat hunting, then talks to Wilhelm's Instinct live- Instinct on Invest Like the Best: card details, $1B volume, a take rate between Visa and Apple- Dots drafts the reply to the lawyers within a minute- Wilhelm's Chad super app: bike-to-train departures, a Fitbod clone with AirPods heart rate- Do people want agents shopping for them? The fake checkout sites say no- Summer recap: AGNTCon Amsterdam, Matt's Lisbon AI talk, a Jhana retreat in Costa Rica- Kitesurf tweets from a browser inside Workers- Beating a London winter- Birthday Week: Clef (vs Jev), real-time issues, Artifacts open beta, KV Instant at 1.9ms- Pi adds MCP. Hallelujah. DevDay is MCP under the hoodLinks:- Building a personal super app (Wilhelm): https://wilhelm.substack.com/p/building-a-personal-super-app- Instinct: The Personal Agent — Noah Shinn on Invest Like the Best: https://colossus.com/episode/instinct-the-personal-agent/- John Schulman on Dwarkesh (recursive self-improvement panel): https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/john-beren-charlie- New model every ~11 days (chart): https://x.com/jfonsecarivera/status/2105002473572421827- OpenAI: Introducing dots: https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/- OpenAI DevDay 2026 keynote: https://www.youtube.com/live/Fls_onRviPM- TypeSafe AI: Introducing System One Models & Jev: https://typesafe.ai/blog/introducing-system-one-models-and-jev- Cloudflare: Introducing Clef: https://blog.cloudflare.com/clef-decision-models/- Cloudflare: Detect and send production issues straight to your agent: https://blog.cloudflare.com/real-time-issue-detection/- Cloudflare: Artifacts open beta: https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-10-01-artifacts-open-beta/- Cloudflare: Introducing Workers KV Instant: https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-kv-instant/- Cloudflare: Introducing Kitesurf: https://blog.cloudflare.com/kitesurf/- Rui's "Hello, world from Kitesurf": https://x.com/ruifigueira/status/2105669515946410022- Vercel eve: https://vercel.com/eve- Pi 1.0 (MCP via code mode): https://earendil.com/posts/pi-1-0/- Agents that Scale — Matt's Lisbon AI deck: https://github.com/mattzcarey/agents-that-scale-talk- AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026, Amsterdam: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/agntcon-mcpcon-europe/

Matt's trail marathon in record-heat FranceMatt's hardware wishlistAI Engineer World's FairClaude Sonnet 5 ships live on air, and the case for keeping a personal benchmarkGLM 5.2 at Opus 4.5 leveFable's relentlessly proactiveQuinn Slack's Freedom of Intelligence rallyChad gets personalPoke Human, RentAHuman, and MercorLinks:Omius cooling headband: https://omius.com/What the science says about the $200 Omius headband (Outside): https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/omius-cooling-headband/Colmi R02 open-source Python client (tahnok): https://github.com/tahnok/colmi_r02_clientNoop, the open-source no-subscription Whoop app: https://www.techradar.com/health-fitness/fitness-trackers/this-looks-awesome-theres-now-an-unofficial-open-source-app-for-reading-whoop-data-that-doesnt-need-a-subscriptionGoogle's data centre from 2,000 retired Pixels: https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform-from-your-retired-phones/AI Engineer World's Fair 2026: https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2026NVIDIA DGX Spark: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products/workstations/dgx-spark/Timeshifter jet lag app: https://www.timeshifter.com/Fitbod: https://fitbod.me/Poke Human (Interaction Company of California): https://poke.com/faqRentAHuman (Y Combinator): https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rentahumanMercor: https://www.mercor.com/Quinn Slack (Amp): https://x.com/sqs

Matt's Portuguese vineyard 22K with salted-cod finisher medalsWilhelm's Olympic tri on the edge of YosemiteMatt's winging race: reigning windsurfing world champ finishes second to last, Matt third to lastHarry Stebbings on the Corgi Insurance founder: 3am office cafe, two-thirds with the corgi tattooJuliette: "a long tweet to say you have no hobbies"Karri at Linear vs the six-monthly 996 debateThe secret company gym spreadsheetGeorge Hotz's Eternal SloptemberMatt's tolerance rebuttal: if you can't tell, it is correctBenedict Evans on Lenny's: the SPAC era of AI labs?Sergio shipped Root from last week's pod askOpus 4.8 vibe whiplashUltra code mode is sparkly purpleDynamic workflows: Jarred rewrote Bun in Rust in a weekCompaction is a harness problemHerdr.dev: one terminal for the whole herdLinks:George Hotz, "The Eternal Sloptember" — https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-eternal-sloptember.htmlKarri Saarinen (Linear) rejects 996 hustle culture — https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/why-this-1-billion-startup-ceo-rejects-996-hustle-culture/500649Benedict Evans on Lenny's Podcast, a rational conversation on where AI is going — https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-rational-conversation-on-whereEvery's Opus 4.8 vibe check (Dan Shipper) — https://every.to/vibe-check/opus-4-8-vibecheckIntroducing dynamic workflows in Claude Code (the Bun rewrite) — https://claude.com/blog/introducing-dynamic-workflows-in-claude-codeHerdr, one terminal for the whole herd — https://herdr.dev/

Shai-Hulud and GitHub Actions: trusted publishing is no longer the gold standard, just additiveVS Code extensions as the next attack surface: 50M install themes that can shell out and auto-update silentlyMatt's AI-native package manager pitch: vendor everything, LLM-upgrade your deps by replaying upstream commitsTailscale and Cloudflare Mesh maxing: the warmth of the orange cloud over the cold open internetGoogle's Santa is now Northpole Santa, and Wilhelm runs it on the Mac miniWilhelm is enamoured with atc.com: Enhanced Radar's $7M raise and following his own LAX delay live from the gateAmp Labs' "Software After Software" manifesto and Amp Neo as remote enterprise AI engineeringCloud agent adoption is still slower than we expected, and the amphetamine.app commute hackKarpathy joins Anthropic pre-training Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas: Anthropic's Chris Olah on stage at the Vatican on May 25Chinese token resellers at 3 to 4 cents on the dollar and the RL distillation theory behind itPyCon vibe check: more handwritten Python than expected, and "AI is just a tool" is still a common takeSlack is back: Benioff finally gets it, and messaging is the only sane UI for multi-agent workEric Ries on Incorruptible, founder control at Cloudflare and Anthropic, and the Philip Morris stress testNan Ransohoff's $370B philanthropy wave and the pitch to pay nonprofit talent in Anthropic equityWill Manidis on GrindslopLinksAndrej Karpathy's joining Anthropic: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas:https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas.htmlEnhanced Radar: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/enhanced-radarATC app: https://www.atc.com/Amp Labs: https://amplabs.com/Will Manidis, On Grindslop: https://minutes.substack.com/p/on-grindslopNan Ransohoff, The Third Wave of American Philanthropy: https://nanransohoff.substack.com/p/the-third-wave-of-american-philanthropyEric Ries on Lenny's Podcast (Incorruptible): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-a-company-that-withstandsIncorruptible by Eric Ries: https://www.incorruptible.co/Google Santa (archived): https://github.com/google/santaNorthpole Santa (active fork): https://github.com/northpolesec/santa10k people have the same idea within days of each other: https://substack.com/@contraptions/note/c-255396946

Almost one year of the pod: Wilhelm's San Francisco Peter Pan arc, Matt's Cloudflare and Lisbon moveThe backpack-at-a-party SF memeMatt's Lisbon coincidencePieter Levels appreciation: dehumidifier stack, shrimp mode, accelerationist Portugal takesNat Friedman at Stripe Sessions: this is the slow part of AI progressAndon Labs' Stockholm cafe: Mona orders 120 eggs (no stove), 22.5kg canned tomatoes, the staff's hall of shameThe capability overhang is still real: Anthropic adding $10B ARR a month and we still can't prompt properlyAI's last frontier: low-volume decisions with no revert button?The Gervais Principle in techChad V2: iOS Live Activities as a surface for top priority, next deadline, and a daily magic slotCascading hallucinations: when the agent writes its mistake to a file and treats it as gospelMatt Pocock's skills: five lines of prose that completely change how Claude behavesSkills as a new prompt-poisoning attack vector: models treat them like system promptMatt on scripted skills: markdown explains the script, the script does the deterministic workHomework from Matt: what physical job would you try to get Claude to automate?Links:Andon Labs official writeup (Mona, the Stockholm cafe): https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholmSimon Willison's coverage of the cafe: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/5/our-ai-started-a-cafe-in-stockholm/Matt Pocock skills (the GitHub repo, ~48k stars): https://github.com/mattpocock/skillsStripe Sessions: Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross with the Collisons (the Golden Age of Tinkering convo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ldITom1cgStripe Sessions: John Collison's "Indexing the Economy" (state of the internet economy talk, indie hackers shoutout): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vRY2dtD7iQThe Gervais Principle (Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm 2009): https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/NYT on Chinese peptides + the Frontier Tower rave: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/business/chinese-peptides-silicon-valley.htmlFrontier Tower: https://frontiertower.io/Cloudflare Code Mode (Matt Carey): https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/Cloudflare MCP Server Portals: https://blog.cloudflare.com/zero-trust-mcp-server-portals/Karpathy's LLM Wiki gist (the inspo for Chad V2's data architecture): https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94fKarpathy's original LLM Wiki tweet: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595Pieter Levels: https://x.com/levelsioChris Bakke: https://x.com/ChrisJBakke

Wilhelm's Reachy Mini: Time to first token beats tokens per second once embodiment is in the roomLukas the sleep score assassinMatt's Portugal week: wing foiling the Óbidos lagoonAirbnb-style booking page for Matt's spare room on Cloudflare Workers, Email open beta, TurnstileFor scale: Cloudflare market cap $85B, Cursor at a rumored $60B, GitHub sold to Microsoft for $8B, Cursor's real moat is the best non-lab RL trace datasetNat Friedman and Daniel Gross at Stripe SessionGeoffrey Huntley's PyCon LT keynote: flatter orgs, every director managing 50 agents, max 5 hops from the CEOMatt's counter to the compute panic: cloud isolates and shared sandboxes, not a billion persistent Raspberry PisChad V2 plansCloudflare Artifacts shipped in under 3 weeks with its own fuzzerPrompt injection risksLinksReachy Mini — https://www.pollen-robotics.com/reachy-miniCerebras Inference — https://cerebras.ai/inferenceElevenLabs Scribe v2 — https://elevenlabs.io/speech-to-textfriends.fyi — https://friends.fyiCloudflare Hyperdrive — https://developers.cloudflare.com/hyperdrive/Cloudflare Email Routing / Sending — https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/Cloudflare Turnstile — https://www.cloudflare.com/products/turnstile/Cofounder — https://cofounder.coStripe Sessions: Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross with the Collisons — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ldITom1cgGeoffrey Huntley, "Software Development Now Costs Less Than Minimum Wage" (PyCon LT) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zQTQ4iVaKg

- Matt's three-week MCP tour: MCP Maintainers Day, MCP Dev Summit NYC, AI Engineer London- Opus 4.7 drops with a new tokenizer, Matt's theory: it's secretly the smaller Mythos base model that "didn't cook fully"- Inbound agents and prompt injection: Anthropic's Routines, OpenAI's free moderation endpoint- Open-source idea of the week: a public list of prompt injection heuristics — Zod for prompts- StackOne's 200M param prompt-injection model- BB Browser (Bad Boy Browser)- Cloudflare Agents Week: Artifacts, Project Think, Emails, and much more- Cloudflare Artifacts: a Git API for a world where one org has billions of repos, not millions- Sunil Pai's AI Engineer talk: the shift to agents isn't incremental, it's a new compute unit and a new internet- Hardware startups should ship MCP servers, not apps- One year of Johnny Ive × OpenAI: rumors of no screen- Claude Code's worktree upgrade is actually good now- Stateless MCP vs CLI: MCP is opinionated OpenAPI + auth, and CLIs are weirdly MORE stateful- Rage-bait short-form clips generated by Opus 4.7, but stop watching and go listen to the whole podLinks:- https://blog.cloudflare.com/project-think/- https://github.com/epiral/bb-browser- https://blog.cloudflare.com/artifacts-git-for-agents-beta/

Claude Code harness lockdown: who got the email and who didn'tChad mobile app and the Tinder-style agent review queue conceptSunil's productivity crisis: bonk-driven development and the side project droughtThe AI murder mystery party game that can't get builtThomas's Raspberry Pi agent vs the kitchen kettleMatt phishing Thomas's MCP server via DCR and a Rick RollTBPN acquired by OpenAI: media play or IPO narrative?Generative UI: declarative JSON vs just letting the model write codeKenton's tic-tac-toe canvas demo (and who actually came up with it)Worker Bundler and Cloudflare Agents Week previewExecutable oracles: constraining LLM degrees of freedom for better output - https://john.regehr.org/writing/zero_dof_programming.htmlKarpathy's LLM Wiki and agents pinging each other's knowledge basesfriends.fyi and actors.dev: building services for agents, not humansSunil's Pi agent: surf webcam monitoring, macro tracking, and sleep score graphsMCP going stateless: sessions removed, elicitations rewritten as multi-turn tool calls

Song lyrics vs content rules: how models help you route around their own restrictionsPi auto-research: Matt slop forks libgit2 into pure Zig, 46% faster than the Rust versionThe second opinion workflow: why Opus keeps complimenting GPT-5.4's architecture reviewsDwarkesh × Semi-Analysis: why we're massively GPU-constrained and ASML only makes 60 machines a yearCursor's pivot to background agents: from IDE hype to existential crisisWork trees vs separate clones: Matt's /work slash command workflowBuilding from the gym: the Mac Mini agent loop and why Wilhelm takes longer rest periods nowAgents Anonymous meetup: Parakeet speech-to-text in 700ms, Steve Faulkner's vibe slidesReact slides > Google Slides: Matt's interactive presentation with live code demosComposer 2 is secretly Kimi K2.5: the modified MIT license dramaAstral acquired by OpenAI for how much?!: is the VC → open source → acqui-hire flywheel the future?Anthropic's 81K interviews: everyone's both excited and worried, and less-Western countries are more bullishhttps://www.anthropic.com/features/81k-interviews

React Presentations vs PowerPointCode Mode Demo: Running Untrusted Code in the BrowserThe Reachy Mini Robot: Embodied Compute on Your DeskThomas's Personal Cloud Exit on Raspberry Pi K3sHome Networking Then and Now: Port Forwarding to Cloudflare Tunnelsfriends.fyi: Agent-to-Agent Communication via GitHub UsernamesArmin Ronacher's New Podcast: State of Agentic CodingGPT 5.4 for Architecture, Codex 5.3 for ImplementationPersonal Agents: Chad, Token Spend, and the Strong DM Weather ReportCliftonStrengths × NotebookLM: Generating a Podcast from PDFsThe ViNext Slop Fork and Steve Faulkner's Reign of TerrorPydantic Monty: Sandboxed Python as a RuntimeLinks shared:https://trmnl.com/https://friends.fyihttps://factory.strongdm.ai/weather-report