brandontory

Founder of Share. Ex-Google AI engineer. John 3:16 🦄

[Naithan Jones @NaithanJones]

@Southside_Gunn People saying hip hop is dead because of her outfit or voice inflection

She is rapping about ignorance, killin and whoring, same as the men rappers

It’s dying because the content is negative energy. The audience is starting to shrink as a result. Many are waking up fortunately

[brandontory @brandontory]

@alive_ Congrats @eddylazzarin!

[brandontory @brandontory]

New interview with @TheMUSEUMTv where we talk about my story and how independent artists can benefit from Share.

https://t.co/rj4iUZm1Kt

[François Chollet @fchollet]

You cannot think your way to a perfect design. Only building and testing, over many iterations, can reveal the flaws in your mental model and provide the feedback you need to create the best design possible.

[brandontory @brandontory]

Is @russdiemon right or is @even_biz right?

[RUSS @russdiemon]

this isn’t a gotcha, just somethin that’s been confusing for me to watch but paying 20% on all revenue for y’all to host an artists work that their fans can buy is indirect to consumer, not direct to consumer lol

direct to consumer means no middleman. y’all are the middleman and take 20% for it. Shopify is like $39/mo + 3% per sale. a domain is like $15/yr.

basically an artist can bypass this and get a website and sell directly to their fans

just food for thought

[brandontory @brandontory]

If you're stuck right now focus on paying your debts. There is nothing more freeing. Debts are financial but also non-financial obligations: completion of things you owe to someone.

[brandontory @brandontory]

I keep seeing massively complex AI workflows with the goal of "read me my schedule for today".

[brandontory @brandontory]

@ryanleslie was wrong about how direct-to-consumer would work in the future.

The insight about getting fan data was brilliant, but at the time he went direct we didn't have the technology for fans to participate in the economy of music.

Now we do.

The thing people consistently miss about Napster is it wasn't just pirating, it was about making money. People sold the mixtapes they burned with pirated music. This was a signal: fans want to make money too. It's the same reason NFTs worked in 2021, but, NFTs were missing the most obvious part: music sales revenue.

This was some kind of philosophical issue where nearly everyone in charge of those platforms insisted that music should be free forever. But it's not what artists want. And, coincidentally, once we admit that music has value that value can underpin an entire onchain economy.

That's why we built SHARE. Direct-to-consumer is fantastic but it is not new and it is not the full picture.

[Chris Dixon @cdixon]

https://t.co/zAHyO5TJ0c

[brandontory @brandontory]

Not learning to code because of AI is like not learning to read because of the printing press.

Irrational. Coding is more about reading than writing.

[brandontory @brandontory]

I use Codex everyday. In some ways it is flawless. In other ways it costs me time.

Where it's fantastic: prototyping new features, building an entire application based on a clear specification from 0 to 1. Fixing well understood bugs that do not require deep knowledge of the codebase or outside context.

Where it actually costs me time: Trying to ask it to solve non-trivial issues that require debugging and that cannot always be inferred based on reading the code alone, anything that requires understanding that spans multiple repositories, anything where the cost of not doing it myself leads to a lack of understanding that slows down technical decisions in the future (mental tech debt that adds up).

In general though, an amazing tool. I consider it the sky crane of software.

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

Software development is undergoing a renaissance in front of our eyes.

If you haven't used the tools recently, you likely are underestimating what you're missing. Since December, there's been a step function improvement in what tools like Codex can do. Some great engineers at OpenAI yesterday told me that their job has fundamentally changed since December. Prior to then, they could use Codex for unit tests; now it writes essentially all the code and does a great deal of their operations and debugging. Not everyone has yet made that leap, but it's usually because of factors besides the capability of the model.

Every company faces the same opportunity now, and navigating it well — just like with cloud computing or the Internet — requires careful thought. This post shares how OpenAI is currently approaching retooling our teams towards agentic software development. We're still learning and iterating, but here's how we're thinking about it right now:

As a first step, by March 31st, we're aiming that:

(1) For any technical task, the tool of first resort for humans is interacting with an agent rather than using an editor or terminal.
(2) The default way humans utilize agents is explicitly evaluated as safe, but also productive enough that most workflows do not need additional permissions.

In order to get there, here's what we recommended to the team a few weeks ago:

1. Take the time to try out the tools. The tools do sell themselves — many people have had amazing experiences with 5.2 in Codex, after having churned from codex web a few months ago. But many people are also so busy they haven't had a chance to try Codex yet or got stuck thinking "is there any way it could do X" rather than just trying.
- Designate an "agents captain" for your team — the primary person responsible for thinking about how agents can be brought into the teams' workflow.
- Share experiences or questions in a few designated internal channels
- Take a day for a company-wide Codex hackathon

2. Create skills and AGENTS[.md].
- Create and maintain an AGENTS[.md] for any project you work on; update the AGENTS[.md] whenever the agent does something wrong or struggles with a task.
- Write skills for anything that you get Codex to do, and commit it to the skills directory in a shared repository

3. Inventory and make accessible any internal tools.
- Maintain a list of tools that your team relies on, and make sure someone takes point on making it agent-accessible (such as via a CLI or MCP server).

4. Structure codebases to be agent-first. With the models changing so fast, this is still somewhat untrodden ground, and will require some exploration.
- Write tests which are quick to run, and create high-quality interfaces between components.

5. Say no to slop. Managing AI generated code at scale is an emerging problem, and will require new processes and conventions to keep code quality high
- Ensure that some human is accountable for any code that gets merged. As a code reviewer, maintain at least the same bar as you would for human-written code, and make sure the author understands what they're submitting.

6. Work on basic infra. There's a lot of room for everyone to build basic infrastructure, which can be guided by internal user feedback. The core tools are getting a lot better and more usable, but there's a lot of infrastructure that currently go around the tools, such as observability, tracking not just the committed code but the agent trajectories that led to them, and central management of the tools that agents are able to use.

Overall, adopting tools like Codex is not just a technical but also a deep cultural change, with a lot of downstream implications to figure out. We encourage every manager to drive this with their team, and to think through other action items — for example, per item 5 above, what else can prevent a lot of "functionally-correct but poorly-maintainable code" from creeping into codebases.

[brandontory @brandontory]

What it's like as a founder using AI in day-to-day development vs. what they say in the headlines.

[brandontory @brandontory]

@JustinIt4Fun_ ✊🏾

[brandontory @brandontory]

Why AI expands the amount of work to be done and why I believe understanding the underlying systems will only become more valuable.

[brandontory @brandontory]

@JulianGilliam Thank you I appreciate the love.

[formless @formless_xyz]

Money is a social technology that helps humans work together.

Revenue sharing isn't just about revenue, it's about human connection at scale.

Transferring energy to the right people.

[brandontory @brandontory]

If your business depends on going viral every day, you don’t have a business.

[brandontory @brandontory]

How you make money in an attention economy.

[brandontory @brandontory]

AI is changing everything.

A conversation with Jason Martin (Co-Founder and CEO of @formless_xyz).

[brandontory @brandontory]

We measure, we name, and then we agree that the illusion in our minds is reality.