J-P

Jean-Philippe is an SF-based engineering manager with roots in Ottawa, Canada. ex-Tripadvisor, now LLM apps at YouTube. mastodon: @[email protected]

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.

We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.

[austin petersmith @awwstn]

The Certifiably Insane Way to Build an AI Agent:

1. choose a category where mistake tolerance is roughly the same as it is in self-driving cars. we chose "email-based scheduling assistant." many people want this product, but they immediately fire him if he screws up an interaction with a prospect, a candidate, or a potential investor

2. you learn that the edge cases are too complex and too frequent to be solvable. ours: managing timezones for people who travel (and change travel plans) constantly. knowing when NOT to respond, when to text the customer on the side to verify something, when to follow up, which sub-calendar to use, when to bend the rules on availability, when we can schedule that one type of call during your commute but not the other type of call. sharing your availabilities without compromising your privacy. and on and on.

3. the product doesn't feel viable, but you don't want to give up. you spend hours in a hot tub in Marin with a friend who makes self-driving cars. you make a plan to do it the way they did: hold the steering wheel. you go home and build a human-in-the-loop platform and hire contractors to serve as a backstop and catch mistakes before they happen (and to help design a map of what a world-class EA would do in every weird scenario). you decide trust is the currency in your category, so it must be the thing you won't compromise on. the product must succeed at any scheduling request, no matter how complicated.

4. you instantly feel an overwhelming market pull. so you keep going, growing that team to 75 people working 24/7 to support the nonstop scheduling needs of your customers. tons of engineering time goes to scaling the human platform instead of building the product.

5. you try to raise a Series A and investors say you are insane. your gross margins are extremely negative. they believe this is a problem worth solving, but they don't believe it is as hard to solve as you say. they want AI, not humans. your competitors put "NO HUMANS IN THE LOOP" on their landing pages to call you out. you keep going.

6. you work day and night building the harness that can meet the quality standard your customers have come to expect. you create a massive synthetic gold dataset. audit it, and clean it, label it. repeat. then, experiments. fine-tuning. RL. ACE. DSPy. sub-agents. sub agents for your sub-agents. rebuild the harness. throw more tokens at the problem.

7. some weeks you make big progress. some weeks your evals climb a single basis point, but that's better than nothing. more experiments. more tokens.

john coogan said the hot trend in 2026 will be dogged pursuits. that pushes you to continue the pursuit, doggedly.

8. then, one day, you realize you are scheduling thousands of meetings a day and approaching 50% autopilot with no increase in churn or complaints. you put 150 customers in a full self-driving experiment, and they use the product MORE than they were using it when they had the human backstop. you can really start to let go of the steering wheel.

9. you don't know yet if this was a hill worth climbing, but you are nonetheless stoked that you can see the top. you have created a proprietary map of what to do in a million different situations. nobody else has that map, and the models keep getting better at following maps. your plan was to bet on trust, and your product can be trusted.

today was the first day Howie crossed 50% autopilot:

[J-P @jpdaigle]

@smhanov @asmartbear I feel bad that a company I was once at had to bug @smhanov for a discount on websequencediagrams. It was policy you *had* to ALWAYS ask vendors for a discount, I was a bit embarrassed. He said no, and of course we bought the license anyways :)

[J-P @jpdaigle]

Even Stronger example: you can order a thousand dollars worth of wine from a dealer with just a verbal request, and provide no info in advance.

[difficultyang @difficultyang]

I will never cease to be amazed that I can call up any random restaurant in the USA and place an order for takeout and not pay until I show up to get it

[Mark Villacampa @MarkVillacampa]

as a Spaniard this is such a culture shock

at events, we talk about food, rent, football, where someone's from...

then you move to SF and people are like “what problem are you obsessed with?” brother I am obsessed with dinner

[Jack Wotherspoon @JackWoth98]

https://t.co/e6enxfTNnQ

[Thrilla the Gorilla @ThrillaRilla369]

Happy pride month to Home Depot for not selling a single piece of straight wood.

[J-P @jpdaigle]

@smhanov Awesome! Yes, websequencediagrams being upgraded for the agentic system design age is 🔥
I can’t wait!

[Logan Kilpatrick @OfficialLoganK]

Welcome to Gemini 3.5 Flash, our most powerful model to date. It pushes the frontier of intelligence, speed, and cost putting 3.5 Flash in a class of its own.

We spent the last 6 months making sure Flash is great for real world use cases. It's available everywhere now!

[J-P @jpdaigle]

Grocery store in Oakland.
“well the boss said to put these tags up, so…”

[Konstantinia 🇺🇳☭ @yaoifakecel]

In an ideal society we would operate government-run casinos to swindle money from the elderly to pay for things like school lunches and education

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

The stats here are kind of remarkable. BART's new fare gates have led to a 1,000-hour decline in clean up time; 41% drop in crime; and $10 million increase in projected revenue. https://t.co/bQMIcgUPal

[Deva Hazarika @devahaz]

One of the worst communication gaps is between people who care about precision in language and those who don’t

[J-P @jpdaigle]

The nostalgia’s hitting hard 😢

[Brendan Dolan-Gavitt @moyix]

It's November 2001. Chop Suey is playing in xmms on your Sun workstation. You fire up IE5 and point it at your just-finished PoC – a buffer overflow in gopher handling, of all things. The calculator pops up. You don't know it yet, but this is the best computing will ever be

[Nick Cho @NickCho]

Can nothing be done?
Lived in California since 2011 & while overall think it's wonderful, the one thing that I've been absolutely perplexed by is Prop 13.
It's the worst thing about CA & everyone just accepts it, & almost every other problem with CA is because of it.

[J-P @jpdaigle]

TIL that HP LaserJet printers apparently have an embedded TLS cert, which expired on March 31st.
Now iOS + macOS won't print 🙄

[J-P @jpdaigle]

Service Model (by Tchaikovsky) is v. funny if a bit bleak.
Also check out the Bobiverse series by Dennis E Taylor.

[Rohin Dhar @rohindhar]

Just finished reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Was a bit more about spiders than I was anticipating, but has to be one of the best contemporary science fiction novels I’ve read😅

Anyone have any other recommendations for recently written sci-fi (say written in the last 20 years)?

[Garrett Langley @glangley]

BART added fare gates in August of 2025, and by last month there were 500,000 more rides compared to the year before.

Lower crime in public spaces means that public services are better for everyone.

[Bryan Bischof fka Dr. Donut @BEBischof]

too real

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

This week on Complex Systems, we have compliance regimes designed to go viral in and around industries, like HIPAA and the new hotness SOC 2, and we Delve into the difference between Potemkin compliance and the messy-but-real value these regimes can actually provide.