Patrick J. Auld

Software Antagonist

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

I'm paying for Claude, Cursor, and GPT. I'm not maxing all of them at the same time.

But last week I hit my Claude limit mid-migration and just... waited.

So I built a market for that. SecondTokens is now in private beta. 🧵

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

Anyone talking about The Permanent Underclass lack a revolutionary mindset.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

All regulations should have a max duration of 10~20 years and then expire. With a simple renewal process. Making people consider and have to take action to maintain them reduces build up and provides people permission to update them.

[Josh Barro @jbarro]

It should be legal to build buildings that are shaped like the typical building that already exists in an area, and yet

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

People are the combination of:

The I. Who they are and self
The we. Their relationships
The what. Their work and actions

It is a three legged stool and definitely doesn't work with only one leg.

[immad @immad]

You can work 5 days a week and succeed as a startup.

Mercury has done that from day 0 and we are valued @ $5.2bn 7 years after launch.

I have been an entrepreneur for 20 years and raised 3 kids while doing it.

The point of success is to have a great life not just a startup 😊

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

We're all going to create 100% personalized software with agents, the same way we all print every item we need with our personal 3D printers

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

People don't lie down and get bored. We find, discover, invent, and imagine new, novel, and wonderful things.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

Nearly 1% of people in the United States used to be employed as switchboard operators. Something like 20% of the pre-car economy was related to horses and 10% of jobs. Everyone used to be in agriculture.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

People are amazing. To somehow believe that the next generation, when faced with a changing society, won't find new and unthinkable uses for a general tool is ridiculous

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

I am aghast at the number of people who believe generations of humans will be incapable of anything because of AI, as though human will, spirit, and creativity have never overcome.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

Is it worse to be trapped with poor leadership for years, or to force leaders into permanent campaign mode where every decision is optimized for approval ratings?

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

I've "manually" coded maybe a dozen lines of code this year. And 100% of them have been in the GitHub web editor on a PR. It was faster to make the change that way during a review of my agent's code than to re-prompt it.

Crazy time to be alive. I'm loving this ride AI is giving us.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

Did I ever care what my code looked like? In hindsight, I cared about making something I could use later. It meant clean, readable code that I could step back into and tactically update and improve in the future. I have a vivid memory of when I first grok'ed the Visitor Pattern when reading a more senior co-worker's code.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

Clean code is something I've focused on enough to be told my code "looked like it was from a textbook" (I'm still beaming from that compliment, a decade+ later). I don't feel bad about focusing less on it now. I get more done. Which I always cared more about. It is honestly confusing to think about my feelings on coding right now.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

Question of the year: Can AI increase your Bus Factor?

> 3. Coinbase is testing "one person teams" where a single person is the engineer, the designer, and the PM. A pod of one with agents.

[Andrew Yeung @andruyeung]

Coinbase is cutting 14% of its staff because of AI.

But @brian_armstrong (founder, CEO), shared a few things in his memo that most ppl will miss:

1. "No pure managers." Every leader has to be a working individual contributor. The pure people-manager role, the one that built most corporate career ladders for the last 50y, no longer exists at Coinbase.

2. Leaders will have 15+ direct reports. That is insane. Previously, managers capped out at 6 directs. This would be IMPOSSIBLE without AI.

3. Coinbase is testing "one person teams" where a single person is the engineer, the designer, and the PM. A pod of one with agents.

Org structures are being redesigned in front of our eyes.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

CS schools should keep teaching what they have been. AI doesn't change it.

Hot take: University never prepared you for the workforce. It's not the point.

Most of the things I did in college, I never did in my work. Coding an OS from scratch, low-level assembly, building game simulations in niche languages? It's not day-to-day.

The point of those was to expose me to different ideas, expand my thinking, and show the foundational components. With that understanding, I could write SaaS applications.

Quick aside: I was so annoyed at one point by how unprepared I and every new hire I got were that I made a "how to work in the industry" class. I even pitched it to some professors' friends. I dropped it after realizing it's not what should be taught.

People come out of college and do all sorts of things. There is no "standard" across companies and industries worth teaching before they get there.

Universities still teach assembly and compiler design, even though a tiny fraction of students ever touch them again. It's an important context because there are times that it matters. and understanding how problems have been applied to those domains enriches your ability to solve other things

Parts of AI will have to be integrated into the curriculum. It's a tool that we're going to have. These are additive, though

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

"Entry-level jobs are going to disappear!"

Many will. The skill set is changing. It's just being sensational not to include, "and all the new jobs will be different in ways we don't know yet".

Who thinks a bunch of young adults is not going to find uses for AI? How could you believe they won't become the most capable users of it?

Entry-level jobs are going to change. People who are early enough to the new paradigm won't be entry-level; they will be the category-defining leaders in it. I hope I can find my way through it, as well as the younger generation will.

People are powerful and creative. The youth are adaptive and entrepreneurial. I'm not worried about them.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

These are all secondary market actions for reserved TSMC capacity at the end of the day.

[X Daily News @xDaily]

NEWS: xAI plans to supply tens of thousands of GPUs to coding startup Cursor to train its upcoming Composer 2.5 AI model, marking a strategic shift toward providing cloud computing services to third-party developers.

The arrangement, according to Business Insider, allows Cursor to leverage xAI's massive infrastructure to develop advanced coding capabilities while providing xAI with a new revenue stream to offset data center costs. https://t.co/kJqJguR7eg

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

Anthropic is an Enterprise B2B software company, and your personal subscription can best be thought of as an entrepreneurial/startup subsidy.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

If you're firing people because of AI, it means you believe there are people in your organization who, if they were 2x more effective, would not meaningfully contribute to your business goals. That's not an AI problem. That's a organizational problem.

[Patrick J. Auld @PatrickAuld]

What's the best way to use a Chief of Staff? For people who have never utilized one before, I'm finding it is the replacement and leverage they provide?

[Ryan Sarver @rsarver]

https://t.co/mdGbEHnc0s