Otis Chandler

Founder of

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Two conversations this weekend make me think that there's a vibe shift afoot in Silicon Valley around what one should work on and what is worthwhile.

Culturally, it feels like the moment is ripe for new frameworks:

• Davos expert morality is stale and discredited.
• It's also apparent that the "just be super based" Counter-Enlightenment is not really an answer. (Yes, woke went too far, but simply inverting it doesn't work.)
• EA is no longer the automatic default for smart people.
• There's increasing skepticism of slot and slop machine dynamics.

Overall, "what is worthy and valuable?" feels like it's becoming more central.

[dan @irl_danB]

if you've been using OpenProse, you now have a bunch of dynamic workflows saved as code that lean on best practice classical engineering principles to build composable scalable dynamic workflows

and all your programs got better and faster and cheaper for free

model: opus-4.8
harness: claude code + /workflow

is rapidly approaching Prose Completeness

[a16z @a16z]

https://t.co/ZaKnu7RVIz

[Ben Lang @benln]

Jack Dorsey on how every company can now be a mini-AGI:

[Balaji @balajis]

The right kind of ambition is to compete against yourself. To be the best version of yourself.

[Thariq @trq212]

https://t.co/MXt5XS4xBX

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

https://t.co/bqYU0I0prI

[Otis Chandler @otown]

Everyone underestimates network effects, but now they matter even more

[Michael Mignano @mignano]

https://t.co/mDxV9mRfbA

[Taylor Pearson @TaylorPearsonMe]

Eli Goldratt's book, The Goal, was famous for its (then unpopular argument) that keeping every machine running 24 hours a day, the metric most plant managers cared about, was actively making factories worse. I suspect we're seeing the same fallacy in how many people are using AI agents.

Goldratt's point was that machine utilization isn't throughput. What you want from a manufacturing plants is making good widgets as cost-effectively as possible.
It doesn't necessarily follow that running your machines all the times optimizes that.

Picture a three-station assembly line. Stations 1 and 2 each crank out 200 widgets an hour. Station 3 can only handle 100. Running stations 1 and 2 around the clock doesn't ship more product. It just piles up half-finished widgets in front of station 3, ties up cash in inventory, and creates more work managing the pile.

He developed the Theory of Constraints to point out that what matters is solving the bottleneck in the system, not increasing machine utilization.

I suspect a lot of agent usage right now is the same fallacy at higher resolution. Running 20 Claude Code sessions in parallel can feel productive because something is always happening. But, if the bottleneck in your work is judgment about what's worth doing, more agents just generate more output for you to wade through.

This is not to say there aren't workflows running 20 agents in parallel very effectively, I'm sure there are. And, I suspect there's a general retraining we all need to do around evolving historical workflows. But....

The constraint for most knowledge work is deciding what's worth executing and no one is task switching between 20 things at the same time effectively I don't think. I find I can run maybe 2 or 3 things in parallel with maybe 1 or 2 admin-y type things on the side and that is only if I'm very locked in.

[Josh Wolfe @wolfejosh]

1/ I just finished one of the best books I've EVER read.

Comes out next week.

My friend @DavidEpstein (Range, The Sports Gene) has written a masterpiece on the virtue of constraints, of not thinking OUTSIDE the box but "INSIDE the BOX"...

As a few quick excerpts that 🤯...

[dan @irl_danB]

you’re using Skills to effectively write programs for your agents

but there are decades of engineering best practices that we’ve left behind in doing so

I made prose.md to solve this

it’s still a work in progress, and it doesn’t solve the sharing/repo-specific issue yet. but that is next on our list, stay tuned!

[Aaron Levie @levie]

https://t.co/syK3QYG52A

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

LLM Knowledge Bases

Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So:

Data ingest:
I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them.

IDE:
I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides).

Q&A:
Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale.

Output:
Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base.

Linting:
I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into.

Extra tools:
I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries.

Further explorations:
As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows.

TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

https://t.co/EVPCod6rxu

[Chrys Bader @chrysb]

https://t.co/dPP9HPvML2

[a16z @a16z]

"Action produces information"

[Sam Altman @sama]

I wrote this early this morning and I wasn't sure if I would actually publish it, but here it is:

https://t.co/7Dw9UFpeep

[Adam Back @adam3us]

i'm not satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas.

[Ryan Sarver @rsarver]

https://t.co/mdGbEHnc0s