The Next Token

Dillon Mulroy, Rhys Sullivan, and Sunil Pai

The Next Token is a technical, conversational podcast from Sunil Pai, Dillon Mulroy, and Rhys Sullivan about the ideas, tools, and weird edges shaping software right now. Expect candid conversations about AI, developer experience, building on the web, open source, infrastructure, and the work behind the work: what they are trying, what is breaking, what is actually useful, and what deserves a second look. Cloudflare sponsors the show, but the conversations are host-led, curious, and independent in spirit.

Episodes

  1. 16h ago

    Ep 01 - "I Want Your Product to Enable My Agent"

    Recorded June 30, 2026, 2pm Pacific. Live from AI Engineer World's Fair! Fable is still banned (as of recording time, ahem). Advice: Build for agents. We're still talking about loops, but which loops? And more receipts are demanded. LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER IN THE NEWS Model-tiers image (OpenAI forum) https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/openai1/original/4X/f/0/8/f088bfcb17e4f7a8da3d2ba48d6391fa5a9201d9.jpeg Claude models page (four model cards) https://claude.com/platform/api Starbucks sizes https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/409/hot "Freedom of intelligence" tweet (Quinn Slack) https://x.com/sqs/status/2071690420548198581 Magnitude / harness-level routing https://magnitude.dev Anthropic's "Project Deal" https://www.anthropic.com/features/project-deal "The Dumb Zone" tweet (Matt Pocock) https://x.com/mattpocockuk/status/2071288332642812229 Regulation / CA gov tweet https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2071632971388662233 Rhys tweets to poke additional bears https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2071811069002281335 TOPIC - I DON'T WANT TO USE YOUR AGENT "I don't want to use your product's agent (Dillon quote-tweet) https://x.com/dillon_mulroy/status/2070983687785914822 Dax's original tweet https://x.com/thdxr/status/2071010042216665452 Low-level-learning PlanetScale fireside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8tRi1RYf7c A wild PlanetScale CTO appears https://x.com/NickVanWig SOCs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_operations_center Ankur Goyal / Braintrust "two mega-trends" tweet https://x.com/ankrgyl/status/2071329164125147440 Dillon's reply to Ankur https://x.com/dillon_mulroy/status/2071330371283915027 "The Primitive is the Product" - Lenny Pruss, Amplify Partners https://www.amplifypartners.com/blog-posts/the-primitive-is-the-product "I am a golden god" - "Almost Famous" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCfFCFkVSss Rita Kozlov - "Welcome to Agents Week" (the math on scaling agents to the masses) https://blog.cloudflare.com/welcome-to-agents-week/#the-math-on-scaling-agents-to-the-masses TOPIC - LOOPS & SOFTWARE FACTORIES (ROUND 2) "The Coming Loop" - Armin Ronacher https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/6/23/the-coming-loop/ Dillon's software-design skills repo https://github.com/dmmulroy/skills Rhys tweets at Sam Altman re junior engineers (etc.) https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2053177733598077340 TOPIC - RECEIPTS REQUIRED shadcn tweet ("Are you sure?") https://x.com/shadcn/status/2069054418247393389 Theo Brown tweet re moving code agents off laptops https://x.com/theo/status/2071083700385955906 Boris Cherny "five archetypes" tweet https://x.com/bcherny/status/2071379474277613732 FOLLOW THE HOSTS Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/@dillon_mulroy / https://dillonis.online / https://twitch.tv/dillon Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/@RhysSullivan / https://rhys.dev / https://executor.sh Sunil Pai - https://x.com/@threepointone / https://sunilpai.dev CREDITS The Next Token is sponsored by Cloudflare https://www.cloudflare.com Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts.

    1h 13m
  2. Ep 0: "None of My Software Has Gotten Better"

    Jun 26

    Ep 0: "None of My Software Has Gotten Better"

    Recorded June 15, 2026. Dillon, Rhys, and Sunil discuss the Fable/Mythos situation and require receipts for bold claims about how AI is changing everything. Follow Dillon Mulroy - @dillon_mulroy / dillonis.online / twitch.tv/dillon Rhys Sullivan - @RhysSullivan / rhys.dev / executor.sh Sunil Pai - @threepointone / sunilpai.dev The Next Token - YouTube / X Topics The Fable/Mythos situation Feelings, etc. Can you trust a tool that quietly degrades itself? Why more code hasn't meant better software. Open weights, sovereign models, and where access to intelligence is heading. Receipts Required Revisiting bold predictions (accurate and otherwise). In the News Claude Fable 5 & Claude Mythos 5. Anthropic's launch announcement (June 9, 2026): anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5. Priced at $10 per million input tokens / $50 per million output tokens. Safeguards fall back to Claude Opus 4.8 on: cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and distillation. Access suspended by the US government. Anthropic's statement (June 12, 2026): anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access. Fable 5 / Mythos 5 system card (safeguards, alignment, evals): anthropic.com/claude-fable-5-mythos-5-system-card. Project Glasswing (the Mythos cybersecurity project): anthropic.com/glasswing. Receipts Required Geoffrey Hinton: "People should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists. … It might be ten years." (Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence, 2016) Dario Amodei (Anthropic): "I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code." (Council on Foreign Relations, March 10, 2025) Sundar Pichai (Google): "Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster." (Q3 2024 earnings call, October 2024) "We've been using AI to generate code internally at Google for a while. Today, 75% of all new code at Google is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, up from 50% last fall." (Google Cloud blog post, April 2026) Boris Cherny (Claude Code, Anthropic): "I don't prompt Claude anymore. I have loops that are running. They're the ones that are prompting Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops." (Source, June 2026) Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw, OpenAI): "Here's your monthly reminder that you shouldn't be prompting coding agents anymore. You should be designing loops that prompt your agents." (X, June 7, 2026.) Tweets & Code Referenced Dillon's Fable tweet "imagine if they banned all models and we all went back to writing code by hand and the last 6 months were just a fever dream…imagine" (X, June 12, 2026) Greg Brockman's tweet about the old days "how did we ever write all that code by hand" (X, February 13, 2026) Sunil's "$250 run" tweet "spent all day on fable for a giant PR. ~10kloc, lots of testing and intervention. 250$. I... don't think it's worth it? happy with 4.8/5.5, and the quality of work is better when it's smaler steps. Still rocking @cursor_ai, that's software that I still love using on the daily." (X, June 11, 2026) Mitchell Hashimoto's perf improvements tweet "I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big f*****g problem. …" (X, May 28, 2026) shadcn's /improve skill "​​Survey any codebase as a senior advisor and produce prioritized, self-contained implementation plans for OTHER models/agents to execute. Strictly read-only on source code — never implements, fixes, or refactors anything itself. Use when asked to audit a codebase, find improvement opportunities (bugs, security, performance, test coverage, tech debt, migrations, DX), suggest features or where to take the project next (roadmap, product direction), or generate handoff plans for another agent to implement." Factorio "Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories." Books Referenced Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson (also: Sunil's blog post about this) PGP Source Code and Internals by Philip Zimmermann In Person AI Engineer World's Fair. June 29-July 2, 2026, San Francisco. Coffeeflare. Free coffee meetup with the team during the Fair (no badge needed) - Tuesday, June 30, 2026, 7am-10am, Sightglass Coffee, San Francisco. Credits The Next Token is sponsored by Cloudflare. Subscribe on YouTube: @NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts.

    52 min

About

The Next Token is a technical, conversational podcast from Sunil Pai, Dillon Mulroy, and Rhys Sullivan about the ideas, tools, and weird edges shaping software right now. Expect candid conversations about AI, developer experience, building on the web, open source, infrastructure, and the work behind the work: what they are trying, what is breaking, what is actually useful, and what deserves a second look. Cloudflare sponsors the show, but the conversations are host-led, curious, and independent in spirit.