At its core, computer chips are made of silicon (silicon dioxide is sand).
If you stop to think about it, we’ve essentially found a way to make sand think. It’s miraculous.”
Levels of Individual Agency:
L0 — I don’t know how to do this.
L1 — IDK. Please teach me.
L2 — How do I teach myself?
L3 — I did the task. Can you check it?
L4 — I did the task well. What’s next?
L5 — I did all the tasks.
L6 — …silence…
I stole this idea and now use it with every single employee.
It’s the best illustration I’ve seen of teaching someone to be high agency.
It says there are 5 levels of work:
Level 1: “There is a problem.”
Level 2: “There is a problem, and I’ve found some causes.”
Level 3: “Here’s the problem, here are some possible causes, and here are some possible solutions.”
Level 4: “Here’s the problem, here’s what I think caused it, here are some possible solutions, and here’s the one I think we should pick.”
Level 5: “I identified a problem, figured out what caused it, researched how to fix it, and I fixed it. Just wanted to keep you in the loop.”
Using this framework, here’s what I say to every new employee…
You will live at Level 4 from Day 1 and as we build trust you will rise to Level 5.
Being high agency doesn’t just mean tackling problems in this way. It means your entire way of working should be oriented to being a Level 4+ employee.
Plz feel free to steal it as well.
And ty @stephsmithio for the framework!
new post on harness engineering for AI self-improvement: https://t.co/ZYvGfVs61k
It is hard to forecast how much the future of RSI will rely on harnesses. Likely harness engineering will evolve in the direction of self-improvement and enable auto-research, and, in turn, smarter models keeps harnesses simple.
Even when many harness improvement get eventually internalized into core model, the need to specify goals and context will not disappear.
@paraschopra fantasy world game where AI villagers live real lives, they have there own brain, they gossip, they show evolution can occur among ai npcs
Claude Fable one-shotted this entire 3D game based on Stanford's Generative Agents paper.
My prompt: "build me a fantasy world game where AI villagers live real lives — read the papers, do whatever it takes."
9 villagers with memories, daily plans & gossip.
Emerging AI Agents.
Introducing Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use.
Its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.
BREAKING:
Anthropic just dropped Claude Fable 5—this is Mythos, made safe for public release. It is the best coding model in the world.
We've been testing it internally @every for the last week or so across coding, writing, marketing, editing, and more—here's our vibe check:
- It broke our benchmarks. Fable scored a 91/100 on our Senior Engineer benchmark—this is human senior engineer level. The previous high score was Opus 4.8 at 63. GPT-5.5 is a 62.
- It's a one-shot wonder. You can set it and forget for hours or overnight on huge coding tasks, and come back to completed work. It cleared entire production bug backlogs, built a playable 3D, and even made a 2-minute animated film—all one-shot.
- Taste and attention to detail. In coding and knowledge work tasks, it has much better taste and attention to detail than we've ever seen. It gets subtle things right, adds little features you might not have thought of, and generally understands the assignment in ways that surprised us.
- Great use of context. We set it loose analyzing customer feedback surveys and our website data and it came back with a crisp, clean report that identified a. our biggest problem and b. a concrete testable solution—and then we sent it off to build that.
- It's best for power users. If you're already used to orchestrating multiple agents in your work, this model can do things that you've never seen before. If you're a knowledge worker or vibe coder with a more basic setup, you're not going to notice a huge difference—in fact, it probably isn't the right model for you.
- It's very slow, token-hungry. Using this thing for regular knowledge work is like squashing an ant with a rocket launcher. It also routinely uses 500k to 1M tokens on tasks. That's why it's best for your heaviest jobs—but not as good for tasks like collaborative writing.
- It's expensive. It's about twice as expensive as Opus, and it's also incredibly token hungry—so expect it to be something you'll use sparingly unless your company pays for it.
Overall, I think of it like a warp drive for coding: It can get you across the galaxy in a few hours, when it used to take months or years. But it's not appropriate for getting around town—you need something faster, cheaper, and more maneuverable.
The ceiling is extraordinarily high on this model though. Even our most advanced testers like @kieranklaassen felt like they were only scratching the surface of it.
Want our full vibe check with all of our testing and benchmarks? Read it on @every: https://t.co/MgJLZszJUB
One of the new, buzzy jobs in Silicon Valley is the AI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), an engineer who is embedded within a client organization to help customize solutions, such as building and tuning agentic workflows that suit the client’s particular needs. I’ve heard from people who are wondering anew about the FDE career path since OpenAI and Anthropic started building new teams to place FDEs within client organizations.
The rise of FDEs for AI workloads is one way AI is creating new jobs (and why the jobpolcalypse narrative of upcoming job market collapse is false -- there will be many AI and non-AI jobs). However, I believe there will be far more AI Engineer jobs than FDEs, as I explain below.
The FDE role was pioneered about two decades ago by Palantir, which sent engineers to government locations to work on secure, air-gapped networks. In addition to having good technical skills, FDEs need communication skills and sometimes business skills. For example, they may need to speak with clients to understand their needs, formulate a strategy to prioritize projects, explain complex technology, and respectfully push back if a client asks for something unrealistic. They’re enjoying a resurgence because of the amount of work involved in taking an off-the-shelf LLM and building it into a custom agentic workflow that fits particular business needs.
However, I believe the number of AI Engineer jobs will be far larger. A company might accept a few FDEs to be embedded within its organization. But most companies will want far more of their own employees working on their projects. While my organizations do hire FDEs, we hire far more AI Engineers! Also, a common client concern is that it is hard to find vendor-neutral FDEs — they are, after all, there to deeply integrate a particular vendor’s product into a company. In this moment when it’s hard to predict which AI service will be the best one in a year’s time, optionality (the ability to pick whatever vendor turns out to fit best in the future) is very valuable. In contrast, letting FDEs tightly bind a company’s processes significantly reduces optionality.
Right now, I see surging demand for AI Engineers who can build software applications using AI software components (like LLM prompting, agentic frameworks, evals, etc.) and effectively use AI coding agents (like Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity CLI, and OpenCode). As the AI Engineer role matures, I expect it to fragment into more specialized roles, like the generic Software Engineer role from decades ago fragmented into frontend, backend, mobile, data engineering, devops, and so on.
What will be the future, specialized AI engineering roles? I don’t know. Perhaps there will be AI FDEs, LLMOps Engineers, Evals Engineers, AI Data Engineers, Harness Engineers, and other roles we don’t have names for yet. But for now, I see a lot of AI engineers who are generalists create a lot of value. Skilled AI Engineers are in very high demand! As our field continues to mature over the coming decade, I look forward to new specializations within AI Engineering that create even more job opportunities.
[Original text: The Batch newsletter]