saw an AI video on Instagram of an elderly man peacefully sewing t-shirts on an old Singer machine, giving the impression that the company's products are thoughtfully made in this way. we are reaching new levels of phoniness with brands using "craft washing" to sell crappy goods

"We are spending millions sending AI experts to learn business. We should be sending business operators to learn AI. Business knowledge is slow. It took most of my career to instinctively know which trade-offs to make around working capital and inventory. AI execution is fast. An experienced operational team can master agentic tooling, evals, and model orchestration in a matter of months. We are running the harder transfer at immense cost and mistaking it for progress." - Praveen Jonnala, CIO of Vistance Networks I can back this up from every implementation we've done at Varick (Finance, Operations, HR, all of it). The exceptions often live in one person's head. Think the vendor who keeps invoicing against a PO that was closed months ago, or the customer whose payment terms got changed on a phone call and no one updated the ERP. These nuances are never documented, and it's not something you can pick up during a 6-week engagement as an AI engineer. On the flip side, we've seen controllers and Accounts Payable managers learn to read evals and write rules that improve agent outputs in just a few short weeks. As a result, when we come into a company to implement AI, we start with the operators of a workflow. Our engineers sit with them to understand every nook and cranny of the workflow, translate that into rules the agents can use, and then train those operators to manage the agents once we leave. If you're interested in doing this kind of AI transformation inside your company, book a call below.

Why are you still using pull requests? Is it for code review? If so, do you really think your or your colleagues catch bugs and mistakes that an Opus 5.5 or Fable or Astra won't find? You can literally spawn all three of them and have them check four times each. (Also, don't tell me you don't have a "stamp plz" Slack channel or group chat somewhere.) Is it for knowledge sharing? Surely there's better ways for that now than the PR, no? We have models that can generate explainer videos, presentations, podcasts, games, quizzes, walkthroughs, ... for any piece of code it can reach. Is CI the reason? Well ackshually, CI means continuous integration and its original meaning is the *opposite* of having long-lived branches and PRs. But, leaving that aside, your agents are hopefully already running the tests before they push something, and hopefully they can run as long as they want and don't block you so they can run the whole test suite and generate "irrefutable proof" and end-to-end demo videos and so on... And so they run the tests and confirm and then you push to a branch and everything runs again and then you merge and then it runs again? That doesn't make sense, does it? Maybe you work in open source and you accept contributions, in which case I can't speak to the value of pull requests. It's been 2 years since my last OSS contribution. But from what I heard, the time of the PR is coming to an end in OSS too? I honestly don't get why people still stick to PRs. With agents you can now move 10x faster, you can finally do real continuous integration, and get more confidence in the changes the agent made. Don't slow yourself down by having all the changes pile up in a PR.

I tried using Muse and Instinct in parallel over the past 30 days. A lot of that time went into deciding which one to talk to for different tasks. The obvious answer was to use one for work and one for personal stuff. That sounded reasonable until I needed to move a meeting. If the new time means I need to pick up my kids later, who gets that request? My work agent needs to know about the pickup. The personal one needs to know about the meeting. Now I'm explaining the situation twice and making sure everybody has the relevant information. Most people aren't good at delegating to one assistant. Having two now gives me another thing to manage, especially when each of them understand a different part of my life. For now, I've been trying one at a time. Eventually, I'd love to put them in a group chat and tell them to figure it out together.