Michael Souder

[yatshitcray @yatshitcray]

Of everything that happened during my year at DOGE...

This is what I’ll remember most.

The first time I visited the Retirements Mine, I didn’t know what to expect.

Some of the folks there had spent their entire careers inside that mountain. They were understandably cautious about me and the project at first, but they graciously taught me how everything worked.

As I learned from them, I started building little tools to make their jobs easier. At first it was small: a button that saved hours of repetitive data entry. Before long, it became entire digital systems that helped them review retirement cases faster.

Looking back, I’m grateful to say we built an incredible partnership.

It wasn’t just the folks in the Mine, either. Over the past year, I had the privilege of working alongside retirement executives, engineers, and countless career employees. Every one of them played a role in bringing this effort to life.

And then, somewhere along the way, visiting the Mine stopped feeling like a work trip.

This might sound ridiculous to say, but over time it started to feel more like coming over for Thanksgiving. Except instead of fixing the family printer, it was figuring out how we could get all this paper onto computers.

What struck me most came during these last few months.

On my more recent trips, I’d set up shop in a conference room, and people would stop by throughout the day just to chat and pitch ideas. One adjudicator (let me know if I can tag you 😉) even had the day off, heard I was in the Mine, and drove all the way in anyway because she wanted to share an idea.

And they weren’t asking whether AI was coming.

They were pitching ideas for what we should build next.

This was a team that had spent decades working with paper. Now here they were, brainstorming how technology and AI could make their work even better.

That’s when I realized this effort became real.

It wasn't just because we'd gone digital. It was because the people closest to the work were excited to help shape what came next.

That’s the kind of thing you can’t fake.

[Maxime Rivest 🧙‍♂️🦙🐧 @MaximeRivest]

I love it when technology feels like magic.

[Michael Dell 🇺🇸 @MichaelDell]

My wife and I are seeding 25M kids with $250 each, and the government is giving newborns $1,000. 🇺🇸🚀

To claim your child's "Future Wealth" starter pack, you must file IRS Form 4547.

Don’t let them start at zero. Claim it here: https://t.co/8owbWufINL

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

SpaceX has acquired xAI, forming one of the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engines on (and off) Earth → https://t.co/3ODfcYnqfg

[Tesla @Tesla]

https://t.co/9wppdFR5EI

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I took delivery of a beautiful new shiny HW4 Tesla Model X today, so I immediately took it out for an FSD test drive, a bit like I used to do almost daily for 5 years. Basically... I'm amazed - it drives really, really well, smooth, confident, noticeably better than what I'm used to on HW3 (my previous car) and eons ahead of the version I remember driving up highway 280 on my first day at Tesla ~9 years ago, where I had to intervene every time the road mildly curved or sloped. (note this is v13, my car hasn't been offered the latest v14 yet)

On the highway, I felt like a passenger in some super high tech Maglev train pod - the car is locked in the center of the lane while I'm looking out from Model X's higher vantage point and its panoramic front window, listening to the (incredible) sound system, or chatting with Grok. On city streets, the car casually handled a number of tricky scenarios that I remember losing sleep over just a few years ago. It negotiated incoming cars in tight lanes, it gracefully went around construction and temporarily in-lane stationary cars, it correctly timed tricky left turns with incoming traffic from both sides, it gracefully gave way to the car that went out of order in the 4-way stop sign, it found a way to squeeze into a bumper to bumper traffic to make its turn, it overtook the bus that was loading passengers but still stopped for the stop sign that was blocked by the bus, and at the end of the route it circled around a parking lot, found a spot and... parked. Basically a flawless drive.

For context, I'm used to going out for a brief test drive around the neighborhood to return with 20 clips of things that could be improved. It's new for me to do just that and exactly like I used to, but come back with nothing. Perfect drive, no notes. I expect there's still more work for the team in the long march of 9s, but it's just so cool to see that we're beyond finding issues on any individual ~1 hour drive around the neighborhood, you actually have to go to the fleet and mine them. Back then, I processed the incredible promise of vehicle autonomy at scale (in the fully scaleable, vision only, end-to-end Tesla way) only intellectually, but now it is possible to feel it intuitively too if you just go out for a drive. Wait, of course surround video stream at 60Hz processed by a fully dedicated "driving brain" neural net will work, and it will be so much better and safer than a human driver. Did anyone else think otherwise?

I also watched @aelluswamy 's new ICCV25 talk last week (https://t.co/RdaM23kvez) that hints at some of the recent under the hood technical components driving this progress. Sensor streams (videos, maps, kinematics, audio, ...) over long contexts (e.g. ~30 seconds) go into a big neural net, steering/acceleration comes out, optionally with visualization auxiliary data. This is the dream of the complete Software 1.0 -> Software 2.0 re-write that scales fully with data streaming from millions of cars in the fleet and the compute capacity of your chip, not some engineer's clever new DoubleParkedCarHandler C++ abstraction with undefined test-time characteristics of memory and runtime. There's a lot more hints in the video on where things are going with the emerging "robotics+AI at scale stack". World reconstructors, world simulators "dreaming" dynamics, RL, all of these components general, foundational, neural net based, how the car is really just one kind of robot... are people getting this yet?

Huge congrats to the team - you're building magic objects of the future, you rock! And I love my car <3.

[Gwynne Shotwell @Gwynne_Shotwell]

More than 50 years ago, in an extraordinary national endeavor, we sent astronauts to the Moon for short stays. Now it’s time to focus on putting hundreds and eventually thousands of people on the lunar surface to live and work.

Starting with Artemis 3, Starship will truly change the game. This is a race, not to repeat what has been done, but to do much more.

Don’t bet against American innovation

[DHH @dhh]

Omarchy + Framework really are a match made in heaven! And I think we can make the installer EVEN FASTER and EVEN SIMPLER. Think preloaded on hardware and a turn-it-on-to-being-productive goal of 3 minutes or less. The days of spending HOURS setting up a system need to be over.

[DHH @dhh]

37signals will have a booth at Rails World for the first time! The team will be there to chat Basecamp, HEY, and building with Rails. Oh, and we'll have a Omarchy 2.0 COPY PARTY with limited-edition USB keys too 😄

[tobi lutke @tobi]

The AI memo has been extremely successful inside of Shopify. People all over the company have built remarkable things in response to it. One of my favorite is Scout, built by a small team outside of R&D!

Scout has indexed hundreds of millions of merchant feedback items from Social posts, video feedback, and all our customer support channels. Then it makes it available (via MCP) in our internal librechat tool for deep research. I use it all the time. Asked the team to do a demo:

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Agents will become a common way people shop. So today we are releasing 3 tools to make adding commerce to those agents trivial:

- Checkout Kit: embed commerce widgets and checkout(!) directly into your agent and chat. This is already being used by Microsoft’s @Copilot.
- Shopify Catalog: low latency global product search across millions of merchants
- Universal Cart: shop from any store, anywhere, in one cart

With these, you can build seamless embedded commerce experiences quickly, starting with all the best products by the best merchants in the world instead of having to sign them all up individually. No need to build a complex new checkout, or dealing with regulatory marketplace rules. Commerce just plugs in and feels seamless in conversations.

We believe commerce should be everywhere people are, so we’re making that as easy as possible for the AI age.

[Gwynne Shotwell @Gwynne_Shotwell]

Our fundamental mission is to revolutionize global connectivity and eliminate the digital divide. Core to this mission is constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

SpaceX is manufacturing tens of thousands of Starlink kits a day—all right here in the United States—and we are making huge investments in PCB manufacturing and silicon packaging to expand even further.

[Gwynne Shotwell @Gwynne_Shotwell]

SpaceX has hosted hundreds of students this year from 20+ schools across the RGV – including elementary STEM classes, high school rocketry teams & college engineering programs – to see the future of space exploration being built in Texas & to help inspire them to become rocket scientists 😉

[Gwynne Shotwell @Gwynne_Shotwell]

We’re excited to team up with @TMobile to bring our @Starlink Direct to Cell capability to the US!

[Boom Supersonic @boomsupersonic]

XB-1’s supersonic test flight has landed. ✈️

Chief Test Pilot Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg touched down at the Mojave Air & Space Port a few seconds ago.

Our live Q&A with Geppetto & @bscholl will begin shortly at https://t.co/hEg3y88nb2. Join us to hear what it feels like to make aviation history.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

SpaceX will provide free Starlink terminals to affected areas in LA tomorrow morning

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Make great software that people actually want

[Gwynne Shotwell @Gwynne_Shotwell]

I don’t know what to say!