Shyam Pillai

learner, builder, systems thinking

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Funny how the pendulum shifts

1. "GPT wrappers are worthless" → the value acrues to application layer

2. "AI will eliminate white collar jobs" → someone needs to manage all these AI agents and everyone is now saying white collar workers will rise due to AI

3. "Open source will never catch up" → Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of tasks

4. "I only use Claude Code, Codex is mid" → Codex is becoming a super app. Coding, docs, browser, computer use, automations, all in one surface.

4. "You need to pick a model and go deep" → model loyalty is dead, the best founders swap weekly based on the task

5. "SaaS is dead" → This was mostly true but for some SaaS margins actually improve when agents pay for their own tokens and need their own seats

6. "AutoGPT is the future" → AutoGPT died. Then agents actually got good 2 years later with Hermes, OpenClaw, and managed agents. The idea was right. The timing was wrong.

7. "Prompt engineering is a career" → lasted about 18 months as a job title. Workflow engineering replaced it.

8. "Computer use is a gimmick" → "sent from computer use/ai agent will be the new sent from iphone

9. "AI design looks generic" → the generic look is a taste problem not a technology problem. The founders feeding their agents references from Japanese packaging, brutalist architecture, and 1960s print are getting beautiful output.

10. "Fine-tuning is the moat" → a well-structured Obsidian vault with good markdown files outperforms fine-tuning for most use cases and costs nothing.

11. "Benchmarks tell you which model to use" → benchmarks tell you which model won a test. I think we're all waking up to this lol.

12. "AI will consolidate into 2-3 winners" → AI is fragmenting into thousands of vertical applications built on commodity models. The consolidation is at the model layer. The explosion is at the application layer. Both are happening simultaneously.

13. "The hard part is building" → the hard part is choosing what to build. Building takes a weekend. Choosing the right thing to build takes taste, domain knowledge, and customer conversations. thats why i built https://t.co/a5ARFnvky2 to make it easier for you.

14. "The terminal is the future" → desktop apps just ate the terminal. Claude Code desktop, Codex app, both shipped GUI versions in the same month. The next 100 million agent users will never open a terminal (thank god).

I guarantee you I'm holding at least 2-3 beliefs right now that will look stupid by Christmas. I just don't know which ones. Neither do you. No one does. Build anyway.

Keep moving because this is the greatest time to be building.

I'm rooting for you.

[darkzodchi @zodchiii]

Anthropic engineer showed how one person can run 5 AI agents, that code, test, review, and deploy at the same time.

In 30 minutes they built the whole thing live in one session.

Here's what they cover:

> when to use one agent vs a full team
> how to split work so agents don't step on each other > the exact framework for deciding what each agent handles

that's exactly why, I put together a guide on building agent teams that actually work.

full guide in the article below 👇

[pH @pHequals7]

https://t.co/noKIgZK9aG

[Akshay 🚀 @akshay_pachaar]

https://t.co/Exoyd8tB0d

[Shyam Pillai @pillais]

@hnshah All the value delivered is captured by the LLM providers in terms of pricing, as the software and agent creation costs are approach zero - which is a biggest problem for companies developing software on llms or with llm. Potential respite is open source llm models and harness

[Mnimiy @Mnilax]

https://t.co/W4MxdOyUKD

[Noisy @noisyb0y1]

A HUMAN INVENTED A TOOL THAT CAN BUILD A MILLION-DOLLAR COMPANY - AND IT'S FREE

Vannevar Bush described this idea back in 1945 - a machine that expands the human brain to infinity, stores everything you know and connects every idea to every other one automatically. For 80 years nobody could build it.

Now it's a free app on your laptop.

One properly built Obsidian vault replaces an operations director, an analyst, a content strategist and a project manager simultaneously - running 24 hours a day with no days off, no salary and no Slack messages asking for clarification.

The people who figured this out first are already running $15,000-$20,000/month businesses completely alone, no team, no office, no investors.

The limits of this tool are the limits of your thinking. And judging by what the best users are doing with it - there are no limits.

[Defileo🔮 @defileo]

https://t.co/XknL2qFBAP

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Hiroki Asai spent 18 years as creative director at Apple under Steve Jobs. He was described as "a silent force who could channel Steve."

He taught Brian two of the most important principles:

"The first was simplicity. Startups are naturally simple because you have no money.

Lack of abundance creates natural constraints.

Once you raise money and hire a bunch of people, you go in a lot of directions and lose your sense of focus.

You start to lose your muscle for simplicity.

Hiroki taught me that simplicity is not removing things. Simplicity is distilling something so fundamentally that you understand its essence.

The second was a sense of craft and details. How you do anything is how you do everything. Everything must be perfect.

John Wooden, the winningest coach in college basketball history at UCLA. The first hour on his team, he spends an hour teaching you how to put your socks on.

Bill Walsh said the way you tuck your jersey into your pants was one of 10,000 details that determined whether you won.

Don't focus on winning. Focus on getting all the inputs perfect.

We do focus on growth, but we kind of stopped focusing on growth. We started focusing on making everything perfect.

If everything is perfect and you don't grow, then you focus on the wrong inputs. But if you have the right inputs and make them perfect, then you'll grow really fast."

[Claude @claudeai]

Live from Code with Claude: we're launching dreaming in Claude Managed Agents as a research preview.

Outcomes, multiagent orchestration, and webhooks are now in public beta.

[Shyam Pillai @pillais]

The biggest ever expanding moat is rapidly building FREE software around the LLM with usage and context locking @AnthropicAI

[Saurav Singh @sauravv_x]

@claudeai Today ✅Claude Finance

-----
✅ Claude Code
✅ Claude Cowork
✅ Claude Design
🔲 Claude Marketing
🔲 Claude Sales
✅ Claude Finance
🔲 Claude HR
🔲 Claude Operations
🔲 Claude Customer

[Peter Pang @intuitiveml]

https://t.co/oWr2pTk4Hu

[Roan @RohOnChain]

This 1 hour MIT lecture by Jim Simons (Quant King) will teach you more about quantitative trading than most people learn in their entire career at Wall Street.

Bookmark this & watch, no matter what. It’s the most productive start you can give your week. Then read article below.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

sequoia put out a blog post called "services is the new software"

look at this map of over $1T in services being replaced by AI agents

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

the most dangerous thing about claude:

it's the world's most convincing YES-MAN

so i built a "board of advisors" skill that makes 5 agents attack your idea from 5 different angles:

• one assumes your idea will fail and tries to prove it
• one strips away your assumptions and rebuilds the problem from scratch
• one hunts for the bigger opportunity you're too close to see
• one has zero context about you and responds like a complete stranger
• one only cares about what you actually do next

then...

1. all 5 responses get anonymized and peer-reviewed blind
2. a chairman agent reads everything and synthesizes the final verdict

after a few minutes, you get one recommendation you can *actually* trust.

free skill + full breakdown:

[Dan McAteer @daniel_mac8]

Jensen is right.

There will be more software engineers in the future.
Not less.

The people trying to convince you otherwise fall into three categories:

1. Influencers attention harvesting
2. Academics making a living
3. Politicians looking for votes

Common thread is that these people are trying to control you through fear because it benefits them personally.

You are complicit if you let them scare you.

Don't let them.

You should not trust anyone who acts like they have certainty about the future, esp when it comes to complex systems like the global economy.

It's simply not possible to have certainty like that.

[gemchanger @gemchange_ltd]

https://t.co/bVArkKPyv1

[Prajwal Tomar @PrajwalTomar_]

https://t.co/TDxO1Tclra