I last wrote code in 1980 on a TRS-80 or a Commodore 64, I forget which, but alas it doesn’t matter! Over the last two months I built three pieces of software. One of them has over 40,000 lines of code that I’ve never seen. The point of this series isn’t for you to build these. They’re mine; they fit my life; yours will be different. They’re here as worked examples — what each cost, what it…
There’s a fundamental truth about AI that most people don’t think about enough: the transformer architecture — the engine underneath ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, all of them — is predictive by nature. It analyzes the most likely next word and generates it. That’s extraordinary and powerful, but it also means AI isn’t thinking. It’s pattern-matching at superhuman speed. And here’s the other thing: AI…
In Part I, I curated a lot of big picture articles about AI and society. Today’s post will be more practical and tactical about the business of AI. First from Thomas Tunguz at Theory Ventures – The AI Problem Matrix, which does a great job of laying out a framework for where and how humans (and also AI/Software) will be able to create value in the new world and where it will be capped. Next, two…
There’s a narrative gaining steam in the AI discourse that goes something like this: coding assistants are getting so good that we won’t need software engineers anymore. Some version of “AI writes code now, so why would you hire humans to do it?” This take is wrong. Not slightly wrong — fundamentally wrong. And it’s wrong because it confuses three very different things. Writing Code, Building…
Sometimes when I’m mentoring an earlier-career founder/CEO, I cover a topic and think “I must have written a blog post about this, or a chapter of Startup CEO or CXO or Boards, in the past…” and then am shocked to discover later on that I haven’t. This topic is one of those topics, which came up in a recent conversation, and since sometimes the top-of-mind answer is the best one, I thought I’d…
Yesterday I published a five-thousand-word roadmap for fixing America’s broken political system (the Small). Thirty-odd structural reforms, fifteen years in the making. Nonpartisan redistricting. SCOTUS term limits. Killing the debt ceiling as a weapon. The whole plumbing. And the day before that, I relaunched the Country Over Self podcast – the Medium. Consider this the finale of a three-day…
As part of my three blog posts to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s founding this long weekend, this is the Medium (yesterday’s was the Small). I’ve written about two intersecting topics on this blog over the years. In 2011, I wrote what I called “the beginnings of a roadmap” to fix America’s badly broken political system — a short list of structural reforms framed, as I noted at the…
I’m going to write three blog posts to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s founding this long weekend, one per day. They fall into Small, Medium, and Large t-shirt sizing. Today, the Small. I launched a limited edition podcast series called Country Over Self: Defining Moments in American History in October 2024 – at the time, I blogged about it here. The series had 13 episodes in which I…
After months of the fastest and most thorough software development cycle I’ve seen in my career, I am proud to announce the launch of our Content Guardian Agents platform Markup AI today. Here’s the defining quote from one of our early clients, the head of content at a B2C marketer: “90% of AI content is mind-blowingly great, and 10% completely wrong — and you spend hours trying to fix the little…
This one has nothing to do with running a company. But it’s one of the most fascinating things I’ve done with AI, and I fell down such a deep rabbit hole that I have to share it. My friend Chad Dickerson — former CEO of Etsy, now an executive coach — mentioned that he’d uploaded his raw DNA file to an AI and started asking it questions. My reaction was something like: wait, you can do that? You…