Dissolution
AI's messing up investing ⓧ Technical Debt's ZIRP era ⓧ AI and The Enlightenment
👋 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 ⚡
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely —E.O. Wilson
📚 Reading
AI destroys seed investors ability to analyze product:
AI is messing everything up...when you can just magically 'incant' a reasonable app vs. having to actually understand what you are doing, subtle design tradeoffs, etc.... there is no signal in it. Hell, it even makes early revenue too easy because you just plug a few APIs and source your first customers from a liquid global market (at scale someone will buy anything!) — there is no more signal in product.
Sam Lessin—X | 6 minutes
Entering Technical Debt's ZIRP Era:
When AI can untangle any mess, when the cost of change approaches zero... quality emerges from quantity. It's like evolution. You don't design the perfect organism. You slop out millions of mutations and let selection sort it out. Except now selection happens in milliseconds and the mutations are guided by something that's read every programming book ever written.
Scott Werner—Works on My Machine | 4 minutes
A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment:
There is no hint of this critical, questioning attitude written into the default system prompt…We are attempting to use an all-in-one text box for a vast array of tasks and use cases, with a single system prompt to handle all manner of queries. And the fawning, deferential assistant personality is the lowest common denominator to help with most tasks.
Maggie Appleton | 14 minutes
🎧 Listening
Future of AI, Tech, & the Global World Order:
The whole thing about computing is that…computing just arose without government regulation, without government oversight. Even with the internet, with just government funding it. It's this very weird thing if you're in the business of governing and regulating that this giant thing that swallowed the economy happened without you. The entire software industry, in a sense, happened that way. You never needed to be licensed to be a software engineer.
Steven Sinofsky—The a16z Podcast | 77 minutes
Inside Vercel: The $3B giant that’s changed coding forever:
The amazing thing about open source is that you're always learning. You're always improving the software. Anything that you don't like, you can customize yourself. And when you use open source software, you have this natural gravitas to get closer to the people that build that software. You can send a patch. You can go and ask a question. The how it works is not just fixed manuals and documentation…then that starts building community.
Guillermo Rauch—The Eric Ries Show | 79 minutes
Inside ChatGPT-5's Brain: System Prompt Secrets for First Movers:
OpenAI is leaning aggressively into an agent operating system. This is not intended to be just a better chatbot, it is the architecture for an operating system. OpenAI is building towards ChatGPT as your primary workspace, something that competes directly with Microsoft…your workspace that consolidates documents, that consolidates code, that consolidates scheduling and memory into one unitary interface. Your day, your workday goes in ChatGPT.
Nate B Jones—AI News & Strategy Daily | 14 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—From silicon to slime
2️⃣ years ago—‘Crossing the river by feeling the stones’
3️⃣ years ago—Return of the Great American Bubble Machine