Kasey McCurdy

Father. Husband. CrossFit. Keto. Author. Designer. Developer. Product-focused-javascript-junkie. Filmmaker. Musician. Comedian. Christian. Flawed Human.

[Kasey McCurdy @pyroblue]

@infinitethird @dvntownsend Hard agree. The man is a genius...and yet, <1% of my friends could name him.

[Kasey McCurdy @pyroblue]

You don't have to choose between being an AI doubter or a TokenMaxxer. it's ok to be in the middle. I find it more interesting to look at both sides and make my own opinions based on experience (with this tech and many before it). the religious fervor on both sides is exhausting.

[Kasey McCurdy @pyroblue]

@jrswab @dreamsofcode_io consume tokens.

[Kasey McCurdy @pyroblue]

@jrswab @de1lux a-freakin-men. you learn nothing from ideas. you learn everything from experiences.

[Mo @atmoio]

Once the bubble pops, Anthropic and OpenAI will become the Coinbase and Block of the AI world. Mundane companies that ship narrative wrappers on mundane bytes.

That the bubble will pop isn’t some apocalyptic doomsday prophecy. It’s not that complicated: AI is freakishly expensive to serve. If the returns on the other end are not justified, the bubble pops. And thus begins the decades long buildout to actually economically justifiable AI.

It’s amusing how resistant reality is to our fictions and fantasies. In the peak of the crypto bubble we thought reality was going to be transformed into financial liberty and democratization for all, and network states and decentralized reserve currencies. Coinbase stood to be a multi-trillion dollar company and is now just a mundane tech startup.

Today we spin similar narratives about the intellectual upheaval of AI, about the new democratization of intelligence and how everything will soon begin to orbit this new technology.

At the end, Anthropic and OpenAI will be mundane IT providers with an insanely grim research outlook to make AI economically sensible and useful, no different from Google’s position in trying to make quantum commercially viable.

Reality is, fortunately, pretty hardened against our delusions.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Coding is basically the pinnacle of what you could reasonably automate with AI, and yet we still need human engineers to oversee agents for them to be effective.

The AI models are trained on an incredible amount of sophisticated code. The users are highly technical and can use the latest tools quickly. The work is “verifiable” because you can test an app. The outcomes are often removed from the quality of the code (you can have sloppy code but the app can still work). And the context for the agent is often already digitized and sitting in the codebase.

That’s an incredible amount of benefits that AI coding agents get to work with. Some of those apply to knowledge work, but most don’t in areas where the work needs to be fully reviewed to be useful, or where data isn’t as abundantly digitized. This makes the job for agents in knowledge work more complicated.

So if with all of that, engineers still remain in very high demand, the risks are going to be less than what’s perceived for other areas of knowledge work. Agents will let people do far more than they did before, but the people don’t go away.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🚨🇺🇸 YouTubers staking out Area 51 may have just caught the first wild footage of the F-47, America's sixth-generation fighter.

If real, this is the plane built to dominate skies for the next 40 years.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

I am so thoroughly convinced that anyone who thinks AI 100x's their output is a liar or a lunatic.

You are telling me you can make 1 years worth of decisions in 3.65 days? Let alone describing those accurately and coaxing the result from the AI... (1.8 days european time)?

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

who could have seen this coming? 🤷‍♂️

[Alberta Tech @albertadevs]

BREAKING: CEO discovers tokens cost money

[@jason @Jason]

Business AI is here.. for your business! 😂

[Kasey McCurdy @pyroblue]

@CollinSchaafsma

[DHH @dhh]

You can’t outwork the whole world. There’s always going to be someone somewhere willing to work as hard as you. Someone just as hungry. Or hungrier.

Assuming you can work harder and longer than someone else is giving yourself too much credit for your effort and not enough for theirs. Putting in 1,001 hours to someone else’s 1,000 isn’t going to tip the scale in your favor.

What’s worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great “work ethic” because they’re always around, always available, always working. That’s a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who’s overworked.

A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.

So how do people get ahead if it’s not about outworking everyone else?

People make it because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many other reasons.

So get the outwork myth out of your head. Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours. Neither is going to get you ahead or help you find calm.

[The Outwork Myth — It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work, 2018]

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Ship the best product. Use lots of AI, some AI, maybe no AI. Just be the best.

[Karan @karankendre]

CEO waking up to a $500M Claude API bill

[Kasey McCurdy @pyroblue]

@cookrn @vividvoid +1

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Every time GitHub has an outage our team is paged. Incidents at Vercel get automatically filed by anomaly detection systems.

We just detected an outage 16 minutes before their status page changed. Deployments suddenly dipped and surged.

Despite all the chatter about coding AGI, the reality is that software infrastructure remains an extremely hard problem.

I have no doubt the GitHub team is highly competent, and there's no shortage of models and agents available to them. Don't forget this is the company that brought us Copilot, the first major breakthrough product in AI coding. Yet clearly the prompt "/goal scale GitHub, make everything extremely fast, make no mistakes" is not enough.

The hard parts of software remain very hard, especially under unprecedented demand, as more people join in on the fun of building new things.

[Una 🇺🇦 @Una]

When people comment "why bother learning to code anymore?"

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

I've yet to see, or hear of a company that is winning against its competition, because said company is spending more on AI tools, or using it better than the competition.

Ways I see companies win:
- better product
- better marketing
- cheaper prices
- better unit economic
- more funds raised

etc

[Husk @huskirl]

Next time I’ll do 2 miles