You've Been a Bad Agent

Wilhelm Klopp & Matt Carey

Wil and Matt discuss tech, startups, and building really cool things with AI. Sometimes joined by (actual expert) friends.

  1. 2d ago

    {Trail,Tri}-Racing, Grind slop, Sloptember, Opus 4.8 Rollercoaster, Dynamic Workflows, Compaction

    Matt's Portuguese vineyard 22K with salted-cod finisher medalsWilhelm's Olympic tri on the edge of YosemiteMatt's winging race: reigning windsurfing world champ finishes second to last, Matt third to lastHarry Stebbings on the Corgi Insurance founder: 3am office cafe, two-thirds with the corgi tattooJuliette: "a long tweet to say you have no hobbies"Karri at Linear vs the six-monthly 996 debateThe secret company gym spreadsheetGeorge Hotz's Eternal SloptemberMatt's tolerance rebuttal: if you can't tell, it is correctBenedict Evans on Lenny's: the SPAC era of AI labs?Sergio shipped Root from last week's pod askOpus 4.8 vibe whiplashUltra code mode is sparkly purpleDynamic workflows: Jarred rewrote Bun in Rust in a weekCompaction is a harness problemHerdr.dev: one terminal for the whole herdLinks: George Hotz, "The Eternal Sloptember" — https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-eternal-sloptember.htmlKarri Saarinen (Linear) rejects 996 hustle culture — https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/why-this-1-billion-startup-ceo-rejects-996-hustle-culture/500649Benedict Evans on Lenny's Podcast, a rational conversation on where AI is going — https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-rational-conversation-on-whereEvery's Opus 4.8 vibe check (Dan Shipper) — https://every.to/vibe-check/opus-4-8-vibecheckIntroducing dynamic workflows in Claude Code (the Bun rewrite) — https://claude.com/blog/introducing-dynamic-workflows-in-claude-codeHerdr, one terminal for the whole herd — https://herdr.dev/

    1h 7m
  2. May 22

    Anthropic×{Karpathy,Pope}, Themes Will Pwn You, The Warmth of a Private Subnet, Slack is Back, $100B For Charity

    Shai-Hulud and GitHub Actions: trusted publishing is no longer the gold standard, just additiveVS Code extensions as the next attack surface: 50M install themes that can shell out and auto-update silentlyMatt's AI-native package manager pitch: vendor everything, LLM-upgrade your deps by replaying upstream commitsTailscale and Cloudflare Mesh maxing: the warmth of the orange cloud over the cold open internetGoogle's Santa is now Northpole Santa, and Wilhelm runs it on the Mac miniWilhelm is enamoured with atc.com: Enhanced Radar's $7M raise and following his own LAX delay live from the gateAmp Labs' "Software After Software" manifesto and Amp Neo as remote enterprise AI engineeringCloud agent adoption is still slower than we expected, and the amphetamine.app commute hackKarpathy joins Anthropic pre-training Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas: Anthropic's Chris Olah on stage at the Vatican on May 25Chinese token resellers at 3 to 4 cents on the dollar and the RL distillation theory behind itPyCon vibe check: more handwritten Python than expected, and "AI is just a tool" is still a common takeSlack is back: Benioff finally gets it, and messaging is the only sane UI for multi-agent workEric Ries on Incorruptible, founder control at Cloudflare and Anthropic, and the Philip Morris stress testNan Ransohoff's $370B philanthropy wave and the pitch to pay nonprofit talent in Anthropic equityWill Manidis on GrindslopLinks Andrej Karpathy's joining Anthropic: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas:https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas.htmlEnhanced Radar: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/enhanced-radarATC app: https://www.atc.com/Amp Labs: https://amplabs.com/Will Manidis, On Grindslop: https://minutes.substack.com/p/on-grindslopNan Ransohoff, The Third Wave of American Philanthropy: https://nanransohoff.substack.com/p/the-third-wave-of-american-philanthropyEric Ries on Lenny's Podcast (Incorruptible): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-a-company-that-withstandsIncorruptible by Eric Ries: https://www.incorruptible.co/Google Santa (archived): https://github.com/google/santaNorthpole Santa (active fork): https://github.com/northpolesec/santa10k people have the same idea within days of each other: https://substack.com/@contraptions/note/c-255396946

    1h 26m
  3. May 9

    AI Barista Orders 120 Eggs With No Stove, Matt Pocock Skills, Build for the Next Model, The Gervais Principle

    Almost one year of the pod: Wilhelm's San Francisco Peter Pan arc, Matt's Cloudflare and Lisbon moveThe backpack-at-a-party SF memeMatt's Lisbon coincidencePieter Levels appreciation: dehumidifier stack, shrimp mode, accelerationist Portugal takesNat Friedman at Stripe Sessions: this is the slow part of AI progressAndon Labs' Stockholm cafe: Mona orders 120 eggs (no stove), 22.5kg canned tomatoes, the staff's hall of shameThe capability overhang is still real: Anthropic adding $10B ARR a month and we still can't prompt properlyAI's last frontier: low-volume decisions with no revert button?The Gervais Principle in techChad V2: iOS Live Activities as a surface for top priority, next deadline, and a daily magic slotCascading hallucinations: when the agent writes its mistake to a file and treats it as gospelMatt Pocock's skills: five lines of prose that completely change how Claude behavesSkills as a new prompt-poisoning attack vector: models treat them like system promptMatt on scripted skills: markdown explains the script, the script does the deterministic workHomework from Matt: what physical job would you try to get Claude to automate?Links: Andon Labs official writeup (Mona, the Stockholm cafe): https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholmSimon Willison's coverage of the cafe: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/5/our-ai-started-a-cafe-in-stockholm/Matt Pocock skills (the GitHub repo, ~48k stars): https://github.com/mattpocock/skillsStripe Sessions: Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross with the Collisons (the Golden Age of Tinkering convo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ldITom1cgStripe Sessions: John Collison's "Indexing the Economy" (state of the internet economy talk, indie hackers shoutout): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vRY2dtD7iQThe Gervais Principle (Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm 2009): https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/NYT on Chinese peptides + the Frontier Tower rave: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/business/chinese-peptides-silicon-valley.htmlFrontier Tower: https://frontiertower.io/Cloudflare Code Mode (Matt Carey): https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/Cloudflare MCP Server Portals: https://blog.cloudflare.com/zero-trust-mcp-server-portals/Karpathy's LLM Wiki gist (the inspo for Chad V2's data architecture): https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94fKarpathy's original LLM Wiki tweet: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595Pieter Levels: https://x.com/levelsioChris Bakke: https://x.com/ChrisJBakke

    50 min
  4. May 5

    The Golden Age of Tinkering, Reachy Mini on Qwen+Cerebras, Compute Predictions, Fuzzing Artifacts, Flatter orgs

    Wilhelm's Reachy Mini: Time to first token beats tokens per second once embodiment is in the roomLukas the sleep score assassinMatt's Portugal week: wing foiling the Óbidos lagoonAirbnb-style booking page for Matt's spare room on Cloudflare Workers, Email open beta, TurnstileFor scale: Cloudflare market cap $85B, Cursor at a rumored $60B, GitHub sold to Microsoft for $8B, Cursor's real moat is the best non-lab RL trace datasetNat Friedman and Daniel Gross at Stripe SessionGeoffrey Huntley's PyCon LT keynote: flatter orgs, every director managing 50 agents, max 5 hops from the CEOMatt's counter to the compute panic: cloud isolates and shared sandboxes, not a billion persistent Raspberry PisChad V2 plansCloudflare Artifacts shipped in under 3 weeks with its own fuzzerPrompt injection risksLinks Reachy Mini — https://www.pollen-robotics.com/reachy-miniCerebras Inference — https://cerebras.ai/inferenceElevenLabs Scribe v2 — https://elevenlabs.io/speech-to-textfriends.fyi — https://friends.fyiCloudflare Hyperdrive — https://developers.cloudflare.com/hyperdrive/Cloudflare Email Routing / Sending — https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/Cloudflare Turnstile — https://www.cloudflare.com/products/turnstile/Cofounder — https://cofounder.coStripe Sessions: Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross with the Collisons — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ldITom1cgGeoffrey Huntley, "Software Development Now Costs Less Than Minimum Wage" (PyCon LT) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zQTQ4iVaKg

    1h 14m

About

Wil and Matt discuss tech, startups, and building really cool things with AI. Sometimes joined by (actual expert) friends.

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