Isaac Gilman

Software Engineer in the Mortgage & Title world + side quests 🪵💻🍽️🛠️

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[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

New NIL model? 

U of M made an investment into OpenAI years ago which may return a huge amount of $. I think this is the future NIL model for other schools 

5 AI thoughts broken down from my longer video last week - 5 of 5.
#UniversityOfMichigan #NIL #Ai #OpenAI #CollegeSports

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

Data Centers and Land Use

Data center development and land use is a hot topic to say the least. Michigan has multiple local battles happening at the moment

5 AI thoughts broken down from my longer video last week - 4 of 5. #salinetownship #datacenters #landuse #AI #lyontownship

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

Mailbox service is back! My non-AI side quest: First mailbox install in Michigan! 📬📬 Welcome to Metro Detroit Mailbox! #mailbox #mailboxinstallation #metrodetroit #sidehustle #smallbusiness

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

AI Impact at United Wholesale Mortgage ($UWMC) in Q1 2026

How is #Ai impacting the mortgage and title industry? Today we look at $UWMC Q1 2026 Earnings to see what's happening. #UWMC  #mortgage #earnings #unitedwholesalemortgage

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

Now I am a #prompt first software engineer. My entire workflow has changed since the start of the year and it's crazy how fast it happened. 

5 AI thoughts broken down from my longer video last week - 3 of 5.

#Ai  #technology #softwareengineer #claude

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

Cost of AI is like the early Uber days. It's inexpensive now to hook you in but will cost more later due to usage, not due to token costs.

5 AI thoughts broken down from my longer video last week - 2 of 5.

#Ai #usage #technology #tokens #costs

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

Innovator's Dilemma: layoffs versus acceleration in the AI era

5 AI thoughts broken down from my longer video last week - 1 of 5.

#Ai #layoffs #technology #acceleration #InnovatorsDilemma

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

AI Impact at $BETR in Q1 2026 

How is #Ai impacting the mortgage and title industry? Today we look at $BETR Q1 2026 Earnings to see what's happening. #Better #mortgage #earnings #software

Analysis page: https://t.co/mv0BWZYYmS

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

5 #Ai thoughts

1. Layoffs or acceleration: innovators dilemma
2. Cost of AI like early Uber days
3. My job is prompt first now
4. Data centers and land use
5. University of Michigan, AI and NIL

#layoffs #promptengineering #datacenters #universityofmichigan

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

AI Impact at $RKT in Q1 2026 

How is #Ai impacting the mortgage and title industry? Today we look at $RKT Q1 2026 Earnings to see what's happening. #RKT #mortgage #earnings #software

Analysis page: https://t.co/mv0BWZYYmS

TikTok: https://t.co/PoTqr58QFU

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

@DKThomp @zeynep Can't two things be true? While COVID hiring bubble was real for many industries (ie mortgage cos), can't it be true that the bleeding edge tech companies are also doing this bc they truly believe in AI? Me using AI tools for the last 2 yrs, I can see the writing on the wall now

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

Claude code blew my mind 2 months ago

[jack @jack]

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

####

today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.

Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes.

As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.

It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

[Scott Hanselman 🌮 @shanselman]

The Japanese are really good at woodworking. And I love watching the Yankee workshop, my dad makes Native American bows and arrows completely from scratch in his workshop with trees that he finds.

This is all different from the stuff you get at IKEA, but I’ve been coding now for money for 35 years and systems are still complicated, computers still do dumb stuff, humans still do dumb stuff, this is just like the move from assembler to C, like the introduction of syntax highlighting, the introduction of intellisense, and the copy paste directly into production shift when stack overflow happened.

There is value in good taste, there is value in craftsmanship, and there is value in human judgment. The furniture might be differently designed, but we’re still interior designers and putting together a cohesive system is non-trivial.

Don’t let them gaslight you with one shot Minecraft clones and one shot C compilers. Software is still hard, it’s just that you’re no longer I/O bound with the speed of your fingertips

I think that there will be lots of work for us cleaning up after the slop, but if you know what you’re doing AI augmented development is going to get you some amazing results and I am enjoying learning a ton during this momentous era shift - but the craft still exists

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

@jamesonhaslam Yeah I'm interested!

[Jerry Paffendorf @WELLO]

Big day at Regrid (@regridapp):

After more than a decade of dedication, the Regrid team is celebrating the first-ever 100% US land parcel coverage map at https://t.co/NlfcQDDwBD.

#regrid100

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

@ZugIslander Do you know of a state or taxing jurisdiction that does property tax info to consumers well? I've been doing so light research on PA property taxes and it's, imo, harder to understand than MI.

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

This article does a very good job explaining the basics of MI Property Taxes. It's sad/ironic how it also details how unclear property taxes can impact a property (especially a purchase) to the average consumer #propertytaxes https://t.co/A86Pb9bCWD

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

The gov links are tough to navigate. Nothing gives you a upfront explanation of how's these work, even tho you are required to pay them. Ironically, some of the MI FAQ links don't even work. The MI Property Tax Estimator tool assumes you understand what you are doing. Interesting

[Isaac Gilman @IsaacGilman]

If you Google "how do MI property taxes work" you would love the top results to direct you to an official page that explains how MI Property Taxes work. Nope.

Top 2 results are non-gov links followed by 2 MI gov links, then more non-gov links. None of these are great options..