Mark Bao

Co-founder, CTO, designer @goodygifting. Technology and behavioral science for social good. Systems, mindfulness, psychology, writing, and living well 🪴

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

B/c having a vendor w/ 1000’s of people who wake up every day literally only thinking about solving your problems is a good feeling and worth paying for and why the vertical software selloff is stupid because SMBs don’t fucking care about benchmarks they just want. it. to. work.

[Mark Bao @markbao]

@nateberkopec

[Mark Bao @markbao]

@_andresjasso Those who only use a less malleable tool with limited freedom will be as limited as engineers who never wrote code, only prompts.

And I wouldn’t call it an expert trap when it’s still humans creating the most original+creative work in Figma, and AI designs are average/derivative

[Mark Bao @markbao]

@_andresjasso This seems overly reactionary. Figma proficiency is design proficiency. If you’re good at ideating in Figma, you’ll be good at ideating in design-as-code

The same isn’t true for people who never built up design proficiency. Their designs will most likely be fine, not exceptional

[Mark Bao @markbao]

SF quake - that was a long one

[Mark Bao @markbao]

Which stock do I buy to invest in airport beers specifically

[Mark Bao @markbao]

wild that Costco CEOs are the nearest thing to philosopher-kings that we have. also Dario Amodei

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Jevons paradox is happening in real time. Companies, especially outside of tech, are realizing that they can now afford to take on software projects that they wouldn’t have been able to tackle before because now AI lets them do so.

We’re going to start to use software for all new things in the economy because it’s incrementally cheaper to produce. Marketing teams at big companies will have engineers helping to automate workflows. Engineers in life sciences and healthcare will automate research. Small businesses will hire engineers for the first to build better digital experiences.

And as long as AI agents still require a human who understands what to prompt, how to review when an agent goes off the rails, how it guide back, how to maintain the system that was built, how to fix the ongoing bugs, and more, we will still have humans managing these agents.

This is why all the advice you get of not going into engineering is wrong. The world is going to increasingly be made up of software, and the people that understand it best will be in a strong economic position. This will happen in other roles as well where output goes up and demand increases.

[Mark Bao @markbao]

…instead of giving you the truth, and adjusting your prompt to compensate. (LLMs have gotten better at pushing back instead of glazing you though)

Similar to developing a theory of mind of other people. The general skill here is ‘people skills’, and it has a LLM analog as well.

[Mark Bao @markbao]

The more you use LLMs, the more you learn to predict its answer and personality, in a similar way that the LLM is predicting our behavior.

I think that’s a lot of the experience that comes from using LLMs, e.g. noticing what parts of a prompt might lead it to people-please you…

[Mark Bao @markbao]

clown show

[Mark Bao @markbao]

I still use Cursor / Claude Code more because I like to code alongside the AI, but for totally “driverless” tasks, nobody has really gotten close to Devin’s UX.

Maybe because the foundation labs don’t have the capacity to run ten million VMs due to their greater distribution

[Mark Bao @markbao]

In AI code, I think most products are still playing catch-up to what @cognition Devin built two years ago

No other product lets you configure a VM with your environment and server/test scripts; lets you interact with the browser in the VM; and supports projects w/multiple repos

[Mark Bao @markbao]

Devin’s issue has mostly been that it’s not super fast, though it’s gotten better. Like with other AI tools, the bottleneck is code review (no, you cannot fully outsource that to AI in a serious company). And since they’re not subsiding as much, it can get expensive

[Mark Bao @markbao]

@JoePostingg “Enshittification is the fakest thing ever” would necessitate that everything gets better which obviously isn’t true. Some gets better, some gets worse, and if you don’t call out the negative then there’s more incentive for companies to cost cut and make it worse with no blowback

[Mark Bao @markbao]

@theo TUI UX is awful.

[Mark Bao @markbao]

@sgrove oh god that one too lol

[Mark Bao @markbao]

moltbot is a truly awful name. looks bad, sounds dirty, awkward to say. -1000 aura. branding matters

[Mark Bao @markbao]

@MattZeitlin How current were they on this? They updated their pricing in June 2025 so users pay overages above plan limits. It’s not a free for all.

[Mark Bao @markbao]

@JeremiahDJohns And it makes sense. Chronological feed just gets you a random slice in time, whereas algorithm gets you the best content, on average.

You’d miss most of the best content with chronological feed, unless you read your entire feed which nobody does.