Matteo Cassese

(he, him) Hi, my name is Matteo Cassese, and I’m a digital marketer, coach, and entrepreneur. I'm a digital pioneer. A storyteller. And an innovator at heart.

[Matteo Cassese @matteoc]

My 02023 in Review: Resilience, Growth, and Transformation

https://t.co/KJjmtRG8Ql

This year was a pivotal chapter in my life. I faced the challenge of overcoming burnout. The highlight of my year was embracing a mastermind group.

[Jane Manchun Wong @wongmjane]

DeepSeek V4 “improved” the code and said nothing happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989

[nopara73 @nopara73]

came across this lost 3m talk of 26yo steve jobs where he unknowingly explains today's LLMs as the very thing computers are worse than humans in, then unknowingly again predicts the future of interfacing with AI that nobody's working on yet

https://t.co/zXxAsTQQBJ

[Matteo Cassese @matteoc]

Life imitates AI - I've started to use more dashes when I type 🤦‍♂️

[shadcn @shadcn]

Must read.

[Matteo Cassese @matteoc]

@suekhim Sue how about adults? We are all forgetting how to think. Logic, systems thinking, feedback loops, first principles thinking are needed more than ever @suekhim

[David Lieb @dflieb]

Thought experiment: if every company suddenly had infinite free compute, what new products would emerge?

My take: with very few exceptions, not much would change. The bottleneck is figuring out what people want, and it’s not so easy to apply compute to solve that.

[Matteo Cassese @matteoc]

Madness

[Chris Paxton @chris_j_paxton]

Get your chores done for free if youre okay with the data being used to train robots

[Matteo Cassese @matteoc]

How I am spending my Friday. 4 parallel claude code sessions in ultracode workflow mode 😅

[Sid @sidbid]

To get started just mention the word "workflow" in any prompt and Claude will spin one up.

You can also turn on `/effort ultracode` which uses workflows aggressively without you having to ask for them

[Cybertruck @cybertruck]

Hey Luce

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Matteo Cassese @matteoc]

I took a inspiration from one of @bruces favorite leitmotivs from the good old #SWSX closing remarks for this talk: What happens to engineers will happen to everyone

https://t.co/YEqXNdM5lx

[tmuxvim @tmuxvim]

I put a prompt injection into my LinkedIn bio and recruiters are messaging me in Old English and calling me Lord.

[Leon Lin @LexnLin]

@ClaudeDevs guys weekly limit is still the same. basically you'll use it up faster and have to wait longer :D

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Solution: New companies.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Fireside chat at Sequoia Ascent 2026 from a ~week ago. Some highlights:

The first theme I tried to push on is that LLMs are about a lot more than just speeding up what existed before (e.g. coding). Three examples of new horizons:

1. menugen: an app that can be fully engulfed by LLMs, with no classical code needed: input an image, output an image and an LLM can natively do the thing.
2. install .md skills instead of install .sh scripts. Why create a complex Software 1.0 bash script for e.g. installing a piece of software if you can write the installation out in words and say "just show this to your LLM". The LLM is an advanced interpreter of English and can intelligently target installation to your setup, debug everything inline, etc.
3. LLM knowledge bases as an example of something that was *impossible* with classical code because it's computation over unstructured data (knowledge) from arbitrary sources and in arbitrary formats, including simply text articles etc.

I pushed on these because in every new paradigm change, the obvious things are always in the realm of speeding up or somehow improving what existed, but here we have examples of functionality that either suddenly perhaps shouldn't even exist (1,2), or was fundamentally not possible before (3).

The second (ongoing) theme is trying to explain the pattern of jaggedness in LLMs. How it can be true that a single artifact will simultaneously 1) coherently refactor a 100,000-line code base *and* 2) tell you to walk to the car wash to wash your car. I previously wrote about the source of this as having to do with verifiability of a domain, here I expand on this as having to also do with economics because revenue/TAM dictates what the frontier labs choose to package into training data distributions during RL. You're either in the data distribution (on the rails of the RL circuits) and flying or you're off-roading in the jungle with a machete, in relative terms. Still not 100% satisfied with this, but it's an ongoing struggle to build an accurate model of LLM capabilities if you wish to practically take advantage of their power while avoiding their pitfalls, which brings me to...

Last theme is the agent-native economy. The decomposition of products and services into sensors, actuators and logic (split up across all of 1.0/2.0/3.0 computing paradigms), how we can make information maximally legible to LLMs, some words on the quickly emerging agentic engineering and its skill set, related hiring practices, etc., possibly even hints/dreams of fully neural computing handling the vast majority of computation with some help from (classical) CPU coprocessors.

[Andrea Volpini @cyberandy]

Many installed OpenClaw. I didn’t.

I forked @NanoClaw_AI instead.

I didn’t need another assistant. I needed a team member: one that could run tasks using Agent WordLift.

The interesting part? The team dynamics when one member suddenly has “claws.”

👉 https://t.co/9iTjsgwlLr

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.

[Matteo Cassese @matteoc]

See you soon https://t.co/wCGDhBhxYD

[Matteo Cassese @matteoc]

Reverting from Opus 4.7 to Opus 4.6 in Claude Code and couldn't be happier. Less usage, better performance. Use this command to get the 1m token version.

/model claude-opus-4-6[1m]

@AnthropicAI this is feedback for you too