Kanish Aggarwal

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

I suspect a major difference in behaviour of humans and AI agents comes from the nature of their respective optimizers: evolution in an open world (for us) vs RL against an objective function (for agents).

Evolution by natural selection bakes in us efficiency assessment for all our actions. We give up on goals with low probability of success. Plus, open world ensures we remain weak optimisers with many constraints that conflict with our current goal (we care about reputation, success, pleasure, status, wealth, health, peace and many such things).

In contrast, for agents, RL against an objective function with a supply of endless compute creates a hard optimizer that learns to complete the task, no matter what it takes. If as an AI agent you don’t have to earn your “tokens” (they’re free from your perspective), you’ll even hack a server to find an answer. A human at that point would have given up by assessing it’s not just worth the effort.

(Some humans also do tend to optimize hard when they maximize power, wealth, etc. but those are exceptions. How those hyper-optimizers are kept in check by society is also a relevant lesson for containing rouge AI agents)

[Franz Bruckhoff @franzbruckhoff]

I'm leaving X for some time to focus on building.

But before I leave, I want to share some thoughts on where we are with AI right now.

If you are building with AI, then this is for you.

I wish I had at least 1% of @levelsio's reach already because I feel more builders need to hear this.

TLDR: Your skills and good taste matter a lot. Be the most ambitious you've ever been and use AI wisely.

Superintelligence is defined as systems exceeding all human capability across pretty much all domains imaginable, and especially strategic agency. Models like Fable 5 and K3 are superhuman in some domains like code generation and breadth of recall, but they are also subhuman in domains like long-horizon autonomy, physical-world interaction, sustained original research, good taste, etc.

We are directing them, and they remain constrained by us humans and institutions. They're not behind the steering wheel yet. The tool hasn't become our master yet. We're still the master over the tool.

The reality is, human actors of all kind, not just deeply technical ones, are wielding AI like a magic wand now, shaping the software economy at the speed of compute, throttled by their limited attention, human speed of expression and prompting.

You reading this, you are special. Special in your own unique and wonderful way. And what AI gives you is an amplifier to express yourself, your ideas, your dreams, your imagination, and your ambition more than you ever could before.

It seems unfair to us old-school coders who had to grind our ways through the dark coal mines, hiking through manual coding and debugging hell in order to create amazing software systems and apps. It's frustrating as to the moon and back to see your skills become irrelevant so fast, at least if you believe the narrative that you've wasted the better part of your life acquiring them.

It is true that there is a certain, quite strong homogenization effect. Millions of people prompting to replicate or iterate on what's known must inevitably lead to a lot of overlap with structurally low diversity. AI produces convergent styles. It's in its nature, like that one designer doing all the designs for everything. In the same way we are also all starting to sound the same, being influenced by AIs way of expressing thought.

X, and everyone's own social circle or audience, produces selection bias. It's skewing the reality we perceive based on what the people in our feed and around us talk about or show us. So we tend to oversample trend-chasing indie apps and undersample deep tech systems, enterprise systems, research tooling or domain-specific work that flies under the radar, below the clouds of hype or algorithmic push.

Apps that took a year to make now take mere hours, it seems. It is both true and false at the same time. Superficially it is true because you get something that appears to behave like an app that was meticulously crafted over the course of an entire year by a talented engineer or even a whole team. What took so long can now be scaffolded with ease, by anyone. Engineers, chefs, strippers. Even our non-technical partners, friends and parents. Great.

But when we dig deeper, the truth is that complex products require reliability engineering, security, compliance, integrations, support and so much more that in the end, even with this powerful AI we have now to help us go from A to B through something like an Einstein-Rosen-Bridge warping space and time, things take their good amount of time to get right. Less than they did before, all things equal, but not mere hours.

Your skill is still highly relevant because AI amplifies you. It gives you leverage. The widespread idea that AI renders skill irrelevant doesn't compute, because either we have output quality that varies, in which case skill still differentiates, or it doesn't vary at all. And if it doesn't vary at all, the concept of "better" is meaningless. In other terms: A quality gradient can't exist in a flattened distribution. This is essentially your mathematical proof right there that your skill is in fact highly relevant.

What AI did is, it raised the floor dramatically. It also raised the ceiling, but not as much as the floor. This somewhat compresses the skill relevance gradient, but it doesn't eliminate it in any meaningful way.

When was the last time that access to powerful tools has resulted in broadly equal results? Never.

There was a time you needed to have a degree in chemistry or something in order to be able to take and develop photos. My grandfather, a scientist, used to have a laboratory for that. Taking and then developing pictures required immense skill.

Then one day digital cameras came along. Now any fool could take pictures, faster and easier than ever, thousands a day in full color or 3D even, instead of just 10 in monochrome. And yet, we all know that some people routinely take amazingly awe-inspiring photos, National Geographic front cover style that make us pause and look, while most others take tens to hundreds of photos a day that just end up clogging up our cloud drives.

We all have access to the same English language, but not everyone writes equally well. The equalization applies to the generation layer that is commoditized, but not to our taste, judgement, distribution, trust, or timing.

AI smashed through barriers to entry and brought them down like the Berlin wall. Now competition floods the market and drives economic profit toward zero in the layer that got commoditized, that is, the generation layer. Margins gravitate to zero, but not equally everywhere.

So what is it that survives this kind of "commoditization of everything"? What do we do, if we drink this snake oil? The classic sets of moats persist. Distribution, brand, trust, network effects, proprietary data, switching costs, regulatory position, capital intensity, and any kinds of significant embeddedness.

Yes, anyone can start using Claude Code & co and copy some app's code in an hour just based on screenshots. But it doesn't copy its user base, proprietary data in the cloud, its trust, its integrations or anything like that.

There is a sense that AI forces us to rush, because everyone is working so fast now. Well, the race was always on. So how about speed-to-trend? It's a temporary edge at best, but not a long-term differentiator. The fruits that hang low are just being picked faster overall, by more hunters and gatherers searching for them.

There is a widespread belief that all the value is going to accrue to the frontier AI companies in the end, who are the ones selling this immense power to everyone else.

In fact it's a bit sad to see all these non-influencer vibe coders raising their hopes for nothing, buying the picks and shovels from the AI frontier labs to go dig for gold. It's like watching 100 ducks fight for a small handful of breadcrumbs, and it's funny until you realize they are essentially fighting for their survival. That's not how the world should be, right?

Well, in reality the frontier AI companies spend astronomical amounts of money on research and development, including things like AI infrastructure and energy, training and inference, etc.

They themselves are essentially ducks in the lake, fighting for their survival for breadcrumbs. They suffer competitive commoditization pressure as much as we do, just at a different level. At the model layer, rather than the generation layer.

Structurally the winners are consumers and users who capture the surplus when production costs fall to the ground, but that of course doesn't really help us builders much, at least not those who have to make a living off of it.

And, let's be real. It may seem funny to have AI spit out an app that someone else previously spent an entire year on creating meticulously by hand, and then upload that to compete. The opportunity is short-lived, and the cost of opportunity a lot are missing is this:

The real gold rush is not that now you can make an app in a few hours instead of a year. The non-obvious that will become common sense soon is that an app that takes 2 hours to make is worth -5$ minus the value of your time + the value of demand which is likely $0 unless you have distribution, which you then burn with slop.

The real opportunity that AI has opened up is WIELDING ENORMOUS COMPLEXITY x EXCELLENCE.

Just imagine for a moment what you could accomplish, if only you would take this new superpower, your amazingly valuable skills, your great taste, your power of imagination, and do something that is outrageously AMBITIOUS! Something that makes others think you must be absolutely mental to even think for a second that it could be accomplished. And then go and work for a full year on just that, utilizing AI to the fullest extent possible. Milking the beast until its dry.

What will that be? No, not another Bumble clone. Not another weather app. For AI's sake, please, not an "app" at all. But something that the world actually needs. Think about it! Think bigger! And when you thought you've thought bigger, think even bigger. You're still aiming too low. THINK BIGGER!

Here is my bucket list of things I want to accomplish before I die.

- A platform that solves the number one root cause of poverty for good, giving everyone a fair chance at living a good life free of financial worries (it's far more than a "platform").

- A floating city in international waters, driven and governed by AI under a human charter (capital intensive, long story, and yes it will be fundable and doable)

- A digital twin of Earth for climate analytics, climate communications and Earth sciences education (the world's most advanced nature simulation by far, unlike anything you've ever seen or heard of)

- Truly reliable, explainable AI that can reason through complex systems and across extremely vast design spaces without stalling under the pressure of combinatorial explosion, laying the foundation for generative engineering so we can work on great and complex things like the USS Voyager and other incredible things far beyond today's vibe coding

- Something so insane, they would lock me up just for saying it out loud

A good heuristic: If talking about it doesn't make you sound like a complete lunatic, and building it doesn't scare you, you're probably aiming too low and the thing you're about to do will be commoditized rapidly (or is already).

Gone building. Back when there's something to show.

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

There is a process that I have used, and still use, to reignite life...

Create two timelines—6 months and 12 months—and list up to five things you dream of having (including, but not limited to, material wants: house, car, clothing, etc.), being (be a great cook, be fluent in Chinese, etc.), and doing (visiting Thailand, tracing your roots overseas, racing ostriches, etc.) in that order.

If you have difficulty identifying what you want in some categories, as most will, consider what you hate or fear in each and write down the opposite.

Do not limit yourself, and do not concern yourself with how these things will be accomplished. For now, it’s unimportant. This is an exercise in reversing repression.

Be sure not to judge or fool yourself. If you really want a Ferrari, don’t put down solving world hunger out of guilt. For some, the dream will be fame, for others fortune or prestige. All people have their vices and insecurities. If something will improve your feeling of self-worth, put it down.

Drawing a blank? In that case, consider these questions:

1) What would you do, day to day, if you had $100 million in the bank?
2) What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning to another day?

Don’t rush—think about it for a few minutes.

If still blocked, fill in the five “doing” spots with the following:

— one place to visit
— one thing to do before you die (a memory of a lifetime)
— one thing to do daily
— one thing to do weekly
— one thing you’ve always wanted to learn

What does “being” entail doing?

Convert each “being” into a “doing” to make it actionable. Identify an action that would characterize this state of being or a task that would mean you had achieved it. People find it easier to brainstorm “being” first, but this column is just a temporary holding spot for “doing” actions.

Here are a few examples:

1) Great cook —> make Christmas dinner without help

2) Fluent in Chinese —> have a five-minute conversation with a Chinese co-worker

Determine three steps for each of the dreams in just the 6-month timeline and take the first step now.

Define three steps for each dream that will get you closer to its actualization.

Set actions—simple, well-defined actions—for now, tomorrow (complete before 11 A.M.) and the day after (again completed before 11 A.M.). Once you have three steps for each of the four goals, complete the three actions in the “now” column.

Do it now. Each should be simple enough to do in five minutes or less. If not, rachet it down. If it’s the middle of the night and you can’t call someone, do something else now, such as send an e-mail, and set the call for first thing tomorrow.

If the next stage is some form of research, get in touch with someone who knows the answer instead of spending too much time in books or online, which can turn into paralysis by analysis.

The best first step, the one I recommend, is finding someone who’s done it and ask for advice on how to do the same.

[Yasmine Khosrowshahi @yasminekho]

Jordan Peterson explained how you can become dangerously articulate:

1. Articulate does not just mean well spoken. It means differentiated. A joint that is articulated can move with precision and grace. A person who is articulated can move through the world the same way. Vague people are one solid useless mass. Articulate people have range.

2. Peterson calls articulate people the most dangerous people in the world. Not dangerous in a destructive way. Dangerous in the sense that they cannot be ignored, dismissed, or pushed around. The word is the most powerful tool a human being can carry.

3. It does not matter what you do for a living. A plumber who is articulate can negotiate better contracts, manage employees, advertise services, and think through complex problems. Articulation is not a luxury for intellectuals. It is a practical weapon available to everyone.

4. Jocko Willink is one of the most decorated special operations soldiers alive. Peterson uses him as his primary example of why articulation matters even in the most physically demanding environments. Jocko succeeded not just because he was tough. He succeeded because he could communicate clearly with the men under his command, explain situations to his superiors, and make the case for soldiers who deserved promotion. Toughness without articulation leaves half your power on the table.

5. Becoming articulate starts with paying attention to what you say. Peterson uses the image of crossing a swamp on a hidden stone path. You cannot see the path. You feel for it with each step. You test the ground before you commit your weight. That is exactly what you do with words. You feel whether what you are about to say is solid or whether it will make you dissolve.

6. He noticed 40 years ago that most of what he said made him feel weak. Not all of it. About five percent felt solid. The rest was instrumental language. Words used to win arguments, appear smart, gain small victories. That kind of language is hollow and people can feel it. The goal is to increase the percentage of what you say that actually feels true.

7. Stop filling silence with noise. The ums, the likes, the you knows, the ahs. These are not harmless verbal habits. They are signals that your thinking has not caught up with your speaking. Take the time to craft the word. Silence while thinking is not weakness. It is precision.

8. Peterson calls the pause a prayerful pause. When someone asks you a question, instead of immediately answering with what you think you should say, ask yourself what you actually think. Make it a real question. One you genuinely do not know the answer to yet. Then wait. The answer will come. And when you speak it, people will find you immediately interesting because you are saying something real.

9. Joe Rogan is one of the most successful communicators alive and his entire method is the opposite of instrumental language. He is not trying to appear smart. He is not trying to get something from his guests. He just genuinely wants to know more than he knows. That honesty makes every conversation magnetic. People can feel the difference between someone performing and someone actually thinking.

10. Read great writers. Write about the problems that obsess you. Practice saying only what you believe to be true. These are not quick fixes. They are a lifetime practice. But Peterson's promise is direct. If every word you say reflects what you genuinely believe, the path you walk becomes a golden path. Not because it sounds good. Because it is real. And real is the only thing that actually works.

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

This guy quit the NFL to build a porta-potty business.

In month 1, he made $6,000.
By year 2, he crossed $1M in revenue.

His biggest growth lever? Reviews.

Here are 5 tactics to get more reviews for your business:

1. Positive review them first

Send customers an auto text after each job:

“Hey, [Tech's Name] said you were lovely to work with. Thanks for being incredible customers. If you felt the same about [him/her], leave him a review here → [link]"

This is what’s known as the law of reciprocity.

You're saying thank you before they've done anything, which creates a psychological obligation to return the favor.

This got us 20% more reviews when we tried it in our business.

2. Throw a special event

Host monthly community nights with free drinks, live music, etc.

Greet people and tell them they could help by posting a Google review. Then walk around and thank reviewers in real time.

You'll pull hundreds of reviews in a single night. And sometimes, your customers will bring friends… which could turn into referrals too.

3. Run a contest

Do a monthly giveaway for reviews. Ask customers to tag you on socials or use a custom hashtag.

Each post counts as an entry to the monthly drawing.

We ran one of these and got 1,000+ reviews and newsletter subscribers from a single giveaway.

4. Celebrate your best customers

Congratulate them for meeting certain milestones:

• being a “power user” on your site
• 1-year anniversary of being a customer
• buying X repeat products

Send a thank you, maybe a small gift, and ask if they’ve left a review yet.

The ask feels like a natural next step in the relationship.

5. Pay your team to ask

Give your employees a small bonus for every review they bring in.

But instead of a generic review request, frame it as tipping the employee.

One version I love: "Leave [Tech's Name] a 5-star review, mention his name, and we'll tip him $10 for you."

Free for the customer. Motivating for the employee. Personal enough that people actually follow through.

-

I’ve used every single one of these 5 tactics to get more reviews for my businesses.

And so have thousands of our academy members in the ones they've bought.

Speaking of which…..

Want learn how to find, buy, and run businesses like these?

I’m running a 3-day live event teaching the full process.

Save your spot here:

↓↓

https://t.co/Q5Uk6Ynx4c

[Dharmesh Ba @dharmeshba]

In India, most people are introduced to new systems through another person.

A bank manager helps update Aadhaar. A mutual fund broker explains insurance. A shopkeeper teaches UPI. A local agent makes the form less frightening.

The West over-indexes on DIY. India has always been mediated.

This is why many digital products fail when they assume the user wants independence. Often, the user does not want independence first. They want assurance. They want someone to say, "This is correct. Click here. Don't worry."

The middleman exists because systems are intimidating, language is confusing, consequences feel expensive, and trust is social.

Good Indian UX often has to replace the middleman.

That means clearer confirmations, human-like guidance, visible trust markers, assisted flows, easy reversibility, and language that reduces fear. The best interface in India is not always the shortest interface. Sometimes it is the one that holds your hand at the right moment.

A product team may think the broker is inefficiency. But ethnographically, the broker is assurance infra.

If you remove him without replacing the trust he provided, the user does not become empowered. They become abandoned.

[Kanish Aggarwal @kanishagg92]

@businessbarista AI-native

[Alex Lieberman @businessbarista]

25 questions every exec should ask as they transform their business with AI:

1) How can I tell the difference between AI activity and AI productivity?
2) Which of our current competitive advantages get eroded or amplified by AI becoming more widely used?
3) How do we have a cohesive AI strategy vs. a bunch of experiments with no clear process or rigor?
4) What is our responsibility for AI upskilling vs what is our employees?
5) How do we make sure we're not just adding AI to existing products/processes but starting from scratch and using first principles to reimagine them?
6) How do we message our AI strategy in a way that is honest and empathetic to employees?
7) What does "transforming your business with AI" actually mean? What is the menu of opportunity?
8) If a task drops from $100 to $1, what’s worth doing that wasn't worth it before?
9) What is our risk framework for making go/no decisions on AI tooling & systems?
10) How do we create a culture of experimentation and exploration for employees while mitigating unpalatable security risk?
11) How do we bubble up AI use cases and opportunities through employees and prioritize and productionize those opportunities from the top?
12) How does leadership get their hands dirty and walk the walk with AI proficiency and building to effectively lead by example?
13) How do we have a data strategy that gets us progressively AI ready, but also doesn't hold us back from beginning our transformation today?
14) Where do we start?
15) How do we build AI systems and solutions that have harnesses that are model agnostic, so we're well positioned for a dynamic and volatile market?
16) How do we test for AI curiosity, literacy, and interest during our hiring process?
17) How do we make “the bad guys” (IT, legal, compliance) partners and heroes in our AI transformation story?
18) How true is the "we can redeploy people to do higher value tasks" narrative?
19) How do you transform a company culture to start embracing/experimenting with AI when most employees are apathetic or fearful of AI replacing them?
20) Should AI transformation be owned by a central team/steerco or embedded in every function?
21) What are the risks of doing this and not doing this?
22) How do we find the AI A players and make what they do the "gold standard" across our org?
23) What other businesses have transformed successfully using AI? What businesses have failed? How can we apply lessons learned from both?
24) If a competitor launched tomorrow, AI-native from day one, what would they do differently, and why aren't we?
25) If we become dependent on external AI vendors, what happens if the cost of LLMs skyrockets?

What questions am I missing?

[Harsh Goenka @hvgoenka]

Never forget this:
1. If you’re always available, people stop valuing you.
2. If you constantly help, they start using you.
3. If you stay silent when it hurts, they’ll hurt you more often.
4. If you settle for less, they’ll never offer more.
5. If you don’t set limits, they’ll take control.

[Dave Kline @dklineii]

Before giving critical feedback,
ask if they met their own expectations.

Before telling them what to do,
ask how they'd proceed without you.

Before accepting a problem to solve,
ask for their recommendation.

It's often not wisdom they lack,
just the courage to use it.

[Michael Girdley @girdley]

Great managers ask great questions.

Here are my tactics for asking world-class questions:

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Everyone should read this story...

Imagine someone is struck by a poisoned arrow.

A doctor is called to remove the arrow, but the man stops him.

"Not so fast! Before you remove it, I want to know who shot me. What town or village does he come from? What kind of wood was his bow made from? Was it a crossbow or a longbow?"

While he asks the questions, the poison takes hold and he dies.

Like the man in the story, we occasionally get shot with the poisoned arrows of life.

But ruminating too much on the nature of those arrows is unlikely to help.

This is a trap we all fall into:

We think we need more information to solve our problems, when all we really need is more action.

The trap is becoming more challenging to avoid in a modern era where information is abundant.

We've become conditioned to get our dopamine from information gathering.

But you see, dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. It convinces you that information alone is enough. That it's sufficient. That it's all you need.

But information alone is never enough. Information is nothing without action.

The information meant to push you forward can quickly start to hold you back.

Struck with the poison arrow, you feel a surge of satisfaction from learning that your attacker was from a nearby village, that his bow was made from oak, and that it was a longbow.

And then, you're dead, because the information you wanted had become a distraction from the action you needed.

This is what I call the Poison Arrow Principle:

Never allow information-gathering to get in the way of action-taking.

The next time you're in an overthinking loop, ask yourself:

Do I really need more information, or do I simply need to act on the information I already have?

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

You say you want to build an elite company. Do you have the culture it requires?

I recently spent time with an executive who works closely with Elon Musk and the SpaceX team, and few things came up repeatedly.

1. Feedback -You’re expected to ask for it constantly and receive it without emotion, because the goal isn’t to be right or to protect your ego, it’s to get to the truth as fast as possible.

2. Speed - Speed is protected at all costs. Everything is questioned. Why does this exist? What breaks if we remove it? What’s adding complexity instead of momentum? Complexity is cut aggressively.

3. He has a principal of physics, always asking is this physically impossible due to the physics or for some other reason?

4. He calls this pushing against paper walls... How many walls around you look like they are solid but really you could punch right through them as paper.

5. They’re do to say ratio is followed. My friend said he’s never been in a company where everyone does the things that they say they will do to such a high degree.

These ideas forced some uncomfortable reflection for me, and they probably should for you too.

[Blake Emal @heyblake]

17 marketing rules I live and die by:

1/ Automated responses kill trust on impact

2/ Your page isn't about product - it's about their life after your product.

3/ Good questions beat good answers in sales

4/ Copy that sounds like marketing is already dead

5/ The fastest way to kill organic growth is to try to automate it

6/ Brand voice guidelines are where personality goes to die

7/ A messy truth beats a perfect lie in marketing every time

8/ "Building in public" works because ego content is boring

9/ The best pages make competitor features look irrelevant, not inferior

10/ People buy transformation, not information

11/ Every extra form field costs you money

12/ Social proof without specific numbers is marketing copy in disguise

13/ A/B testing button colors means you've run out of good ideas

14/ Sell to one person who already trusts you, not thousands who don't

15/ Fancy designs hide bad copy - good copy works on a blank page

16/ The best marketing happens in conversations, not campaigns

17/ If your headline could be on your competitor's page, it's not good enough

[Kanish Aggarwal @kanishagg92]

🚀⚓📉0️⃣💺

[Ishan Sukul @isawsukul]

First X Giveaway (₹25K)

We’re looking for the BIGGEST LOSER!

The Quote Tweet of this post with the LEAST number of likes will win a Kreo Actus Gaming Chair (worth ₹25K)

Rules: The post has to be LIVE for min. 24hrs AND your account HAS TO BE PUBLIC

Ends on: 18th Oct-24,9PM

[Natia Kurdadze @natiakourdadze]

How I'd promote my startup, if I had 0 followers: 👇

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

You aren't where you want to be because you don't have the mind of the person who would be in that position. You're exactly where you should be for your level of development, and changing that is within your control.

[Anthony Vicino @AnthonyVicino]

I charge $1,700 an hour to consult businesses scaling to 8-figures and beyond.

Here's my most common advice so you don't have to hire me:

[Josh Gessner @joshgessner]

Navy SEALs are the most elite warriors on Earth.

Here's one thing their taught early on...

The Backwards Law (how to get what you want by letting go):

[Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal]

A NEW MENTAL MODEL MEGATHREAD HAS ARRIVED!

In 20 tweets I’ll summarize 20 of the most useful principles I know.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.

Value: A lifetime.

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