Mike Hoefflinger

30 years in Silicon Valley. Enemy of the status quo.

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

The 10’s were mostly about optimizing stuff invented in the 00’s(ish). 20’s will be about new stuff again: AR, autonomous vehicles (both road and air), truly useful AI (maybe voice) assistants, moon bases, Mars landing. Get the popcorn. Should be fascinating...

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

And then there’s this…

TL;DR: fka Clawdbot agents coordinating on their own Reddit’ish board.

Never been happier that I’ve been saying please and thank you in my prompts since GPT-3. iykyk

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

AI thinkbois/goils on here can be exhausting. @emollick is an exception. Remember this: "...I suspect the people who thrive will be the ones who know what good looks like — and can explain it clearly enough that even an AI can deliver it." (eg good management)

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I wrote about my class where MBAs created startups in a few days, the secret behind working with AI agents (hint: it’s good management), and how to build a process around delegating to AIs in a world where agents can increasingly do many-hour-long tasks. https://t.co/LPVYFEviCM

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

RIP Bill Atkinson, perhaps the easiest choice for coding’s Mount Rushmore (original MacOS fundamentals, MacPaint, HyperCard) https://t.co/ma1YY3duCO

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

This is the most Alan “people who are serious about software should make their own hardware” Kay thing in a long time. Now they’ve got to figure out how to avoid being Humane 2.0. Easier said than done.

[Mark Gurman @markgurman]

BREAKING: OpenAI is buying Jony Ive’s secret AI company io for $6.5 Billion and will develop a slew of devices. Ive, in his return to hardware, and LoveFrom will oversee OpenAI design. All the details, including interviews with Ive, Sam Altman & others — https://t.co/DWjBb1bWOH

[Dreaming Tulpa 🥓👑 @dreamingtulpa]

James Cameron on AI datasets and copyright:

"I think people are looking at it all wrong."

"Every human being is a model. You create a model as you go through life."

"My output should be judged on whether it's too close to plagiarism, not my input."

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

Janky-seeming org moves tend to be sign of bigger issues. There’s a universe where Siri separate from “other AI” can lead to good things (succession trial, etc), but you’d take the “under” on that. As Daring Fireball said last week, where’s the “youth” leadership on this?

[Mark Gurman @markgurman]

BREAKING: Apple Vision Pro Chief Mike Rockwell will take over Siri, which is being removed from AI Chief John Giannandrea, I’m told. Rockwell & Siri will report to Craig Federighi. Giannandrea is staying in larger AI role. https://t.co/YaIj2YuYQ3

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

Most interesting part of today’s Stratechery interview w Sam Altman:

Q: What’s going to be more valuable in five years? 1-billion daily active user destination site that doesn’t have to do customer acquisition, or the state-of-the-art model?

SA: 1-billion user site I think.

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

Gary Tan and Andrew Karpathy are 2 of the biggest names in building things in the last decade (and you don’t have to love everything about either). When they suggest Agency > Intelligence (especially going forward with rise of AI), I’d listen.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Agency > Intelligence

I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?

Grok explanation is ~close:

“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.

People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.

It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

@RinoTheBouncer @elyelgow @Much118x also creates amazing TLoU combat compilations…

[Much @Much118x]

#TheLastOfUs

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

Friendly reminder, that’s very roughly the height of the Statue of Liberty.

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

Good god. They caught the Starship booster.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The tower has caught the rocket!!

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

👀

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

Ignore who it’s from (eg Replit, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google … come to think of it Meta might be in the best position), but a YouTube/Insta/TikTok for miniapps/code with a 1M+ “creator”-coder community wrapped in an approachable consumer UX is … interesting.

[ST @seyitaylor]

Yeah, I take it back. We're going to get TikTok and YouTube for software.

@amasad I know you're focused on building a better dev product.

I think you should 1000% find a team with consumer chops to help you rethink the Replit experience so it feels more like a creator than a dev experience.

Since distribution is the bottleneck, how do you make it super simple for people to find a world of software hosted on Replit that does what they need it to do?

Can they duet or remix it? Can it be like the Steam marketplace where people just buy once instead of racking up subscriptions? Comments and likes? Can Replit allow you to record a Replit-hosted video and walkthrough?

Like, if I were thinking about it, I'd do exactly what YouTube did and just have a bunch of knock-offs of existing software available on Replit for free or where people could just do micropayments to access it.

Because if it's this easy to make really basic software, then the assumptions as to distribution of software need to change, and all the value will [again] accrue to the distro layer, not the production layer.

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

It's gonna be a both-not-either mixed reality market, and I'm not saying Meta's Quest/RayBan lineup made Apple blink about the high-end, but I'm not not saying it either: https://t.co/sWfwq0aHqU

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

You gotta respect a sense of humor (especially about leaks) from a 4-commas-club CFO.

[Kontra @counternotions]

Jim Cramer asks Apple CFO Luca Maestri: “Why isn’t Apple monetizing AI as a premium service, for revenue growth?”

Maestri: “It wasn’t in Mark Gurman’s pre-Keynote list of service introductions, so we wanted to be consistent.”

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

What. A. Launch!

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

Ridiculous … in the best way

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!

Congratulations @SpaceX team on an epic achievement!!

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

@krea_ai [asking very nicely] Great UX for this. Could I have an unlock code, pls?

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

All the Aurora pics from around the world are giving such a “Pale Blue Dot” vibe (https://t.co/i6W3LGBoKC). We’re all one team, on the same rock, astronomically lucky.

[Mike Hoefflinger @mhoeffli]

Rough start for this crew of former Apple employees(TM). I respect builders and new is very hard, but Humane’s over-blown lead-up (for what felt like years) consistently felt like trouble…

[Nick St. Pierre @nickfloats]

Is anyone surprised?