How many birds and butterflies did I miss looking at dumb phones? How many good notes or interesting pieces of trash or who knows what?

Maybe I do have a phone problem.

Never Not Nervous is a solid comic. This one spoke to me as someone who has attempted to use a Light Phone in the past.

Related: I spent the weekend in Sheboygan with my family, as is our annual summer kickoff tradition. We spent an hour or two on the beach, and I found a rock. It was a pretty dope rock; I spent 20 minutes slowly examining it, noticing that my up close vision is not quite what it used to be.

I took the rock home and it's sitting on my desk now.

I can't wait to get home and look at it some more.

Before running all of these tests, I actually did this the old-fashioned way. With pencil and paper and thinking. This entire project was inspired by putting Blonde on an 8-track and from experience, I can tell you this is a hard problem. The trouble is, I can’t tell you how I did it. There’s some human heuristic I used, definitely not an algorithm, and I can’t write it down. This seems to be what humans in 1977 who gave a damn did too. This is not what the dude making the Sublime 8-track did.

So I can’t tell you how to do this without testing all possible permutations, but human intuition can get pretty close. This sort of thing has shown up in other fields, like Foldit, an online ‘let humans perfect protein folding’ game. Classical computer algorithms can only get so close, and humans watching these classical algorithms got frustrated when they saw a solution the computer didn’t. Humans can see stuff that classical algorithms can’t. And now there’s a dozen Nature publications to prove it.

But now we have LLMs. They’re also a black box, and if you throw enough tokens and context at them, they’ll out-perform humans. They won’t be able to tell you how they did it, either.

This isn’t a victory for humans over algorithms or LLMs over humans, or anything like that. It’s just a fact that a dead and derided music format left behind a benchmark where human intuition beat classical methods that wouldn’t be in a textbook for a decade after the work was done. And half a lifetime later, LLMs would outperform humans for reasons we can’t really inspect.

So that’s something.

This was such a cool experiment and a fascinating head-to-head comparison of LLMs vs. human in the esoteric domain of "8-track music production".

I don’t want to go back to floppy disks. I like fast updates. I like security patches. I like sync. I like crash reports when they help fix real issues.

What I want is for “phone home” to be treated like a privileged capability, not an assumed right. In other domains, we treat privileged capabilities with care. We put them behind intentional choices. We build guardrails. And we treat abuse as a bug, not a growth opportunity.

What we don’t yet know is how architectural coherence evolves over years in a fully agent-generated system. We’re still learning where human judgment adds the most leverage and how to encode that judgment so it compounds. We also don’t know how this system will evolve as models continue to become more capable over time.

What’s become clear: building software still demands discipline, but the discipline shows up more in the scaffolding rather than the code. The tooling, abstractions, and feedback loops that keep the codebase coherent are increasingly important.

Our most difficult challenges now center on designing environments, feedback loops, and control systems that help agents accomplish our goal: build and maintain complex, reliable software at scale.

There's this very vocal camp of engineers on the internet who like to say things like "it was never about how fast I can type code" and share visceral takedowns of how sloppy and terrible vibecoding and agentic engineering codebases become over time.

I agree with their observations: over time, every vibecoded piece of software I've built becomes shelfware, artifacts of code which served a purpose but is no longer needed.

But I've been programming computers long enough to know that concerns about architecture and sane codebases end up bugging people so much that they invent new techniques to address them.

I am approaching agentic engineering just like I approached using a chainsaw for the second time in my life a couple weeks ago: by consuming a lot of videos and blog posts on how other people are doing it, and then running controlled experiments to see what works for me.

Information allows us to act more skillfully. Imagine you come to a fork on a road. Without a sign, you’d need a compass or a great sense of direction to choose correctly. But with a clear sign, you’d quickly know which road to take. The sign reduces ambiguity.

The Moylan arrow, too, disambiguates a choice. Pulling in on the wrong side of the pump is an annoying inconvenience. By making the driver smarter, the arrow improves the car’s UX. Critically, it does so without much cost to the manufacturer. That’s why it’s become pervasive.

The Moylan arrow works because it’s:

• Clear: legible and understandable
• Findable: located where you’re already looking
• Relevant: provides the exact answer you need
• Contextual: available when needed, but “quiet” otherwise
• Obvious: doesn’t need further instructions
• Cheap: of negligible cost to manufacturers

Jorge goes on to compare this list to the latest crop of chatbots and finds it comes up lacking.

I found this set of heuristics helpful:

Rather than ask, “how might we add AI to this system?,” consider the following questions:

• What is the person trying to do?
• Do they understand the system?
• What’s keeping them from choosing skillfully?
• What questions do they have? Which come up repeatedly?
• Which structural distinctions are ambiguous?

Sometimes, people in technology believe that we can solve problems by getting people to pay attention. This comes up in security, anti-virus efforts, anti-phish efforts, monitoring and alert handling, warning messages emitted by programs, warning messages emitted by compilers and interpreters, and many other specific contexts.

We are basically always wrong.

I jumped head first into the punk/metal pool this month. Here's what's been bumping on repeat for me lately:

Less Than Jake - Anthem

I remember a friend of mine (whose birthday is today, ironically) playing this album in his basement on repeat as we tried to 100% Super Mario 64. Good, clean ska fun. Most of the albums on this list contain songs that I haven’t really listened to, but while chopping up the tree in the back yard these last couple weeks, I’ve had time to immerse myself. And I gotta say, listening to the lyrics of “She’s Gonna Break Soon,” I found myself with a literal lol.

Neck Deep - Life’s Not Out to Get You

I was working out of a Starbucks near my parents house this week and listened to this album the entire day while coding. I reached out to them in the morning to see if they wanted to grab lunch, and sure enough, an hour later, we were at Snuffy’s Malt Shop where my dad peer pressured me into eating a malt. The album whales too.

Mumford and Sons - Prizefighter

My Current Vibes playlist contains albums for every mood, and this album fills the mood for “Sunday morning.” There are a couple of songs that hit right when I need them: Alleycat asks: “’Is this all there is?’ What do you mean, is this not enough for you?” Clover reminds me to “slow down.” Cannot wait to see them again this summer!

The Wonder Years - The Greatest Generation

I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral came across KTIM while I was cleaning out my garage¹, and I fell over myself to add this album to current vibes. It turns out that particular song combines elements from several other songs on the album. I dunno, I used to dog on myself for enjoying emo, but 38 year old Tim ain’t got time to dog on hisself anymore. I’m in my emo era.

Thrice - The Artist in the Ambulance

I played an unreal amount of Madden ’04 as a kid, and that’s how I discovered Thrice. I think this album is classified as “post-hardcore”, but there’s hints of emo and pop-punk in there as well. So many of these songs bring me back to high school.

System of a Down - Toxicity

Again, brings me right back to high school. We’re working towards converting the garage into a music zone; as soon as that’s good to go, I’m gonna fill it with a drum kit and play this album front to back. Terribly, but enthusiastically.

The Rezillos - Can’t Stand the Rezillos

If I had to pick a number one album right now, it’s this one. Still makes me chuckle thinking about discovering this one from a “What’s in your Bag” segment at Amoeba Records with Tony Hawk. My favorite song right now is ​(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures​, which makes me think of my wife every time I hear it.

Pynch - Howling at a Concrete Moon

Another one that’s been on the Current Vibes rotation for a couple years now. 2009 is how I discovered this band, but there’s really not a bad song on this album. Some of these albums are useful for processing how depressing our world can be, and Pynch has a natural ability to write lyrics that speak to finding your way in spite of the hardship. Put another way: listening to this album makes me feel less lonely.

Pynch - Beautiful Noise

This album is less cynical than its predecessor Howling at a Concrete Moon while maintaining the relatable storytelling. I get Post-Punk / New-Wave stuck in my head a lot.

New Found Flory - Listen Up!

I’m so glad these boys are still rocking as hard as they were back in high school. The lyrics in this album are chock full of uplifting messages (​Laugh It Off​ reminds us to not take life so seriously, You Got This is self evident, 100% reminds me of the ‘Do The Thing’ theme of this summer).

Kisses - The Heart of the Nightlife

I burned this album to a CD-R back in college and listened to it constantly. It was another one that came across KTIM and it’s filled in the spot for “music to groove to while doing housework”.

I Prevail - Lifelines

I got to see my nephew play baseball last weekend. These 10/11 year olds have ​walk up music​. Can you believe that? The high school one town over just got a jumbotron. Freaking wild. Anyway, someone’s walkup song was Chaos and I had to Shazam it. This album reminds me of ​Hybrid Theory​: a genre-blurring record with screaming and melody, metal and electronic. I guess it’s “metalcore”.

The Cords - The Cords

Music that sounds upbeat and positive with depressing and hopeless lyrics is extremely compelling to me. I know I’ve said this about this album in the past, but I was hooked on this jangle pop album from the first 8 bars. October is my current favorite jam (“It’s not that it’s gone, it’s just not the same as it was” hits hard).

Cheekface - It’s Sorted

Similar to Pynch, I listen to this album and feel less lonely. ​Popular 2’​s observations about everyone being the unwitting stars of several Ring camera movies makes me snort laugh every time I think about it. I also frequently get I Am Continuing to Do my Thing stuck in my head. Excited to see these guys in October!

blink-182 - ONE MORE TIME...

Everything I wrote about New Found Glory’s new album applies to this one. ANTHEM PART 3 continues to be the theme for 2026.

The Beths - Straight Line Was A Lie

Everything I wrote about The Cords and Pynch applies to this gang as well. I saw them perform around my birthday last year, and I still often think about how the backing vocals aren’t actually Elizabeth, but rather the boys singing falsetto. If I were going to be in a band, I’d want to be a drummer for a band like this. Or The Rezillos. Or Cheekface. Or The Cords. Or System of a Down. Maybe blink, if I practice a lot.

If any of these albums or descriptions remind you of other albums, shoot them my way!

Well gang, I think we can call it a day. Nothing's gonna top this.

A must-watch video from Casey Muratori reflecting on the commencement speech where Eric Schmidt, founder of Google, was booed when encouraging students to adopt AI.

This is a case where he had direct decision-making authority during the time period when the very worst most dystopian parts of the technology business model were developed, perfected and entrenched.

He is giving this commencement speech to a group of students who have known nothing but that their whole lives. They're not like me. They didn't know a time before all of this. They didn't experience technology in the 80s or something like this. So all they know is the dark pattern version. All they know is the one where they don't own anything and their data is kept by other people and their behavior is tracked and their data is sold and they are targeted for advertising. That's what they know about technology. That's what technology is like for them and only that.

Eric Schmidt, one of the primary architects, is now looking them in the eye with a straight face and saying, "You should be enthusiastic about the next new wave of technology. You should want to be in the room and make decisions about how that new technology will go. And you should bring your humanity with you and your good judgment about how we can do things in a way that will benefit all of us and be good for all of us."

Well, yeah, but why didn't Eric Schmidt do any of that? He just said in the first part of the commencement speech that there were all these really bad things that happened on his watch and he was in the rooms the entire time. He was in one of the most important rooms where these decisions were being made and he either didn't want to or couldn't stop any of that from happening.

So if he wanted to pass on something valuable to these students... well, that would have been the thing. It would have been the introspection of what went wrong. Why did he fail? Why did he say "okay" to building this very bad aspect of technology on top of the useful tool? The parts that we all think are actually good. Why didn't he stop that part? Why doesn't he take some responsibility for it?

If you are gonna take credit (and win capitalism) for building Google, you gotta take credit for all of it. Looking back in 2026, was the invention of Google a net-positive for society? How about Microsoft, or Apple, or Meta?

(Props also for the excellent Tim Robinson reference, which captures the essence of what's going on here.)

A lot of the problem is going to come down to us. To be clear, I am cool with a lot of cognitive surrender. I don’t remember phone numbers anymore because my phone does that for me. I am happy my kids didn’t need to learn cursive. I am fine with calculators doing my daily math and my computer figuring out how to schedule my classes. These were once useful skills, but we were probably right to get rid of them.

AI is different because the technology is general enough that virtually any cognitive task can be offloaded into it to some degree. I don’t want to be too precious about writing: there is no principle that says a polished email draft has to come out of a human mind any more than a column of arithmetic has to. But we don’t want to give up everything, and that we mostly don’t know yet, for any specific task, what is important and what is not. Deciding that is going to be a real challenge.

My north star with technology is “am I making the computer do something useful to somebody?”

Useful, as Ethan Mollick touches on here, is the difference between “AI solved the problem for me” and “a personalized AI taught me this hard thing in a way that stuck for me.”

I’m not gonna dog on anyone who likes to write code. It’s therapeutic, it’s constant problem solving, it forces you to understand how something works.

I think software engineers tend to loudly express strong opinions that don’t meaningfully improve the problems that most people have.

AI, like every other tool, comes down to the human that is wielding it.