Shameless self-promotion Why isn't your codebase in English? Holden and I had a great time chatting with Kasey Klimes, who is really thinking deeply about how AI changes software development. Worth your time A colorized photo of Central Park during the Great Depression, New York (1933) pic.twitter.com/FIWjMvZON6 — Civixplorer (@Civixplorer) May 4, 2026 How Stealth Works If America's So Rich,…
It's moments like these when I wish I was reading books in a book club or an English class so I would be able to complain about them to other people. Instead I have you! This is the most divided I’ve felt about a book in the past 10 years (since A Little Life ). There is some absolutely intoxicating writing in this book. There are characters and scenes that I will probably never forget. The hint…
This edition of Good Tokens is best enjoyed while listening to the Phil Collins version of You Can't Hurry Love . Shameless Self Promotion Introducing AgentCAD: About a month ago I became obsessed with the idea of a command line tool for creating CAD drawings as a way to empower coding agents (Claude, Codex, etc) to be better at designing 3D objects. The first version of it is here and I'd be…
Over the past several months, I've been collaborating with a friend of mine, Dr. Dua Hassan on her podcast. One of the things that I think is underrated about being a parent is the degree to which medical stuff with your children just happens to you. Even the planned stuff — the 6 month and 1 year appointments — inevitably happens on a day when you're tired or distracted and there's less time,…
Worth your time Craft is the Antidote to Slop — Will Manidis is in my internet top 5. I hope I'm not insulting him when I say he has great taste (link: https://minutes.substack.com/p/against-taste) Backseat Software I am so sick of being interrupted for feedback. Speed Can Reindustrialize America Austin Vernon is also in my internet top 5. Fraud Investigation — Shorter patio11: Fraud is a policy…
I keep this blog mostly for myself, as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity and creativity. I’m flattered that a small group of people (with impeccable taste!) visit it or have decided to subscribe, but I’m clear-eyed enough to know it’s not the most important place on the internet. When traffic spikes, I almost always know why. When someone signs up, I usually know who they are. Until…
Worth your time The Mundanity of Excellence . Excellence is a product of different kinds of work rather than different levels of effort. Technique (how things are done), discipline (doing things correctly, consistently), and attitude (how things are approached) are the things to focus on. “What we call talent is no more than a projected reification of particular things done: hands placed correctly…
A biography of William Tecmuseh Sherman . Someone notify Henry Oliver : we have a late bloomer. I hadn’t realized how inconsequential Sherman’s career had been before the start of the Civil War. He was well regarded within the Army but saw no real action during the Mexican American War. He left the Army and was in charge of two banks that failed. The bank failures were largely bad luck caused by…
In case this is the last Good Tokens of the year, have a great holiday season and end of 2025. See you in 2026! A message from my sponsor Christmas is just 7 days away. If you’re here, you already know about my dear friend Uri’s hit new game Person Do Thing , but out of love for the game and it’s creator, I have to say one final time, this is a perfect stocking stuffer and a great way to spend…
In a previous post, I mused: “You’re not avoiding failure, you’re avoidng the feeling of failure.” KL asks : 'Can we unpack this into some actionable life hacks?' When I was in 8th grade, I decided not to tryout for the middle school basketball team because I didn't think I'd make it and I didn’t want to get cut. A couple of weeks later, I saw the group of guys that made the team. The best few…
Worth your time Over regulation is hamstringing deep tech innovation . Real specific complaints, not just someone ranting about red tape. Noah Smith on housing : “The true homeownership rate for Millennials at age 30 is less than 35%; for Gen X it was around 45%, and for Boomers it was almost 50%.” Also Noah on drones and the future of war . Perhaps I need a Noah Smith Corner. How to get someone…
In response to my 2025 Things I learned post, my friend Mark tells me “You should do a meta post on how you come up with this list.” Frequent readers of this blog probably know the answer to this already, but I’ll spell it out in more detail here. I’ve been very influenced by my friend / mentor Alex Komoroske who has an essential google doc called Bits & Bobs . I more or less have copied what he…
I borrowed this concept from Tom Whitwell as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity. My 2025 highlights: It was a year of exploration. I left Macro Oceans . I “interned” at Roo Code and got an early peek at how AI is changing software development . I had so many coffee chats. I launched a podcast about building with AI , built a an agent orchestration prototype and spent a lot of time hacking…
Worth your time The GLP-1 rollout continues . The number of Americans taking GLP-1 drugs continues to grow substantially. There’s no official tally, but Circana believes that 23% of US households — about 30 million — had at least one GLP-1 user in September, suggesting there are tens of millions of users. By 2030, five years from now, it expects GLP-1 households to purchase 35% of food sold in the…
Worth your time The Palace of Catalan Music The Goon Squad : Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit. This seems like an unsustainable equilibrium. The K shaped economy . Think old vs. young rather than rich vs. poor . Alaska experiments with voting by phone . Things I learned There’s been a 20% reduction in…
I’m trying to get better at building in public and at celebrating projects that end up as dead ends. Take this in that spirit. What it was Papagei Terminal allowed a user to spin up virtual machines like they were slack channels to make it easier to use >1 Claude Code instance at the same time and make it easier to use Claude in --dangerously-skip-permissions mode. Here is an early prototype.…
A very happy 🎃 Halloween 🦇 to you and yours. Worth your time The most American Building . My grandfather slept in it while it was unfinished in between training stops in World War 2. My father took classes in it. I went to it on field trips. It’s a wonderful building. Preach, Nabeel, Preach . I wonder why “education” rather than “age” has been what has sorted our politics 🤔. On relationship…
I got to join Marc and Ben from the Supra podcast to talk about how AI is changing how software teams operate. Three things I took away from this conversation. First, is that there are some things that AI doesn’t change. At the end of the day, you’ve still got to define the problem, define the approach, define the details . AI changes the tools, the artifacts, and the process, but it doesn’t…
Similar to Shoe Dog — and different in the way that Nike is different from Trader Joe’s. Three things I want to take away from this book: Joe was incredibly structured in how he thought about problems. He wanted to have a retail store where he paid people well which required him to have goods that had a high price per amount of space they took up. He was willing to cycle through lots of weird…
Worth your time The Alpha Terrace Historic District in Pittsburgh, PA. One of my dream places to live. My guilty pleasure on YouTube right now are videos claiming Ancient Egyptians had access to advanced technology that allowed them to machine vases out of hard stone . I’m agnostic as to whether or not this is true, but I can’t look away! A second thing that makes these videos delightful is that…
A message from my sponsor Person Do Thing is on Amazon. You’re here so you know Uri already, but I’ll just say that my family loves this one and that it makes a great gift for the person in your life that loves games. Worth your time The Resonant Computing Manifesto . See if you see anyone you know 😉. The universe as an evolving organism . I have no idea whether or not this is true, but I really…
2025 is the year of slop. Meta has made an infinite slop machine. So has OpenAI . If this isn’t bad enough, our jobs have been invaded by workslop . The implication behind all of this is that slop is the fault of the LLMs or their creators. But for a moment, I want to ask you to consider… is this true? I don’t dispute that we’re seeing a lot more AI generated slop than we were 2 years ago… but I…
Mike Judge has a great piece poking at the AI hype where he asks essentially, “If these tools are so great, where is the explosion of AI created stuff in the world?” The whole piece is worth a read, but one of the most interesting things to me about it is the data he brings to bear on the question. He looks at: iOS app releases Android releases Domain registrations Steam releases Public GitHub…
The Power Broker by Robert Caro deserves its reputation as a masterpiece. One of the best books I’ve ever read and up there in my pantheon of non-fiction books with Breaks of the Game and What it Takes . Reading this book from the perspective of 2025, I think Robert Caro got Robert Moses wrong. 1 Yes, he was obsessed with power. Yes, he ruined neighborhoods and destroyed communities with highways…
Best enjoyed this week in a sunny corner of a park Worth your time If you’ve ever wanted to buy a life sized dinosaur, now is your chance . Someday my son is going to find out I had this opportunity and didn’t take it and will never look at me the same way again. The Quiet Ones by Nikunj Kothari. An ode to the people that do the little things to make a company or a team effective. Illiteracy is a…
This week’s episode is best paired with a hot cup of coffee and Wild Ways by Josh Ritter playing in the background. Last episode was too LLM heavy, for which I apologize. I’ve done my best to group all of that into LLM corner so as not to let it overshadow everything. Worth your time Uri says we should not allow 18 year olds to sign long term contracts . So, so many thoughts here. 1. I remember a…
I'm blatantly stealing this from Matt Holden who taught it to me, but I think about it all the time and I want a reference page to be able to point myself and others too. When working on a team, there are three levels to work on: Level 1: Agree on the problem to be solved Level 2: Agree on the approach to solving the problem Level 3: Agree on the details Many disagreements happen when you skip…
This is a book with a handful of big ideas: 1. There are considerable similarities between the UFO stories of the 1950s and 1960s (then current, the book was published in 1969) and the stories of fairies / angels and demons / other mythical creatures from before the space age 2. Those similarities are interesting even if you don’t believe that UFOs come from extraterrestrial life 3. Even if these…
Shameless self promotion Matt Holden and I are doing a YouTube show about building with AI called --dangerously-skip-permissions . The first episode is “How did we get here?” . Matt and I have been having 1:1 conversations for more than a year now about what tools we’re using and how we’re using them… and now we’re having those conversations in public. I especially enjoy the way that Matt is able…
Worth your time Replacing lawns with wildflowers 💐. When I’ve made it, I won’t tell anyone, but there will be signs. Cate Hall on how to increase your surface area for luck , which is one of the biggest things I learned from Henry Oliver’s book on Second Acts . Cate is quickly rising up the list of people whose work I rush to read. Along the same lines: How to Get Ahead in DC . “Even the context…
Things I learned A group of kangaroos is called a mob . A group of jaguars is a shadow. Worth your time Adding an age check reduced online porn traffic in the UK by 47%. Whether or not you believe it is right, I believe it is unlikely that ten years from now people will be unable to get porn online without verifying their age in some way. What kids say about getting off their phones . Freedom is…
I’ve been reading The Social History of the Machine Gun , which tells the story of the introduction and adoption of automatic weaponry to the battlefield. 1 I’m not really a gun person, but I found it fascinating because it is a real life story of how a new technology challenges the values and assumptions of people and institutions. The life and death stakes add weight to the resistance of key…
Worth your time The Medium CEO on the turnaround he has led over there . Yoram Hazony on Ezra Klein . I appreciated the way both Ezra and Yoram sought to understand each other. After it, I was sold by Yoram that we need a national narrative for why the United States should exist that most people buy in on, but couldn’t understand why he supports the people he does in creating that narrative.…
The first book in ~2.5 years to crack my booklist . This book has more character voices than any book I’ve read in a long time. I can hear so many of them: Dorothea, Celia, Fred, Caleb, Mary, and especially Mr. Brooke in my head. A rebuke to the idea that cellphones ruin the plot of movies. Almost all of the driving conflicts in this story are about the things people cannot bring themselves to…
Inspiration That became my yardstick: I’d ask, “Is this dish good enough to come downtown and wait in line for? If not, it’s not what we’re after.” A chef can go years before getting another dish like that. We’ve been lucky: Hits have come at the least expected time and place. I’ve spent weeks on one dish that ultimately very few people would care about. And then I’ve spent 15 minutes on something…
This one is long, for which I apologize. It’s summer time ☀️ Worth your time The Grand Encyclopedia of Eponymous Laws . Also, a giant list of mental models . The Appian Way . On my last visit to Rome, we walked the Appian Way and it was one of my favorite parts of the trip. It takes you outside the city, but it was a pleasant walk and there’s a park out there. Recommended! Why First Person Drones…
The third day of the Battle of Gettysburg was 162 years ago today. An amazing reminder of the capacity of America to change and flourish. Glory, glory, hallelujah. His truth is marching on. Happy early birthday, America. I continue to love you and believe in you 🇺🇸 🎇 Worth your time If this doesn’t inspire you, I don’t know what to tell you. Having no experience did not stop me from making a…
Summary I finally had the space to really test Claude Code as a part of my development workflow last week. I was blown away — it’s as good as advertised. For my coding productivity, it’s the biggest step change in productivity in the past year and continues to build my conviction that we’re headed to a world where well defined coding projects are cheap to implement. The project My test project was…
Who should read this Over the past several years with Macro Oceans , I found myself in a position I never thought I’d be in: using kelp to launch novel ingredients into the beauty industry (see here and here ). Prior to this, I was a Big Tech product manager, totally comfortable in API docs, but totally lost in Sephora. Suddenly I found myself neck deep in a world I had no experience in: using…
Two years ago, I left a career as a Big Tech PM to join a scrappy seaweed start up selling novel ingredients into the beauty industry . In the process, I got a crash course on the beauty industry and the different companies and people that make the products that fill our stores and homes. I’m not going to say it’s inscrutable, but it did take some time to get my head around. In general, I think…
Super easy to read. Has some moments of real clarity and brilliance and some moments that seem self indulgent. A great book to pick up in the middle of a life change. It isn’t going to tell you what to do, but will get you thinking. Will absolutely stay on my bookshelf. The three chapters that resonated with me most this time around: Actions not words There’s no speed limit Don’t be a donkey
Worth your time How to Live on $432 a month in America How to read coffee tasting notes Einstein and relativity. His path of generating the theory stood out to me: in 8 years of thinking about the problem, he cracked it when he signed himself up for a series of lectures where he had to articulate it to others. “Finally, in the week before his last lecture, Einstein cracked it. At the end of the…
Worth your time People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies and China’s superstition boom . Using Claude to make weapons of mass destruction . Slate Truck is a $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen <- I’m very interested in this one, although I’d go with the SUV. And old post of mine about how recycling in Switzerland works . SEO for…
New around here In an attempt to make my writing more LLM friendly I’ve added an llms.txt file and a /llms feature where anyone — you included — can copy ~all of my writing for use in your chatbot of choice. Like most things around here, I built this for myself, but perhaps it will be useful to you too! Worth your time Four Seasons Recomposed by Max Richter. Bewitching. Slightly rude notes on…
When I read Range in 2019, one of the things that stood out to me was the role that hobbies have in the lives of high performers. As an example, Nobel Prize winners are 12x as likely to have a creative hobby than their scientific counterparts. This really stuck with me. I became much more willing to engage in work outside of work. Side projects, hobbies, explorations: I welcomed all of these in my…
I keep a semi-secret list of great reads that I periodically revisit during a period of change or when the spirit moves me. One of my favorite on this list is Clayton Christensen's 'How Will You Measure Your Life' , which I revisited this week. Some things that stood out this time: Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to…
Worth your time People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies “Progress is an optional goal.” The story of the modern institutional review board and so much more of modern American life. “Become a deep expert in topics you’re passionate about and showcase that expertise publicly” wisdom from Dimitry Alperovitch via Jordan Schneider The Law of Opposites by David Burns. Simple to…
Waymo or way less than you’d expect? Waymo is now carrying 250,000 passengers/week in autonomous cars. Transit agencies are falling behind on automation, which can improve service & save money. It's exciting to see DC's Metro taking a step forward in automating its existing lines. We need to be talking about autonomous buses, too. [image or embed] — Yonah Freemark (…
Worth your time New York State of Mind Manhattan, 1931. A city without skyscrapers, save for a handful in the Financial District and the brand new Empire State. A city of 3-5 story buildings. Yet more people lived there in 1931 than today. pic.twitter.com/yYKkXzIQaZ — 𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖊 🕯 (@atlanticesque) April 20, 2025 I love Chris Ryan Chris Ryan on The Press Box talking about the early…
I’ve been hearing whispers in the parents-of-young-children circles about Chattanooga since we moved back to the Atlanta area 3 years ago. We would discuss family friendly travel destinations and Chattanooga would come up, but I never really got it. What’s in Chattanooga? They’d say things like “they’ve got the Chattanooga Choo Choo” or “there’s a great aquarium”. My children like a train and some…