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A person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.
A little late on this one as it’s travelled across the interwebs and back already, but I felt like it needed to be preserved here as well.
You absolutely love to see it.
Bloomberg reports that the company has instituted a new rule that places a monthly $1,500 cap per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor.
AI fanatics love to say “this is the worst AI will ever be,” but it’s probably also the cheapest it will ever be as it’s subsidized by VC money until they can get people hooked and loyal to brands; bleeding billions as they do. And still, Uber has to put caps on their employees (caps which feel pretty high to me). Just imagine how expensive things’ll be when they have to start turning a profit.
And this process leaves me confident that I’m not falling into the trap I fell into before, where I was letting AI do the thinking and writing for me.
I get it, AI is useful in some areas. Hell, I'm being asked to vibe-code for my freelance client right now... but I still think Arun is using AI too much in their writing process and I honestly think it's likely to be a detriment to their writing and thinking process. Obviously "slippery slope" is a fallacy, but it's one I'd be paying attention to if I were Arun given it sounds like they've relied on AI for a lot more of their writing process in the past.
American Exchange Group, which entered a purchase agreement with Allbirds earlier this year, intends to “build on Allbirds’ legacy and deliver compelling products to Allbirds’ customers” by changing its name to NewBird AI. The company is set to receive $50 million from an investor, and stocks have soared to $19 per share, up from $2.59 earlier this year.
This feels like the moment when we can officially say AI has jumped the shark. Even as a skeptic, I have to admit the usefulness is real; I've been able to utilize Claude Code to help me make some little web apps and tools for myself, but I don't know how you go from being a huge shoe company—even if you are based in the Bay—to an AI company. Its capitalism run rampant. Everyone's just chasing a dollar rather than working on things that they actually think are important, that they enjoy, or that they want to do. It's the personification of a bad MBA.
This is when I realized I was no longer working on a family history project. What I had been building, page by page, was a personal encyclopedia. A structured, browsable, interconnected account of my life compiled from the data I already had lying around. I've been working on this as whoami.wiki. It uses MediaWiki as its foundation, which turns out to be a great fit because language models already understand Wikipedia conventions deeply from their training data. You bring your data exports, and agents draft the pages for you to review.
This is an incredible open source project that I love. I've always tried to dabble with tools like TiddlyWiki, Roam, and Obsidian to essentially build my own little personal wiki. This is a tool to help make that happen based off of data that already exists and working with Claude Code (or other AI tools). I wish there was a more user-friendly interface for it, but beggars can't be choosers, and this tool is incredibly cool. It's also really neat to read about how it came to be, this little personal encyclopedia.
Status is the definitive nightly briefing that informs readers about what is really happening in the halls of media power.
A newsletter about the history behind today’s politics. Click to read Letters from an American, by Heather Cox Richardson, a Substack publication with millions of subscribers.
Jason Kottke’s daily links and commentary on art, science, technology, design, film, and culture since 1998.
