Alan Mulhall

Artist/Software Engineer

[tobi lutke @tobi]

This is very good

[Pontus Abrahamsson @pontusab]

Libraries I can't live without:

◇ zod - validation
◇ react-hook-form - forms
◇ react-table - tables
◇ tRPC + react-query - data
◇ shadcn - UI
◇ motion - animations
◇ date-fns - date utils
◇ ai - AI Toolkit
◇ nuqs - search params
◇ recharts - charts
◇ zustand - state mgmt

[Rohit @ai_rohitt]

🚨 Anthropic just showed a 27-minute workshop on how to actually do prompts for Claude.

Taught by the people who built it.

Free. No registration. No paywall.

I've seen $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.

Watch it and bookmark it now.

[Radha Tripathi @Radha_AI]

Bill Ackman literally gave a 44-minute masterclass that explains money better than any business school.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Two conversations this weekend make me think that there's a vibe shift afoot in Silicon Valley around what one should work on and what is worthwhile.

Culturally, it feels like the moment is ripe for new frameworks:

• Davos expert morality is stale and discredited.
• It's also apparent that the "just be super based" Counter-Enlightenment is not really an answer. (Yes, woke went too far, but simply inverting it doesn't work.)
• EA is no longer the automatic default for smart people.
• There's increasing skepticism of slot and slop machine dynamics.

Overall, "what is worthy and valuable?" feels like it's becoming more central.

[ericscott @ericscottsays]

Figure & Ground

There's a scene in every martial art where the master watches the student obsess over technique—the perfect punch, the correct form—and finally says: you're fighting the air. Feel your feet.

Silicon Valley is fighting the air right now.

The old frameworks have collapsed: Davos morality feels stale. The "based" counter-reaction is just inversion, not insight. EA is no longer the automatic default for smart people. There's growing skepticism of slot-machine dynamics and AI slop. Into this vacuum comes the question that should have been central all along: what is worthy and valuable?

But here's what I notice about the conversation that follows: everyone is reaching for a new figure—a new philosophy, a new ideology, a new framework to believe in. They're looking up when they should be looking down.

Marshall McLuhan borrowed a concept from Gestalt psychology that explains our confusion: figure and ground. The figure is what you focus on—the content, the message, the explicit thing. The ground is the environment that makes the figure possible—the medium, the structure, the invisible conditions.

His famous line: "We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't a fish."

The ground is always invisible until it shifts. And right now, the ground is shifting.

EA wasn't just a philosophy. It was a ground: a community, a set of institutions, a career pipeline, a vocabulary, a status system, a way of sorting who was serious. When people say EA is "no longer the default," they're not describing a philosophical refutation. They're describing a ground collapse. The water changed.

Same with Davos morality. Same with the credential system that told ambitious 22-year-olds that Goldman or Google or YC was the path. These weren't just ideas. They were grounds—institutional scaffolding that told people what mattered, who to trust, what counted as progress.

The vibe shift isn't a shift in figures—in philosophies or ideologies. It's a shift in ground. The institutional infrastructure that used to answer "what's worth doing?" has lost legitimacy. And no new figure, however compelling, will fill that void.

This is why the self-help industrial complex keeps failing people.

Take ikigai—the Westernized Venn diagram version. Four circles: what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for. Find the intersection. There's your purpose.

It's figure-obsessed thinking applied to the deepest human questions. And it fails for predictable reasons:

It's static. Purpose isn't a destination; it's a practice. You change. Conditions change. AI just changed what's even possible.

It's radically individualistic. Four circles, all about you. No community, no lineage, no obligation, no one who came before or comes after.

It's optimization logic. The same mindset that produces engagement algorithms. Find the intersection, maximize. But meaning doesn't yield to optimization. It emerges from commitment.

It ignores formation. The question isn't just what you do but who you're becoming by doing it.

Ikigai is a figure. It can't rebuild ground.

If the problem is ground collapse, the response has to be ground-making. Not a new philosophy to believe, but new conditions that make orientation possible.

Dynamic, not static. Orientation as ongoing practice, not one-time discovery. You don't "find" your ground; you cultivate it, tend it, sometimes rebuild it entirely.

Relational, not individual. You're embedded in communities, traditions, obligations. The question isn't just "what should I work on?" but "what am I receiving, and what am I responsible to transmit?"

Developmental, not positional. Every choice shapes capacity—your ability to perceive, to act, to contribute. Does this work build my ability to orient, or erode it?

Craft-based, not passion-based. Passion is a figure—intense, focused, often fleeting. Craft is ground—the slow accumulation of skill, the submission to standards you didn't invent, the joining of a tradition.

Intergenerational, not instantaneous. The ground crisis is partly a transmission crisis. You're not just optimizing your career; you're a link in a chain.

I think about this through education because education is, fundamentally, ground-making. It's how societies shape the conditions in which the next generation figures out what matters.

Here's what I've learned: you can optimize the figure and destroy the ground.

There's a school model using AI to compress core academics into two hours per day. Students do personalized learning on tablets, master material at 6x the normal rate, test in the top 2% nationally. The figures are extraordinary.

But what's in the other hours? "Life skills workshops"—entrepreneurship, public speaking, activities curated by adults. The ground question—what are we transmitting about what matters, what stories bind us, what makes a life meaningful—goes unasked. They've optimized the measurable and ignored the formational.

This is the trap waiting for everyone reaching for a new framework. You can build a brilliant figure and still leave people groundless.

So what's the move?

It's not "here's the new framework." That's figure-thinking. It's closer to: here's a practice for attending to both.

Figure work asks: What am I building? What skills am I developing? What problems am I solving? What can I contribute?

Ground work asks: What conditions make my orientation possible? What communities am I embedded in? What am I receiving, and what am I transmitting? Who am I becoming through this work?

The practice is holding both, refusing to collapse one into the other.

When ground feels solid, figure-work is appropriate: execute, build, ship. When ground feels shaky—when you don't know what matters, when the old frameworks have collapsed—ground-work comes first. You can't build well on unstable footing.

The master's instruction isn't "stop punching." It's "feel your feet while you punch."

The next wave won't be philosophies. It will be infrastructure—new institutions that help people do figure-and-ground work together.

Learning systems that develop capability and formation. Credentialing that validates skill and craft tradition. Communities that provide belonging and push toward excellence. Media that informs and orients.

The question isn't just "what's worth doing?" It's "what conditions make it possible to keep answering that question, together, over time?"

That's the work.

The fish will never discover water by thinking harder about water. It has to encounter the edge—the place where water meets air. That's where ground becomes visible. That's where the real questions live.

--
co-authored w/claude

[Utah teapot 🫖🔜vibecamp @SkyeSharkie]

claude can walk up and down stairs in @threejs! ... this is part of something bigger and a character controller that will generally be available for use on vrm skeletons for three (i'm open sourcing this stuff), but i'm focused on using it to provide digital embodiment for LLMs more narrowly as well, meaning agent-friendly construction for piloting the characters!

[Wes Bos @wesbos]

I predicted that 2026 would be the year of the shader without knowing that HTML in Canvas was coming.

This is going to be huge for motion graphics and programatic video

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

The holy grail of finance books that are must reads

> The Outsiders
> Den of Thieves
> Barbarians at the Gate
> More Money than God
> Lords of Finance
> The House of Morgan
> Snowball: Warren Buffett
> Poor Charlie's Almanac
> The House of Rothschild
> Predator's Ball
> Smartest Guys in the Room
> When Genius Failed
> The Man Who Solved the Market
> Sam Walton: Made in America
> Cable Cowboy
> Alchemy of Finance
> Invisible Child
> War and Gold
> The Ascent of Money
> King of Capital
> The Caesars Palace Coup
> Titan: John D Rockefeller
> The Big Short

[Harley Finkelstein @harleyf]

Stop taking advice from people who've never built anything. If they haven't put something on the line, their opinion on your risk isn't worth hearing.

The people who judge the attempt are never the ones making one.

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs: make prototypes, slides, and one-pagers by talking to Claude.

Powered by Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable vision model. Available in research preview on the Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, rolling out throughout the day.

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Whether design belongs in Figma or Claude Design is a distraction from a bigger shift.

1️⃣ Design will become autonomous. More helpful to think of it as 𝙳𝙴𝚂𝙸𝙶𝙽.𝚖𝚍, used by your coding agents running your software factory.

2️⃣ Specialized “personal” design tools generated by teams will proliferate. Design is a capability, not a tool. I agree with @rsms that there are many facets of design, and multiple tools are required.

I love prompting in @v0 and it’s become the place where I can channel my inspiration, explore, communicate. But I’m also seeing a new generation of products that use the v0 Platform API or Sandbox and put design on autopilot.

There are next-generation agents like @tryflint and https://t.co/fZ7TO6rczt generating design & brand systems and maintaining them autonomously. Flint can even keep your website and content up to date and its design consistent. No human prompting needed.

From this we will see the emergence of fully autonomous companies with agents like https://t.co/YhOmGYYwgE and https://t.co/v8TuIxujwy, which go a step further and grow and advertise your business.

tl:dr; The future looks very different from the present. AI is a true discontinuity. The “here’s the existing thing but with AI and ${jobTitle} is cooked” is short-sighted.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

I'm lucky enough to have a great doctor and access to excellent Bay Area medical care. I've taken lots of standard screening tests over the years and have tried lots of "health tech" devices and tools.

With all this said, by far the most useful preventative medical advice that I've ever received has come from unleashing coding agents on my genome, having them investigate my specific mutations, and having them recommend specific follow-on tests and treatments.

Population averages are population averages, but we ourselves are not averages. For example, it turns out that I probably have a 30x(!) higher-than-average predisposition to melanoma. Fortunately, there are both specific supplements that help counteract the particular mutations I have, and of course I can significantly dial up my screening frequency. So, this is very useful to know.

I don't know exactly how much the analysis cost, but probably less than $100. Sequencing my genome cost a few hundred dollars.

(One often sees papers and articles claiming that models aren't very good at medical reasoning. These analyses are usually based on employing several-year-old models, which is a kind of ludicrous malpractice. It is true that you still have to carefully monitor the agents' reasoning, and they do on occasion jump to conclusions or skip steps, requiring some nudging and re-steering. But, overall, they are almost literally infinitely better for this kind of work than what one can otherwise obtain today.)

There are still lots of questions about how this will diffuse and get adopted, but it seems very clear that medical practice is about to improve enormously. Exciting times!

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

This is what the future of design looks like. Not just this specific tool¹, but the fact that every team in the world is now is empowered to build their own 'design factory'.

Shader Lab was built with Claude Code, @threejs, @nextjs, and @vercel. To the exact needs, vision, and specification of @basementstudio.

Every time we work on a project with them, we get a glimpse of an arsenal of internal tools they've deployed. Some built specifically for a project, some more general purpose.

It's now easier to generate software re-assembling powerful building blocks, than searching and procuring the right SaaS for the job.

¹ though it's a banger

[AI Panda @AIPandaX]

Skip Sunday movie night and watch this 1-hour MIT lecture by Jim Simons: it's Kasparov-level strategy applied to markets.

[Jon Erlichman @JonErlichman]

“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”

~ John Cleese

[Chidanand Tripathi @thetripathi58]

During a job interview, if they ask: "What is a strongly held belief you have that most people disagree with?"

USE THE GOLDEN RESPONSE:

[Ben @benvspak]

In the 1970s, a researcher tracking early software projects noticed something odd: teams that shared their progress publicly shipped faster and quit less. Not because accountability - because visibility forced clarity.

Building in public isn't a marketing trick. It's a forcing function.

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Code is an output. Nature is healing.

For too long we treated code as input. We glorified it, hand-formatted it, prettified it, obsessed over it.

We built sophisticated GUIs to write it in: IDEs. We syntax-highlit, tree-sat, mini-mapped the code. Keyboard triggers, inline autocompletes, ghost text. “What color scheme is that?”

We stayed up debating the ideal length of APIs and function bodies. Is this API going to look nice enough for another human to read?

We’re now turning our attention to the true inputs. Requirements, specs, feedback, design inspiration. Crucially: production inputs. Our coding agents need to understand how your users are experiencing your application, what errors they’re running into, and turn *that* into code.

We will inevitably glorify code less, as well as coders. The best engineers I’ve worked with always saw code as a means to an end anyway. An output that’s bound to soon be transformed again.

[Felix Rieseberg @felixrieseberg]

A small ship I love: We made https://t.co/DQ5nmzzS1u and our desktop apps meaningful faster this week.

We moved our architecture from SSR to a static @vite_js & @tan_stack router setup that we can serve straight from workers at the edge. Time to first byte is down 65% at p75, prompts show up 50% sooner, navigation is snappier.

We're not done (not even close!) but we care and we'll keep chipping away. Aiming to make Claude a little better every day.