Brad Lindenberg

Co-founder of Quadpay, meritocratic absolutist

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

Voice + tool calls = the future

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

New level unlocked. Zwift + Codex iPad.

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

@mike_matas Ferrari needs to read this

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

This

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @danshipper:

1. The future of work will happen inside Codex or Claude Code. Instead of putting AI into your SaaS tool, you’ll use your SaaS tools inside your favorite AI agents' in-app browser. Dan spends all his time in Codex now—writing documents, managing email, doing research, everything. He's using Google Docs, PostHog, and everything he needs within the agent's in-app browser. The agent can see what he’s doing, and has all of his context, so he and his agent collaborate quickly and super effectively.

2. Automation is a lie—every automation needs a human. Dan's company doubled in size this year despite being incredibly AI-forward. Why? Because in order to make automation work well, you need humans making sure everything keeps working. This is why benchmarks are misleading—they measure AI on problems we’ve already framed and can score, but there’s always a higher frame.

3. PMs will win the AI era. Marcus, a former PM who previously ran Axios’s writing product, joined Every after getting super AI-pilled. Now he runs their product Spiral, and ships faster than anyone on the team. He pairs technical knowledge with spiky product sense, deep user empathy, and an eye for what matters. Dan thinks any PM who gets really AI-native will be incredibly dangerous because the building is done for you—what matters is figuring out what to build and if it’s great.

4. Full-stack designers are becoming superheroes. Designers used to make beautiful interactions that engineers didn’t want to build or couldn’t execute properly. Now designers don’t need to hand things off; they can build it themselves. Designers are naturally creative people, and AI is the perfect tool for them because it lets them bring their vision to life without the traditional bottlenecks.

5. SaaS is not dead. In fact, Dan is bullish on SaaS stocks. When users bring their own AI (via Codex or Claude Code) to use SaaS products, the user—not the SaaS company—pays for tokens. This saves SaaS company’s margins. Since the agents need their own seats, Dan predicts that agents will create massive new demand for SaaS because there will be tons of agents using these products at high volume.

6. Every company will have one “super-agent” inside their Slack that every employee will use. Dan initially thought every employee would have their personal work agent, like a shadow AI org chart, but he’s completely flipped his view. He realized agents need humans who care about them. When someone gets tired of maintaining their personal agent, it becomes useless. The winning model is one forward-deployed engineer or AI-savvy person who maintains a company-wide agent (like Shopify’s River or Viktor), and then it trickles down to more specialized team agents as models improve and become less fiddly.

7. The AI job apocalypse is not happening, but you do need to evolve to stay relevant. Models make yesterday’s human competence cheap. But because everyone uses the same models, it all looks the same if you use it the default way; it becomes commoditized slop. Humans then take that frozen competence and use it to make something new and interesting for their specific situation. The key: “ride the models”—use them for everything you do, try new models when they drop, keep turning over rocks.

8. We will read way more AI-generated writing, and we will like it. Human writing is incredibly important for things that matter, but for internal docs, planning, and email, AI-generated is often better because most people are bad at writing strategy documents.

9. Build software for humans and agents to use together. The current model is building a CLI that an agent uses independently. Instead, you and your agent should be using the app together. This creates new design challenges—agents can make a billion requests in three seconds, so you need approval flows, inboxes that summarize what happened, logs, and easy rollback.

10. Forward-deployed engineers are the new most essential role. The big model companies have teams of people managing their internal agents, and those teams aren’t going away. It’s different from traditional software building, and certain engineers love it. As models get better, this role will evolve—you’ll be managing more agents doing more things.

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

@clairlemon @nikiscevak Remember when the idiots in Canberra were convinced they were going to win the referendum yes / no vote? They exist in an ivory tower of delusion detached from reality.

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

Yes

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Evidence of exceptional ability and asking how they solved hard problems down to the brass tacks level is what matters.

Those who actually deserve credit know the details of the solution, because it was so hard it got seared into their brain. The phonies and posers who falsely claim credit will flounder at the second or third level of detail.

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

This

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Bob McGrew has a framework I keep thinking about: in the AI future there are only two jobs. The Lone Genius and the Manager.

That's it. Everything else gets absorbed.

The Lone Genius is the person sitting alone at a computer, amplified 1000x by AI. One person with taste, vision, and relentless focus who can now do what used to take a team of 50.

The Manager is the person who becomes CEO of their own "firm" where most of the employees are AI agents. They define the goals. They decide what matters. They coordinate. The AI does the execution.

The Marxists will hear "two jobs" and panic. "What about everyone else?!" But here's what they're missing: AI doesn't shrink these two categories. It explodes them open. More people get to be geniuses. More people get to be managers. The barrier to entry for both just collapsed.

What actually gets eliminated? David Graeber called them "bullshit jobs." Graeber was no libertarian! He inspired Occupy Wall Street.

His words: "Huge swaths of people spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe don't really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul."

Graeber said bullshit jobs are "a form of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being." They induce "hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing."

This is who the left should be fighting for. Not to preserve those jobs. To liberate people from them and give them better ones.

The dirty secret of the modern economy: millions of people sit in roles so pointless that even they can't justify their existence. Compliance layers. Reporting layers. Coordination layers. Meeting-about-the-meeting layers. They know it's meaningless. It eats them alive.

AI eats those layers. Good. That's a jailbreak.

What I love about Bob's framework is where it points. The Lone Genius used to require a PhD, a lab, institutional backing. Now a 19-year-old with taste and Codex can ship what took a research team a year. The genius bottleneck was never talent. It was access.

The Manager used to mean you needed to hire 50 people, raise money, build an org chart. Now you can orchestrate a fleet of AI agents from your laptop. The management bottleneck was never skill. It was capital.

AI doesn't concentrate genius and management into fewer hands. It distributes them into more hands. The working class kid in West Virginia. The single mom in Ohio. The 55-year-old who got laid off and now builds software for the first time. Those are some of Bob's future geniuses and managers.

The best founders I see at YC are already living this. They toggle between both modes in the same day. Morning: lone genius, creative insight, the thing nobody else sees. Afternoon: manager, spinning up agents, steering, shipping.

The cycle time between genius and manager IS the new productivity metric.

So when someone tells you AI means "only two jobs and everyone else starves," quote Graeber to them, they’ll get it.

Graeber knew the real violence was making people do meaningless work and pretending it was dignity. AI ends that. More genius. More agency. Fewer spiritual prisons.

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

the nerds are winning

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

Straight A's for @AlboMP's Australia

- Anti-Ambition
- Anti-Freedom
- Anti-Semitic

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

💯

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

@ausvstheagenda Moron

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

Australia’s current political culture is incongruent with what it takes to be a great entrepreneur and it’s extremely disappointing and unfortunate that this is where such a beautiful amazing country has landed. They have the opportunity to do the exact opposite - copy the US QSBS structure etc however they cannot deal with “tall poppies” so they try and make everyone equal - it’s effectively communism. The best and smartest will vote with their feet unfortunately.

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

Australian tally poppy syndrome just reached an all time high.

My message to entrepreneurs: vote with your feet.

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

@ryancarson Yes, I use it for everything. CMO, CFO, CTO, Book Keeper, Accountant etc etc.

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

@signulll https://t.co/eLeYvNMT3M

"A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank."

[Brian Halligan @bhalligan]

I don't remember where I found this, but its spot on.

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

@leighdunsford 😂

[Brad Lindenberg @bradlind]

The reason I’m so bullish on America is not just AI, but because at the end of the day AI on its own is nothing. People need to use it. If you gave AI to Australians, not much would happen, but Americans are savages and will use it to maximum advantage, and the entire economy and country will accelerate as a result.