Recent content on 🦉 olshansky 🦁
Kicking off the conversation A friend of mine read my recent post on Why You Shouldn’t Build a Blockchain and reached out with some thoughts that I’d summarize as: “I still don’t get it…” We’ve had countless conversations about whether digital payments need blockchains, crypto, stablecoins, or other improvements that have nothing to do with crypto. My…
What I learned after spending four years building one
Olshansky's review of People We Meet on Vacation
Olshansky's review of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich
I recently spent quite a bit of time with people outside the “tech bubble”. Some are software engineers who work in slower-moving banking environments. Others are completely outside the tech industry. The reactions to AI ranged widely. Some hate it, some are afraid of it, some don’t care, and others are excited about it. Unsurprisingly, no one I spoke to is a power user.…
A running log of ideas, observations, and questions.
A short miniseries capturing the story of a short presidency. It’s fascinating to see the different forms and shapes a presidency can take. It’s a clear reminder that there is no straight path to entrepreneurship. Everyone does it in their own way. James Garfield was the epitome of a classic leader: an eloquent speaker who invigorated crowds. But he didn’t want it. Chester Arthur…
A reflection on humility, support systems, luck, and learning not to take difficult seasons so hard.
“Star City” is a direct response to fans of “For All Mankind” who wanted more. “For All Mankind” has easily been one of my favorite shows over the last few years. I have to hand it to Apple for giving the team an opportunity to produce such a great show. I also appreciate that they know when a show should stop, but still cater to the fans by providing an…
The path to Safe AI may involve just as much focus on saving human intelligence as it does on building safe superintelligence. Wall-E, not Skynet.
Introduction - Why talk about RAG in 2026? As we keep surfing the AI wave, one of the recurring topics of discussion is cost. If you’re a frontier lab like OpenAI or Google, you scale up by building data centers and buying put options on energy. If you’re a major company like Uber or Snowflake, you start by building “tokenmaxxing dashboards”, until you inevitably need to…
Thoughts and ideas while reading OpenAI's 'Building self-improving tax agents with Codex'.
4.5/5 stars I was visiting my parents and started watching this movie in the background with my mom while on my computer. It’s been a while since I truly watched a “feel good” movie that didn’t try to overdo it on the sentimentality. It was a very pleasant surprise. A speaking octopus, a lost son, a sad grandma, and a man looking to find his roots seems like an odd…
Rohan is the author of one of my favorite blogs from the past year - a learning a day . He recently posted a short note on People, sameness, and our projections : We project a lot onto success — wisdom, contentment, confidence. But it is worth reminding ourselves that those are exactly that -> our projections. It reminded me of a phenomenon I learnt a little while ago: The Halo Effect . The…
Why I invest even though I know I can't beat the market.
DevEx === AgentEx If your system is well designed for developers, it works for agents. If your system is well designed for agents, it may or may not work for developers. The constraints are converging faster than most teams realize. Deterministic APIs; schema-first, minimal guesswork Executable docs; structured examples, not prose Tooling primitives; predictable CLI, composable skills Fast…
Three things you underappreciate when joining a project that has passed the zero-to-one stage.
x402 is the right base layer. The missing piece is a practical key and session story that makes it shippable.
And how I code in April of 2026.
We partnered with Coinbase Developer Platform to bring Apple Pay to Grove so fans can tip creators in seconds.
Reflections from an AI agents summit - business fundamentals, what drives people, and a personal mission.
Four modes of growth: reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
Making useful and safe AI - from cryptoeconomic incentives to raw sensor data in construction.
This is the single best perspective on the shift and risk in quantum computing. It has the perfect balance of technical detail, background, skepticism, realism, and, most importantly, risk tradeoffs. This quote captures it all: The job is not to be skeptical of things we’re not experts in. The job is to mitigate credible threats, and there are credible experts telling us about an imminent…
Intelligence is often conflated with “cached knowledge.” A conversation with an expert is one data point at one point. Evaluating intelligence requires collecting many data points over a sufficient time horizon, while also observing its rate of change. Have you ever spoken to expert? Sometime who has been deep in the weeds on one topic for 20 years? If it’s a topic you know…
Games like Overwatch use Matchmaking Rating (MMR) algorithms to ensure players are matched against each other as close to the same skill level as possible: In an ideal situation, both teams would have 50% win probability, causing the result to entirely depend on the players’ performance. [3] This is a precondition for flow: the difficulty of the task must acutely match the skill of the…
Unexpectedly Intriguing I opened up Netflix on a Friday evening not knowing what I wanted to watch. I knew I wanted to watch a movie, rather than start a new show. I knew I wanted to watch fiction. I wanted something with a hint of comedy, a sprinkle of drama, not too complex, but with a small twist to provoke a thought. The Triangle of Sadness fit the bill, to the T.
This really made me feel old and out of touch. I tweeted about it too . I don’t always read Hacker News comments, but when I do, they’re 🔥 Someone posted an article titled “I won’t download your app. The web version is a-ok” on Hacker News , and a comment in the thread reframed my perspective: The “Smartphone is the internet”, while for most of us, the…
On a semi-frequent basis, I ask myself: What important truth do very few people agree with you on? It’s a well-known question by Peter Thiel. The key is that it is not static. The world changes. We change. So should the answer to this question. It’s akin to a favorite movie, book or food. I have a “top list”, but I give a different answer every time I’m asked. This…
Burnout is a term that’s overused but underdefined. Burnout is tireless work without a tangible result. Exhaustion is tireless work in the name of tangible progress. Both require the same amount of effort, both consume the same amount of energy, but only one yields outcomes. Obviously, everyone needs breaks; you can’t be exhausted on an ongoing basis. But burnout is a lot more mental…
Olshansky's review of Billionaire's Bunker
A wallet-first personal homepage for your content, your audience, and your money.
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Some people talk to think . Others think to talk . There’s no right or wrong, only “what works for you.” Introverts think to talk. Extroverts talk to think. This made me realize how much companies resemble their founders. In the conversation between Ilya Sutskever and Dwarkesh , you can tell that Ilya is very much a “think, think, think, …, think, then talk”…
Writing code has gone away, but sculpting code is here to stay.
A heart warming RomCom with an original angle, a great director, and a good looking cast. I was hesistant to watch it because of the low reviews, but genuinely think this is a great film if you know what you’re getting into. The plot around a mom helping a daughter in her 30s get out of a slumb also hit really close to home. If this is you, you will likely enjoy it even more.
When it comes to digital content, reach used to be king. Then revenue entered the conversation. Companies like Substack and Patreon made revenue and subscriptions a first-class primitive. Companies like Medium followed, and Twitch followed. Now we’re seeing YouTube, Reddit, X, and others experiment with different models of integrated monetization. Now, with AI training on and inferring from…
The difference between discovery and invention is adoption.
A 53-second demo of round-tripping between traditional banking and onchain, and why building it was way harder than it looks.
The world’s greatest set of AI researchers published a paper on 01/01/2026, and no one noticed. A tl;dr of the abstract… What they tried - They tried to use AI in cybersecurity to transition from “detect-and-respond” to “predict-and-prevent.” What they concluded - From a practical standpoint, it’s still early. However, it’ll inevitably happen. My…
Streamlining code reviews for a content earnings platform with agents.
A few years ago someone told me I’m good at documenting my workflows. Truth is, I just hate repeating myself. Funny enough, that’s exactly the mindset that works best with AI. Agents, skills, slash commands… they all run on clear processes. Feels like the right time in history to have that pet peeve.
If you’re in the mood for a short, fun, “the hangover” style movie, you can stop here. It’s exactly what I was in the mood for. You can tell the cast had fun filming it. The crew was on point. The jokes and themes were very “on brand” for a ~2023 style movie. It was cathardic (in a good way) to watch, but will likely fill criny in a decade.
One of my alltime favourite jokes in the context of software engineering is: “There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.” I recently discovered it came from a post on X . It’s been 16 years since it first came out, and there’s finally a small update we can make: 16 years later, we’ve finally solved off-by-1 errors…
Do you ever feel like you can hold two contradicting thoughts at the same time? In fact, I’m doing it right now. I think it’s a great skill, but simultaneously it can lead to overthinking. They say your greatest strength is your greatest weakness, so is everything a double-edged sword? I am a frugal person, and I know I’ll keep being frugal even when I’m a billionaire. At…
I keep seeing a huge red flag when speaking to my network and friends at big tech companies. It’s either complaints about being “forced to use AI and be more productive,” or bewilderment that “GitHub Copilot is so good.” I accept that working in a greenfield startup is different from an enterprise trying to change. However, it’s crazy to see that they’re…
TL;DR: Everything I’ve worked on in the last decade comes back to one thing: incentives. I didn’t plan it that way. I just keep ending up there. The Thread Charlie Munger said it best: “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome.” I’ve quoted this for years. But recently, I realized it’s not just a quote I like. It’s the lens through which I…
tl;dr There are 78K+ agent skills across 8K publishers. Most of them don’t matter. The data from skills.sh tells a clear story: Discovery is the killer app Distribution follows a power law Adoption rewards quality over quantity Ref : Skills Dashboard . 78K skills and counting The skills ecosystem has exploded. As of the last day of February 2026, skills.sh tracks: 78,362 total skills 8,064…
The $5M pitch Command Code AI announced that they recently raised $5M to build a proprietary AI agent that learns your coding style; taste . Meanwhile, session-commit does the same thing with a markdown file and some vibes. How I discovered Command Code AI When I posted about session-commit on X, another developer replied that he uses @CommandCodeAI for taste learning. I was intrigued.…
A surprisingly deep takeaway from an otherwise superficial film. The movie delivered exactly what it promised: a romantic drama (not a comedy) about choosing between your teenage heartthrob and your husband of 60 years. I like how fun and simple it is. It really forces you into a suspension of disbelief on multiple fronts. It’s tacky and cheesy in a reasonable way, but you don’t know where…