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 hood
Links:
- 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 France
Matt's hardware wishlist
AI Engineer World's Fair
Claude Sonnet 5 ships live on air, and the case for keeping a personal benchmark
GLM 5.2 at Opus 4.5 leve
Fable's relentlessly proactive
Quinn Slack's Freedom of Intelligence rally
Chad gets personal
Poke Human, RentAHuman, and Mercor

Links:
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_client
Noop, 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-subscription
Google'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/2026
NVIDIA 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/faq
RentAHuman (Y Combinator): https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rentahuman
Mercor: https://www.mercor.com/
Quinn Slack (Amp): https://x.com/sqs

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

Shai-Hulud and GitHub Actions: trusted publishing is no longer the gold standard, just additive
VS Code extensions as the next attack surface: 50M install themes that can shell out and auto-update silently
Matt's AI-native package manager pitch: vendor everything, LLM-upgrade your deps by replaying upstream commits
Tailscale and Cloudflare Mesh maxing: the warmth of the orange cloud over the cold open internet
Google's Santa is now Northpole Santa, and Wilhelm runs it on the Mac mini
Wilhelm is enamoured with atc.com: Enhanced Radar's $7M raise and following his own LAX delay live from the gate
Amp Labs' "Software After Software" manifesto and Amp Neo as remote enterprise AI engineering
Cloud agent adoption is still slower than we expected, and the amphetamine.app commute hack
Karpathy joins Anthropic pre-training 
Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas: Anthropic's Chris Olah on stage at the Vatican on May 25
Chinese token resellers at 3 to 4 cents on the dollar and the RL distillation theory behind it
PyCon vibe check: more handwritten Python than expected, and "AI is just a tool" is still a common take
Slack is back: Benioff finally gets it, and messaging is the only sane UI for multi-agent work
Eric Ries on Incorruptible, founder control at Cloudflare and Anthropic, and the Philip Morris stress test
Nan Ransohoff's $370B philanthropy wave and the pitch to pay nonprofit talent in Anthropic equity
Will Manidis on Grindslop

Links
Andrej Karpathy's joining Anthropic: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312
Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas:https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas.html
Enhanced Radar: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/enhanced-radar
ATC app: https://www.atc.com/
Amp Labs: https://amplabs.com/
Will Manidis, On Grindslop: https://minutes.substack.com/p/on-grindslop
Nan Ransohoff, The Third Wave of American Philanthropy: https://nanransohoff.substack.com/p/the-third-wave-of-american-philanthropy
Eric Ries on Lenny's Podcast (Incorruptible): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-a-company-that-withstands
Incorruptible by Eric Ries: https://www.incorruptible.co/
Google Santa (archived): https://github.com/google/santa
Northpole Santa (active fork): https://github.com/northpolesec/santa
10k 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 move
The backpack-at-a-party SF meme
Matt's Lisbon coincidence
Pieter Levels appreciation: dehumidifier stack, shrimp mode, accelerationist Portugal takes
Nat Friedman at Stripe Sessions: this is the slow part of AI progress
Andon Labs' Stockholm cafe: Mona orders 120 eggs (no stove), 22.5kg canned tomatoes, the staff's hall of shame
The capability overhang is still real: Anthropic adding $10B ARR a month and we still can't prompt properly
AI's last frontier: low-volume decisions with no revert button?
The Gervais Principle in tech
Chad V2: iOS Live Activities as a surface for top priority, next deadline, and a daily magic slot
Cascading hallucinations: when the agent writes its mistake to a file and treats it as gospel
Matt Pocock's skills: five lines of prose that completely change how Claude behaves
Skills as a new prompt-poisoning attack vector: models treat them like system prompt
Matt on scripted skills: markdown explains the script, the script does the deterministic work
Homework 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-stockholm
Simon 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/skills
Stripe Sessions: Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross with the Collisons (the Golden Age of Tinkering convo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ldITom1cg
Stripe Sessions: John Collison's "Indexing the Economy" (state of the internet economy talk, indie hackers shoutout): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vRY2dtD7iQ
The 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.html
Frontier 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/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f
Karpathy's original LLM Wiki tweet: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595
Pieter Levels: https://x.com/levelsio
Chris Bakke: https://x.com/ChrisJBakke