Paul

Building in Education and Future of Work | Experiments always brewing

[Aaron Levie @levie]

If I were a college career counselor or in career services, I’d quickly be figuring out how to get students to understand these forward deployed engineer jobs exist and how to get them.

The requirements are a mix of deep technical skills, often CS majors or minors. You must be great at understanding problem solving, how to have systems thinking, and have a strong business acumen. The kicker, of course, is to make sure you’re very deep in AI agents; you need to have fluency in coding agents, MCP, CLIs, Skills, and so on.

Hundreds (thousands?) of technology companies will be hiring for these roles, same with any consulting and IT services company, and the vast major of mid-size and large enterprises will be hiring for this talent internally as well.

One great example of opportunity for highly technical talent out there.

[Maxim Leyzerovich @round]

mark kelner, 2026

[Aaron Levie @levie]

A common trend emerging in larger enterprises is token budgeting as a major topic. As agents can do more and more long running tasks, and thus take vastly more compute, allocation of tokens across teams becomes a very real thing in the enterprise.

Companies spend a meaningful amount of time deciding how much to spend on talent, marketing campaigns, events, laptop setups, and even the cost of lunches. Tokens will be no different.

Tokens will similarly need to be excruciatingly well-managed because you’ll need to ensure you don’t blow up your budget, and you’ll need to ensure that the tokens are flowing to the highest and most useful parts of work. You don’t want to find out you burned your monthly budget on something relatively low value and then be blocked on the much higher value task later.

Doing this at large company scale is extremely hard as you have layers of abstraction on data and visibility into the digital work being done by agents in any central way. This is going to mean that agentic spend will increasingly will expand beyond the confines of the IT budget, and end up in organizational budgets like other expenses.

Ultimately team and org leaders will have to be given budgets for this, but even they don’t have adequate visibility and controls in most cases. We’ll need all new software just to solve this problem, and it’s probably an opportunity for startups in its own right.

Going to be an all new era of enterprise resource allocation, especially while we compute constrained.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Distribution is the new moat

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Starting to REALLY see how reaching potential customers is becoming a massive pain point for software startups - esp w AI!

I get so much more messages about software that founders built rapidly that they think will solve some important problem (usually eg AI+context/trust/security).

But how will anyone know about it?

It was fast to build, but getting the world to know about it / care about it is increasingly hard/expensive/time-consuming.

And the irony is: the "easier" it is to build, the more the only differentiation is marketing/advertising! (Because the easier it is to build, the more teams build something similar in parallel, and racing to win the market becomes key!)

[tobi lutke @tobi]

The most future-proof job: Entrepreneurship https://t.co/NbMUHPSoEi via @Shopify

[Jen Abel @jjen_abel]

best thing i’ve read on X … f**k

‘storytelling is the ultimate compression algorithm for human attention.

everything else, data, logic, tech feeds into it, but if you can’t wrap it in a compelling narrative, nobody will give a shit.

people think they make decisions based on facts, but they’re mostly responding to the shape of a story, whether it’s a personal arc, a company vision, or a product pitch.

if you want to accomplish anything meaningful, the story is the interface between it & the world.

get that wrong & nobody will give af. get it right & you bend steel with your bare hands.’

@signulll

[Paul @pgleger]

@JJEnglert GTM Guide

[Erik Torenberg @eriktorenberg]

The future of marketing is buying creators/media properties

[Paul @pgleger]

@vitaliidodonov Alpha

[Paul @pgleger]

@andysparks Love the human and machine interface approach.

[Paul @pgleger]

@toddsaunders Fantastic idea.

[andrew pignanelli @ndrewpignanelli]

https://t.co/WRy3K0hiMN

[Paul @pgleger]

With autonomous agent teams in full swing, I'm curious to see what DAO's 2.0 will look like.

[TBPN @tbpn]

"We're trying to hire as many new grads as we can. We're finding that a lot of young people are agentmaxxing." - Replit founder @amasad

Amjad says that despite the “doom and gloom” around entry-level jobs, this is actually a “golden era” for young people who know how to use AI tools:

"The roles are collapsing. We have designers shipping code, engineers shipping design, and salespeople shipping code."

"The particular skill is not the bottleneck anymore. It is how ambitious you are, how generative you are, how creative you are, and how good you are at utilizing these tools."

"So I think it's really a golden era for a lot of young people coming up right now in the job market. In our time, you would go and interview and become a Java J2EE software engineer doing global migrations. That was your title, right? It's no longer the case. We just want people to come and do things, and I think that's incredibly exciting."

[Paul @pgleger]

@TheMattBerman @openclaw @boringmarketer @virlomain Views

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

There’s a huge opportunity to build Trade School 2.0.

Here’s my thinking:

Both education and employment are in the middle of a tectonic shift.

AI and other new technologies are reshaping those landscapes rapidly.

The traditional college system is fracturing. How do you convince someone to spend $200k+ on a degree when entry-level knowledge economy jobs feel increasingly uncertain?

Meanwhile, the unsexy is becoming sexy.

Plumbers. Electricians. HVAC technicians. Home services. Energy. Manufacturing. People who work with their hands and need to understand people.

Trade School 2.0 embraces technology as leverage in both training and business building in service-oriented sectors.

It could also serve the massive reskilling wave that's coming. Training people for "trades" we can't even envision today

What am I missing? Who’s building this?

[Naval @naval]

Vibe Coding Is the New Product Management

“There’s been a shift—a marked pronouncement in the last year and especially in the last few months—most pronounced by Claude Code, which is a specific model that has a coding engine in it, which is so good that I think now you have vibe coders, which are people who didn’t really code much or hadn’t coded in a long time, who are using essentially English as a programming language—as an input into this code bot—which can do end-to-end coding.

Instead of just helping you debug things in the middle, you can describe an application that you want. You can have it lay out a plan, you can have it interview you for the plan. You can give it feedback along the way, and then it’ll chunk it up and will build all the scaffolding.

It’ll download all the libraries and all the connectors and all the hooks, and it’ll start building your app and building test harnesses and testing it. And you can keep giving it feedback and debugging it by voice, saying, “This doesn’t work. That works. Change this. Change that,” and have it build you an entire working application without your having written a single line of code.

For a large group of people who either don’t code anymore or never did, this is mind-blowing.

This is taking them from idea space, and opinion space, and from taste directly into product. So that’s what I mean—product management has taken over coding. Vibe coding is the new product management.

Instead of trying to manage a product or a bunch of engineers by telling them what to do, you’re now telling a computer what to do. And the computer is tireless. The computer is egoless, and it’ll just keep working. It’ll take feedback without getting offended.

You can spin up multiple instances. It’ll work 24/7 and you can have it produce working output.

What does that mean? Just like now anybody can make a video or anyone can make a podcast, anyone can now make an application. So we should expect to see a tsunami of applications. Not that we don’t have one already in the App Store, but it doesn’t even begin to compare to what we’re going to see.

However, when you start drowning in these applications, does that necessarily mean that these are all going to get used or they’re competitive? No. I think it’s going to break into two kinds of things.

First, the best application for a given use case still tends to win the entire category. When you have such a multiplicity of content, whether in videos or audio or music or applications, there’s no demand for average.
Nobody wants the average thing. People want the best thing that does the job. So first of all, you just have more shots on goal. So there will be more of the best. There will be a lot more niches getting filled.

You might have wanted an application for a very specific thing, like tracking lunar phases in a certain context, or a certain kind of personality test, or a very specific kind of video game that made you nostalgic for something. Before, the market just wasn’t large enough to justify the cost of an engineer coding away for a year or two. But now the best vibe coding app might be enough to scratch that itch or fill that slot. So a lot more niches will get filled, and as that happens, the tide will rise.

The best applications—those engineers themselves are going to be much more leveraged. They’ll be able to add more features, fix more bugs, smooth out more of the edges. So the best applications will continue to get better. A lot more niches will get filled.

And even individual niches—such as you want an app that’s just for your own very specific health tracking needs, or for your own very specific architectural layout or design—that app that could have never existed will now exist.”

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.

https://t.co/3GQUlfH58t

[Paul @pgleger]

Which credit card will offer “AI subscription” perks first? Like $300 annual credit for select AI services.