Founders must pick between being a virus or a dinosaur
As a startup founder, you only have two paths. Be a virus or be a dinosaur - both are apex predators in nature.
Path 1: Be a dinosaur.
Your goal is to keep getting bigger and bigger. The idea is simple - you can keep upselling more things to your existing customers. Companies like Salesforce have executed this strategy well.
Path 2: Be a virus.
You stay laser-focused on a single product or line of business, and you keep your org and core team extremely small and lean. Cursor and Instagram
are examples - both built massive businesses with tiny teams.
There's no wrong answer. But you have to pick one.
- Plank
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Newer: Congrats to Cheiron on its $8M seed led by Menlo VenturesCustomers and partnersModels and research
Congrats to Jeremy Nixon on launching Infinity
Congrats to Jeremy and Infinity! The Plank forward-deployed AI research team has really enjoyed working with them on some of the hardest low-level kernel optimization problems. Watch this space!
Coding agentsSoftware architecture
Coding models should be trained for concept minimalism
I hope OpenAI and Anthropic include elegance and concept minimalism as a metric to train against in post training for coding models. These models require a lot of guardrails to be put in the harness else you end up with a cambrian explosion in concepts in your code very quickly. And once that happens, it is hard to backtrack. In the meantime, I recommend people to add a couple of these steps in your harness pipeline: - as one of the adversarial review steps, ask to count the number of new concepts added and critically evaluate if they are absolutely needed. - in systems that involve AI prompts code and software code, don't let the deterministic code be over-engineered. When in doubt, rely on the AI prompts vs hard-coded code. - be clear in your agents.md and claude.md that you like simplicity and elegance. In the coming days, I will share more about my harness where I have this working. In the meantime if you're interested, DM me and happy to show you.
Models and research
A cell built from scratch grows and divides
For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides! So cool - I can't wait to see computers created with biological building blocks. quantamagazine.org/for-the-first-time-a-cell-built-…
Coding agents
The joy of figuring out how software works may be lost
This was beautiful to read - the joy of understanding how something works, reverse engineering a piece of software or debugging something for hours and the joy of "figuring it out" is something that might become a lost art in the decades to come. I feel this will cause us to spend a lot more time introspecting - what do we really want, dig into the motivations behind our want and the guardrails around what are we ok with. unix.foo/posts/last-people-who-know-how-it-works
Models and research
Meta Brain2Qwerty and a society with mind-reading devices
How would society function when mind-reading devices are built into your glasses and phones? I am thinking of starting to train my mind to "think" in an encoded language that I come up with. But then again, LLMs can likely decipher that too! ai.meta.com/blog/brain2qwerty-brain-ai-human-commun…
Software architecture
AWS Lambda introduces MicroVMs for isolated sandboxes
AWS releases MicroVMs - run isolated sandboxes. Excited to try this - I hope they don't run into AWS Lambda cold start issues. You get virtual machine level isolation, near-instant launch and resume, and direct control over environment lifecycle and state. aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/run-isolated-sandboxes-wit…
Forward deployed engineeringPlank
Training the next generation of FDEs and AI engineers
Excited about training the next generation of FDE and AI engineers at Plank! The way we build software is changing every few months and the only way businesses can keep up is with on-going training of team members. The way you built 6 months ago is already LEGACY.
Coding agents
PostHog's 70x faster SQL parser built with Claude Code
Robbie Coomber from PostHog rewrote PostHog's SQL parser using multiple long-running Claude Code sessions in parallel. The result was 16K lines of "hand"-rolled parser code, 5K lines of tooling, a few more K of tests, and a ~70x speed up! Thats awesome. There really is no excuse to not ask Claude or Codex to optimize your codebase. Of course it requires providing the right evals and harness so that it has a way to measure correctness in an objective way. Also I love that they have a formal declarative grammar for the parser using ANTLR .g4 format. Read more here: posthog.com/blog/sql-parser
