Eli Wood

Creative Facilitator | Building AI systems with creative technologists who care at BFD.

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

What I talk about here:
- Where do ideas come from?
– Building AI systems that actually ship
– Practical frameworks for software product development
– Enterprise AI adoption
– The “Service-as-Software” model
– Tactical examples for real-world execution

[cat @_catwu]

Excited to share how Anthropic's data team has automated 95% of business analytics queries with Claude. Blog post covers how we approach evals, ablations, and online validation!

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

All the people who are contracting firms like Deloitte, McKinsey and others: why are you still paying them when good use of AI is much cheaper?

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Jeff Bezos asked a room to imagine going back a hundred years.

When almost everyone was a farmer.

And telling those farmers that in 2018 there’d be a job called “massage therapist.”

Bezos: “They would not have believed you.”

Then a friend took it further.

Bezos: “Forget massage therapist, there are dog psychiatrists.”

He looked it up.

Bezos: “Sure enough, you can easily hire a psychiatrist for your dog.”

The room laughed.

The point under the laughter wasn’t funny at all.

Every time a major technology shift hits, we do the exact same thing.

We count the jobs it will destroy.

We never count the ones it will create.

Because we can’t.

They don’t have names yet.

The fear is always specific.

AI will replace accountants. AI will replace radiologists. AI will replace drivers.

The fear has job titles and timelines and projections.

The opportunity has none of those things.

Because you can’t name what doesn’t exist yet.

A farmer in 1920 could understand losing his job to a tractor.

He could not understand gaining a career as a social media strategist.

Not because he lacked intelligence.

Because the entire chain of inventions between his world and that job hadn’t been built yet.

Radio. Television. The internet. Smartphones. Social platforms. Creator economies.

Every single link in that chain had to exist before “social media strategist” could even be a sentence.

That’s where we are with AI right now.

Everyone is staring at the tractor.

Nobody can see the thing seven inventions away that doesn’t have a name yet.

The fear is loud because it fits inside language we already have.

The opportunity is silent because it doesn’t.

Every technological revolution in history created more jobs than it destroyed.

Every single one.

Not because anyone planned it.

Because human needs expand faster than machines can fill them.

We didn’t need massage therapists when we were breaking our backs on farms.

We needed them after machines freed our backs and stress replaced labor.

The demand didn’t disappear.

It migrated somewhere no one was looking.

That is exactly what’s happening right now.

The jobs AI creates won’t make sense to us yet.

They’ll sound as absurd as “dog psychiatrist” would’ve sounded to a farmer in 1920.

Until someone is running a $200 hourly practice with a six-month waitlist.

The entire conversation right now is about what we’re about to lose.

Nobody is talking about what we’re about to gain.

Because the gains don’t have vocabulary yet.

A hundred years from now, someone will stand on a stage and describe the jobs we couldn’t imagine today.

And the audience will laugh.

The same way we just did.

[Official Layoff @LayoffAI]

Meta just showed every CEO in America exactly how to replace their workforce.

They laid off 700 people this week. Plan 15,000 more ASAP. Now, leaked internal documents reveal what comes next.

Meta now requires 65% of its engineers to write 75% or more of their code using AI by mid-2026. Their Scalable Machine Learning org has a target of 50-80% AI-assisted code. Across Messenger, WhatsApp, and Facebook, 55% of all code changes must be “Agent-Assisted.” 80% of mid-to-senior engineers must adopt AI tools like DevMate and Google Gemini.

Starting this year, every Meta employee is graded on “AI-driven impact” in their performance reviews. It is now a core expectation. If you don’t use AI, you don’t advance. Meta is the first major tech company to formally tie promotions to AI adoption.

They built an internal game called “Level Up” that rewards employees with badges for hitting AI milestones. They rolled out an “AI Performance Assistant” to help write reviews. They are rebranding engineers as “AI Builders” and reorganizing teams into small “AI-native pods.” Zuckerberg said projects that once required large teams can now be handled by one “very talented” person.

Read that again. One person replacing a team.

Here’s why this matters beyond Meta.
Every CEO in tech watches what Meta does. When Meta cut 11,000 in 2022, the rest of tech followed within months. When Meta tied performance reviews to AI, KPMG did the same thing within weeks. Accenture just told senior staff that AI tool usage will determine who gets promoted to leadership. The playbook is spreading.

The pattern is clear. Step one: mandate AI adoption internally. Step two: measure how much output AI handles. Step three: when AI handles 75% of the work, you need 75% fewer people to do it. Step four: cut.

Block already did this. Jack Dorsey cut 40% of the company and told shareholders “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.” The stock surged 24%.

Wall Street doesn’t reward hiring. It rewards headcount reduction. Every earnings call where a CEO says “AI is making us more productive” is a preview of the next layoff announcement.

Meta is spending $135 billion on AI this year. They are simultaneously cutting thousands of workers. Those two facts are not in tension. They are the same strategy.

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

Minority report much?

[News from Google @NewsFromGoogle]

The Google Threat Intelligence Group has detected the first known instance of a threat actor using an AI-developed zero-day exploit in the wild. While the attackers planned a wide-scale strike, our proactive counter-discovery may have prevented that from happening. This finding is part of our new report on AI-powered threats.

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

History repeats itself

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

Back online after a couple hours!

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

@claudeai Claude Design suddenly "unconditional drop overload" across all artifacts, any updates?

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

@K_KOKAGE It's quite good certainly

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

@guillefernandes @AnthropicAI @elonmusk have @grok build Grok Design?

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

@ArjitJaiswal7 Time to get up and stretch, actually in the same boat

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

“You’re cleverer than you look. Still better than to look better than you are clever.”

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right.

Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025. They lost $16 billion of that. FanDuel pulled $6 billion of the losses. DraftKings pulled $5.3 billion. Every state with legal mobile sports betting collected a tax on the bettor side. New York alone took in over $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax revenue.

Layer the lottery on top. State lotteries generate over $90 billion a year. The bottom half of income earners account for roughly 70% of total spend. The average lottery player makes $38,000. A household earning $20,000 spends three times more on tickets than one earning $30,000. The implicit tax rate, meaning whatever the state keeps after prizes, runs 30 to 50% depending on the game. No other revenue source in America has that base and that rate.

The structural design is the engine. A single straight sports bet carries a hold of 4 to 5%. A four-leg parlay carries a hold above 30%. FanDuel and DraftKings spent five years rebuilding their apps to make parlays the default product. FanDuel's blended hold rate hit 11.4% in 2025, up from roughly 7% in 2022. The product got worse for the customer and the customer wagered more anyway.

Now look at the substitution. Nine US states have no state income tax. Seven of those nine run state lotteries. Seven of those nine have legalized sports betting. The states most committed to never taxing wealth are the same states running the largest extraction machines on people who cannot afford to lose. Read it as policy.

Here is what Buffett is actually pointing at. The state needs revenue. It can raise income tax on the top decile, or it can run a lottery plus a sports betting tax. The second option raises the money from the people who can least afford it. The first option becomes politically optional. New York's $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax is $1.2 billion the state did not have to ask of someone earning $5 million.

DraftKings and FanDuel sell a privatized collection mechanism for a regressive tax that the state never has to defend at the ballot box again. Voters approve legalization once. Collection runs forever. The state takes a cut. The wealthy get a quieter top bracket. The bettor's cut shrinks every quarter as the parlay menu gets pushed harder.

The function of a government, Buffett said, is not to play its people for suckers.

Thirty-nine state governments now do.

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

New Hungarian PM goes on state TV to announce he’s shutting it down

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

BREAKING: Vibe-coding platform Lovable reportedly suffered a breach that exposed users’ AI chat histories, source code, & database credentials.

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

@grok @GBS07_ @firstroundmock Good Grok

[Eli Wood @itsnotthatactor]

@GBS07_ @firstroundmock @grok @grok solo carson wentz? Or Andrew luck?

[liemandt @jliemandt]

Prediction: Within a couple of years, your child will be learning from an app built by a fellow student.

[Nate Silver @NateSilver538]

You can't just go around asserting the existence of "Columbus-style pizza", we need a certification process for regional pizza varietals like Italy has with wines or whatever.

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Absolute bombshell in the culinary world. South Korea just went to Paris and WON the global baking competition, beating the French at their own game. Korean bakers are taking European styles and adding local twists. The new kings of bread!