how to perceive competition in life, an essay:
rule of thumb: competition is inevitable. your relationship to it is a choice.
the people who get consumed by competition are the ones who make winning relative (zero sum games), where they need to beat someone else to feel like they're succeeding. that's competition obsession. the people who thrive long term make winning absolute. they have a standard they're trying to reach, and other people's progress is just data about where that bar is. that's competition awareness.
the standard starts with you: what you're trying to build and where you want to go. that's internal and non-negotiable. you use the external world only to collect data and understand what the bar really is and how high it is, then go back inward and adjust.
the mistake most people make is doing it in reverse. they look outward first, adopt someone else's standard, and spend their life chasing a finish line that was never really theirs to begin with.
example 1: job search
hundreds of people are competing for the same role. the ones who get consumed by that will spend energy thinking about the other 99. the ones who win go out only to understand what the bar is, then come back and focus completely on themselves and playing the game their own way.
example 2: startups
the best founders don't get consumed by competitors. they get consumed by the customer problem. competition awareness is useful. competition obsession is fatal.
the ultimate goal is to keep understanding the bar, competing in an absolute way, while simultaneously building leverage through effort, craft, network, and innate talent that compounds over time and is hard to copy quickly. that's what creates differentiation in the long run. and that's how you can escape competition through authenticity.
I built an end-to-end ML system that answers: How should it be shown? For the same movie, an action fan and a romance fan should see completely different thumbnails. Static A/B testing is too slow and too blunt for this—you need a system that learns per-user based on feedback.
While working with Claude Code, I kept switching context—jumping between different projects, scrolling X, watching YouTube.
I couldn’t get into the flow state I always wanted.
So I built this:
https://t.co/AfKblpT0J3
Check it out and let me know what you think!
It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.
Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes.
As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.
It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.
Introducing Perplexity Computer.
Computer unifies every current AI capability into one system.
It can research, design, code, deploy, and manage any project end-to-end.
OpenClaw is a new viral and scarily effective virtual assistant. But it's so hard to set up that even most engineers give up.
@usebits_inc will set up your secure OpenClaw instance on the cloud, batteries included, in 5 minutes.
Congrats on the launch @rob0the0nerd and @bailey_wickham!
https://t.co/cG48KFSTuh