Cohere

👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡

‘AI’ clearly absorbed the burden of creation. What remains is harder, much harder.

Digitising information was always the easy part, and ‘AI’ does that so well. Meaning — what matters, why it matters, what holds people inside a legible world — that is not a technical problem and ours to solve.

Pushing the frame further: when anyone can generate anything on demand, the shims and glue go away, as does the handshake economy built around them. The interoperability layer that connects humans survives only with explicit and collective commitment.

The bottleneck has moved. From can we produce? to can we cohere?

📚 Reading

The Edge Assumes a Self:

Hierarchy did two things: It routed information — who knows what, who decides what, how context travels up and down the chain. And it routed meaning. It told people what mattered when nothing was clear. It held people inside a legible world. AI can plausibly replace the first function. But the second — the meaning-making scaffolding that hierarchy provided — is not a technical problem. It’s a developmental one.

Nitzan Hermon—Being in Space | 5 minutes

Slop Is Not Necessarily The Future:

AI will write good code because it is economically advantageous to do so. Per our definition of good code, good code is easy to understand and modify from the reduced complexity. This means it requires less context to understand a relevant piece of code and fewer lines of code to be written to achieve some change. Translating this to token economics, we can clearly see the parallels: it is more token efficient to write and maintain software with good code.

Soohoon Choi—Greptile | 4 minutes

Collaboration After Cheap Intelligence:

When anyone can generate a plan, a spec, a design, a pricing model, a prototype, a pile of code, a launch email, a competitive teardown, a forecast, a hiring rubric and when every employee and every agent can spin up competent output on demand, the constraint stops being “can we think of something?” The constraint becomes: what will we commit to together?

Greg Ceccarelli—LinkedIn | 11 minutes

🎧 Listening

Goodbye Internet:

Models can speak assembly, they can speak TypeScript, they can speak HTML, they can speak everything in between […] The way that we built software was we’re going to build all these little shims in between and there’s going to be all this open source software, and I’m going to use yours and you’re going to use mine, and it’s going to make my life easier. A lot of that stuff goes away when these models can just speak all the languages, and you can build anything against the compute.

Dave Morin—More or Less Podcast | 48 minutes

The SaaS Apocalypse Is Overhyped:

Any information that’s in the public gets indexed and then put into these AIs where people can stalk each other and so on and so forth. What that means is the commons becomes a hall of mirrors with all kinds of pseudonyms and so on and so forth. And people retreat back to caves and tribes. So within that trusted tribe, yes, if you share all your code within the trusted tribe, you share your whole code base, boom, you can zip along. And so AI increases productivity within the trusted tribe.

Balaji Srinivasan—The a16z Show | 66 minutes

We’ve passed the inflection point & dark factories are coming:

The thing I’ve enjoyed most about this as a software engineer is that my level of ambition has shot right up […] I’ve got all of these technologies that I’m using because that two to three month initial learning curve has been shaved right down[ ..] Like trying to apply this stuff just for sort of self-improvement. I think that’s a really useful skill to have because honestly, everything is changing so fast right now. The only universal skill is being able to roll with the change.

Simon Willison—Lenny’s Podcast | 100 minutes

🎁 One More Thing

Episode 12 of the It’s Just a Model Podcast; my biweekly guilty pleasure with Peet on the interstitium of innovation, tech, design, philosophy and behaviour.

💎 Timeless

1️⃣ year ago—Horseless intelligence

2️⃣ years ago—Ode to software

3️⃣ years ago—When Will AI Take Your Job?