In “Letters from Silicon Valley,” I write about the convergence of technology, life, and creativity, sharing insights from my extensive experience in the tech industry along with my personal adventures in woodworking, music, and beyond.
Leaving Google after twenty one years, I could recall about a hundred and fifty colleagues, which is roughly Dunbar's number. So an agent read twenty one years of my sent mail and calendar, rebuilt the real list, and several thousand people got a goodbye. What came back surprised me.
Getting real value from an agent today means curating skills, picking models, managing keys and configuring sandboxes. That is not a tool, it is a hobby. There is nothing wrong with hobbies, but most people do not want one. Closing that gap is why I left Google to co-found Vycari.
After twenty one years, today is my last day as a Google employee. I look back at the roles, from municipal Wi-Fi in 2005 to the Antigravity SDK, and at the odd month between losing my badge and leaving the payroll, which turned out to be the most clarifying part of leaving.
This week's reading list explores the shift toward personal, bespoke software and the skills needed to manage AI agents. We also look at the practicalities of prompt injection defense, a shifting four-year timeline of model capabilities, and ambient hardware interfaces like smart rings that are now shrinking our physical inputs.
California's AB2047 would force every 3D printer sold in the state to run state-certified software that detects and refuses to print firearm parts. As an engineer who owns and runs these machines, I explain why that detection software cannot work, why it would have nowhere to run, who actually pays for it, and what the pattern should teach us.
When a mentee told me she wanted to change her role, her team, and her country all at once, I recognized the energy immediately. But hope is not a strategy. The best career plans break big ambitions into a sequence of moves, each one valuable on its own.
This week's reading spans from stunning dark sky photography and Vaonis smart telescopes to immediate practical utility in Postgres database sandboxing and Flipper's new networking gadget. Plus, reflections on the backlash to enterprise tokenmaxxing, Ferrari's custom OLED displays, and the reality of AI-driven layoffs.
I needed to know if local models were good enough for Gemini Scribe, and whether the new Flash Lite could replace Flash 2.5 as the default after Google's pricing change. No agentic benchmark existed for markdown wikis, so I built one. It is open source and looking for contributors.
A year ago I started writing about agents to understand them. Today I'm shipping the second agent product I've worked on at Google: the Antigravity SDK. This post explains why I designed it as a building block for your software, not an extension of your IDE.
This week's reading spans from the philosophical debates in fundamental physics and machine learning to practical insights on Go, Rust terminals, and agentic code review. Plus, thoughts on the new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and the high cost of computer use compared to structured APIs.