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Based on "AI is way Underhyped. This Silicon Valley CEO proves it | Relay.app, Jacob Bank" from EO Watch the original video

Beyond the Hype: Why AI Agents Are Your Next Career Superpower

What if you could assemble a high-performing team of marketing experts, sales coaches, and strategic analysts for less than the cost of your monthly coffee habit? According to Jacob Bank, founder and CEO of Relay.app and a former Google product lead, this isn't a futuristic fantasy, but our current reality – and we're barely scratching the surface of its potential. Bank emphatically states, "AI is way underhyped," and he's living proof, running his company's entire marketing function with a team of 40 AI agents, while his personal AI bill clocks in at a mere $500 a month, a stark contrast to the $50,000 monthly cost of a human team.

Bank's journey reveals a profound shift in how professionals must approach work, learning, and career growth in the age of artificial intelligence. He argues that building and leveraging AI agents is not just an advantage, but "the fundamental skill that will define every professional's career for the next 30 years. It's a requirement."

More Than Just an Intern: The True Power of AI

Just a year ago, Bank himself advocated for thinking of AI as an "intern" – a helpful tool for time-saving, repetitive tasks. He's since dramatically changed his mind. "That was the wrong mental model," he admits. While AI certainly excels at intern-level duties, its capabilities extend far beyond.

Bank illustrates this with a compelling personal anecdote: "I am not good at sales calls. I do not have a background in sales. It does not come naturally." Yet, he now has an AI coach that reviews transcripts of his meetings, offering sophisticated feedback: "Oh, you could have talked about this better. You could have articulated this value or you were too eager to jump into a demo there. You should have asked some more discovery questions." A human sales coach of this caliber could cost upwards of $10,000 a month for just one meeting a week. Bank's AI equivalent? "Like five bucks a week to run."

This isn't about mere efficiency; it's about augmenting human capability at a strategic level. AI can perform complex strategy analyses, competitive assessments, and high-quality content creation tasks that no intern could ever manage. It's about providing personalized, expert-level coaching and insight across any domain, democratizing access to specialized knowledge and skill development.

The Dawn of the "Super IC"

This paradigm shift isn't just for CEOs; it's for everyone. Bank predicts a future where traditional job roles, particularly those focused on single, repetitive tasks or large-scale organizational management, will diminish. "If your job is as a junior content marketer to take a YouTube video and write a blog post based on that YouTube video, that job won't exist anymore," he warns. Similarly, managing a team of a thousand people at a large corporation will become "less and less important because companies are going to be smaller."

Instead, Bank envisions a world of "Super Individual Contributors" (Super ICs). Drawing an analogy to the "tech lead manager" role at Google – a challenging hybrid of technical expertise and team coordination – he believes everyone will need to combine strategic thinking with hands-on execution, leveraging AI to amplify their impact.

For Bank, this means about two-thirds of his day is individual contributor work – making videos, editing blog posts, talking to customers – while the remaining one-third is dedicated to "coordinating my team of AI agents that helps me with those things."

The exciting part? This future aligns with what many professionals truly desire. Junior employees crave more strategic influence, while senior managers often wish they could be "closer to the work." The Super IC model combines the best of both worlds: "We will all need to be strategic enough and senior enough to decide what needs to be done... and we need to be still hands-on enough that we can actually edit the blog post and edit the tweet and make the video ourselves."

Building Your AI Dream Team: Start Simple, Iterate Constantly

Bank's personal marketing success story is a testament to the power of AI agents. After a year of "no results" posting consistently on LinkedIn, he deployed his AI marketing team. One post, detailing the "40 marketing agents that I actually use," garnered an astonishing 1.5 million impressions and the most comments he'd ever received.

His "team" of 40 agents each has a very specific job:

His advice for aspiring Super ICs? "Start simple." Don't try to build a single agent to do 25 things at once. Instead: "Create one agent that can do one thing, create a second agent that can do a second thing... and then maybe have one agent that sits above them and helps invoke them when necessary." Build gradually, one specialized agent at a time.

Crucially, Bank emphasizes that AI agents are not "set it and forget it." Just like human employees, they require ongoing management, modification, and sometimes even "firing." He recounts building an agent to create personalized Google Docs after customer calls – a task he initially thought was brilliant. But after 10 iterations, he realized customers weren't reading the docs. "I fired that agent and I said, 'Uh, we don't actually need that job to be done anymore.'" He repurposed its core function, integrating the summary directly into follow-up emails.

Similarly, when his company shifted focus away from SEO, he simply "told my AI SEO agents, you guys can stop for now." The beauty? "There's no emotional baggage. There's no disagreements. There's no coordination costs." It's about giving yourself "superpowers" to do more of the valuable work you love.

Redefining Career Risk in the AI Age

The advent of AI also forces a re-evaluation of what constitutes a "safe" versus a "risky" career. Bank contrasts his parents' generation, where working 40 years at a single Fortune 500 company was the epitome of security, with today's reality. "I think that has completely flipped," he states.

Today, the riskiest career is one "if your skills are too tied to the environment of one particular company that could change over time." The most robust careers belong to those who are "starting their own companies and who are having lots of different life experience."

He challenges the common perception that staying at a company like Google is safer than joining a startup. While Google might offer more cash compensation in the short term, "if you think through the long-term lens of your career where it's about how broad of a network have you built, how many new skills have you built? How have you pushed yourself to develop new experiences? It is way riskier to stay at a company like Google than it is to join a startup or start a startup."

The choice, according to Bank, is simple: "You can say, 'I'm skeptical. I don't believe it. I'm going to put my head in the sand. I'm going to keep working the way I've always worked.' That's one way to react. The second way to act is like, whoa, this is a cool tool that's going to completely change the way that work is done. And I want to be on the cutting edge of how I'm using it. Please be person number two."

For Bank, it's not about taking more risk, but optimizing for "personal growth and learning new skills." Stagnation, he argues, is the ultimate risk. Progress means "learning and growing and pushing yourself."

Educating for an AI-Powered Future

Bank, a father of young children, also reflects on how AI will shape their future careers. He identifies two fundamental skills that will be crucial:

  1. The ability to clearly articulate what is important, what needs to be done, and give guidance on how to do it. As our jobs become more about efficiently instructing AI, clarity of thought and communication will be paramount. He emphasizes the importance of learning logic and philosophy to develop this skill.
  2. The ability to build social connection and leverage unique personality. AI can do many things, but human connection, empathy, and unique expression remain irreplaceable. "That's why I record our own YouTube videos because it's an expression of my personality and people build a social connection," he explains.

These two skills – clear articulation for AI and strong human connection – will be "durable skills for the future of any career." Just as his daughters see self-driving cars as completely normal, the next generation will grow up with AI as an integral, invisible part of their lives, making these human-centric skills even more valuable.

A Global Perspective on AI's Trajectory

While Bank's primary focus is on individual empowerment, he also offers a sobering global perspective on AI's impact. Having spent equal parts of his life in the US, China, and Canada, he observes that both the US and China appear "very intent on losing, not on winning."

He contrasts the potential applications: "What are Americans going to be using AI for? Well, to make a lot more PowerPoints perhaps and to file a lot more lawsuits against each other." In contrast, he sees China as "much more manufacturing focused," poised to use AI to "make more iPhones, make more electric vehicle batteries, make more drones, and make more munitions." Citing the dramatic disparity in ship production (US built 5, China 1,500 last year), he highlights a potential divergence in how AI will be leveraged for national competitiveness.

Embrace the Superpower

Jacob Bank's vision is clear: AI is not a threat to human potential, but an unparalleled opportunity to unlock it. We are all using AI for "probably 1% of what we should be using it for." By embracing the challenge of building and managing AI agents, by prioritizing personal growth over perceived stability, and by cultivating the distinctively human skills of articulation and connection, we can transform our careers.

The future of work isn't about being replaced; it's about being amplified. It's about gaining superpowers, doing more of the work we love, and shaping a professional journey that is dynamic, fulfilling, and truly impactful. The choice to become a Super IC, armed with an army of AI agents, is ours to make – and the time to start is now.

Based on "Building Is the Easy Part Now | Mike Krieger on What AI Changed" from Every Watch the original video

The "Indoor Tree" Dilemma: Crafting Robust Products in the Age of AI

In the relentless sprint of technological evolution, the advent of artificial intelligence has fundamentally reshaped how we build. What once took months or even years can now be accomplished in a matter of hours, turning the act of creation into an almost trivial exercise. Yet, amidst this unprecedented acceleration, a paradox emerges: while AI makes building easier, the true art and science of product design—knowing what to build, and more importantly, what to cut—remains as challenging, and as human, as ever.

This profound shift is at the heart of a recent conversation with Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and now a key figure at Anthropic Labs, a leading AI research company. Speaking on the "Every" podcast, Krieger, alongside the interviewer, delved into the evolving landscape of product development, revealing that the speed of AI brings its own unique set of challenges and demands a new kind of intuition.

The Zero-to-N Paradox: Speed vs. Simplicity

Krieger’s journey from building Instagram, a product famed for its elegant simplicity, to spearheading AI innovation at Anthropic offers a unique vantage point. He recounts the early days of Instagram, a pivot from a more complex product called "Bourbon," which took nearly a year to develop before they distilled it into what would become Instagram in just three months. This process involved not just adding features but, crucially, removing them.

"The models today are good at adding features," Krieger observes. "They're not necessarily good about figuring out what to cut out of the product." He illustrates this with a startling anecdote: he had Anthropic's Claude AI rebuild Bourbon. In just two hours, Claude produced a feature-complete product, even adding filters – a feature Instagram eventually adopted, but Bourbon originally lacked. "It knew the eventual future of the product so it decided to build that in," Krieger muses, highlighting AI's predictive capabilities but also its tendency towards accretion.

The ability to go "zero to N pretty quickly over the matter of hours" means that an AI can make a multitude of decisions along the way, often leading to over-complicated products. This stands in stark contrast to the human-driven, iterative process where intuition is built over time through real-world usage and painful simplification.

The "Indoor Tree" Metaphor: Why Friction Builds Strength

The interviewer introduces a powerful metaphor to capture this dilemma: "If you grow a tree without it being indoors, without being exposed to wind, it doesn't get as strong... it needs all these forces pushing it back and forth." A tree grown indoors might grow, but it leans, it's not as strong, it lacks the resilience forged by external pressures.

Krieger enthusiastically embraces this "indoor tree" dilemma. In the age of AI, developers can "grow an entire tree indoors," creating fully formed products without the incremental exposure to users that traditionally hones design intuition. This leads to products that, while feature-rich, lack the inherent strength and clarity derived from real-world friction.

He admits to falling into this trap even at Anthropic Labs. "We way overbuilt for V1 before we even got to early access because you can. You're like, 'oh well, we have this option. Why not add this one as well?'" The ease of "vibe coding" – where AI tools rapidly generate code – can lead to "monstrosities," as the interviewer puts it, that are hard to test and even harder for users to understand. The result is a "matrix of functionality" that feels overwhelming, akin to being "thrown into the final episode of a TV show" without context.

The core insight here, echoing the "lean startup" principles of "you ain't gonna need it" (YAGNI), is that just because you can build something quickly, doesn't mean you should include it in the first version. Simplification, driven by human insight and user feedback, remains paramount.

The Art of "Cutting Out" and the Power of Early Launch

The challenge of simplification in the AI era leads to new strategies. Krieger notes that while the "intuitions of the original lean startup ideas are still here," they manifest at different time scales. One crucial adaptation is a greater willingness to do rewrites. What once might have been a company-killing, year-long endeavor is now a matter of days or weeks, thanks to AI's speed and ability to "diff" changes. This reduces the pain of tearing down an overcomplicated V1 and starting fresh.

Another strategy is to "launch earlier," even with a minimal product. Krieger cites Anthropic's "Co-work" product, which went from concept to V1 in just 10 days. Despite knowing it "could have had 100 things," launching a useful-enough version proved invaluable. "I'm not sure developing it for another two months, adding 50 features, would have been more useful. In fact, we probably would have been building in a the indoor tree would have been getting built and then the second it hit real world use, it's like actually nobody wants to do that."

Agent-Native Design: When Computers "Just Work"

Beyond the speed of building, AI is also transforming the very nature of product interaction. Krieger and the interviewer discuss the concept of "agent-native" design, a philosophy championed at Anthropic and adopted by Every. The idea is that an AI agent should be able to use a product as seamlessly as a human user, with the ability to modify, extend, and interact with all its primitives.

"Computers just work now," Krieger explains, reflecting on a non-technical person's observation. What once required arcane command-line incantations can now be handled by an AI like Claude. This "unlocks the functionality that always should have been there or available and just felt like extremely hard for people."

However, implementing agent-native design is not without its hurdles. Krieger points out that even Anthropic's core Claude AI still needs to evolve. He gives an example of Claude telling a user how to add an artifact to a project's knowledge base, rather than simply doing it. This highlights that models, by default, often "think like traditional engineers," favoring explicit steps and guardrails over the implicit flexibility required for true agent-native interaction.

Teaching AI to be "agent-native" involves providing it with good patterns, templatized examples, and even skills about its own API. Krieger humorously describes having Claude in Claude Code create a skill about skills, leading to a meta-conversation where Claude knew it needed to restart to apply the new skill. This self-awareness is key to unlocking deeper capabilities.

The Challenge of Testing and the Need for "Proof of Thoughtfulness"

Testing agent-native products presents a unique challenge. Traditional unit tests struggle with the inherent unpredictability and extensibility of AI-powered systems. "How do you increase the sort of fidelity of the verification?" Krieger asks. He shares a comical anecdote of an agent-native iOS app where Claude, interacting with its own chat feature, ended up having a conversation with itself, reflecting on a "hard day" and receiving sympathy from its own reflection. This emergent behavior, while amusing, underscores the difficulty of anticipating all possible interactions.

The solution lies in "setting up harnesses that are actually exercising as much of that agent native capability as possible," pushing the system to its limits within a safe, robust environment.

This new paradigm also changes the nature of human oversight. The interviewer notes a shift from "proof of work" (did the tests pass?) to "proof of use" (show me a Loom video of you or your agent using it). Krieger expands on this, calling it "proof of thoughtfulness." Engineers must go beyond simply accepting what the AI has built and understand why certain decisions were made. "Did you think this through? Because it's very easy to end up otherwise with sort of this sort of tower of assumptions that you're not fully aware of." The goal is for products to feel "robust," not "built on sand"—able to flex without falling over, with "your data safe and it's underneath here."

Evolving Teams: Conviction, Architects, and Designers as Builders

The shift in product development naturally impacts team structures and hiring. Krieger identifies two crucial directions:

  1. Primitives and Architectural Robustness: Despite AI's capabilities, senior technical expertise in distributed systems and core architecture remains invaluable. AI can debug production systems, but architecting them from scratch still benefits from experienced human oversight.
  2. Product and Prompting Expertise: The rise of AI necessitates deep understanding of prompt engineering and system design. Krieger notes a pairing of product teams with applied AI teams (who help customers with prompts) to bring this expertise in-house, as it often doesn't reside with traditional software engineers.

Interestingly, designers are taking on new roles. At Anthropic Labs, many designers are "writing and contributing almost as much code as the engineers." This leads to a "co-founder model" for labs initiatives, where a designer with an original idea might push the boundaries, with a traditional software engineer "paving the trail sometimes behind the designer to make sure that actually works."

The most critical factor, however, is conviction. Krieger emphasizes the need for someone with "extreme conviction about... the problem space or the question that they're asking." Projects without this "founder level" drive, where someone is willing to "break through walls," are often the "deathnail for projects."

Both Anthropic Labs and Every prioritize small teams. Krieger highlights that "adding more people actually slows the team down" when an idea is still small enough for an individual to hold in their head. The coordination overhead outweighs the benefits. The interviewer, whose company Every employs a "one-person full-stack GM" model supported by shared resources, agrees, noting that the "number of things you can do with one person is getting bigger." This is particularly crucial in AI, where models improve so rapidly that "every three to six months you're you have to throw out like half your product"—a task far easier for a single, agile GM than a large, coordinated team.

The Enduring Art of Product Intuition

The age of AI is a thrilling frontier for product builders. It has democratized creation, accelerating the "building part" to an unprecedented degree. Yet, Mike Krieger's insights from the front lines of AI innovation reveal that the true challenge has merely shifted. The art of product design—cultivating intuition, knowing what to simplify, ensuring robustness, and fostering deep conviction—remains a profoundly human endeavor. The "indoor tree" can grow fast, but it takes human wisdom and real-world friction to ensure it stands strong.

Based on "In a Driverless World, Who Loses and Who Wins? | Freakonomics Radio" from Freakonomics Radio Network Watch the original video

Collision Course: Boston's Battle Over Driverless Cars and the Future of Work

Boston, a city steeped in history and fiercely proud of its working-class roots, has become a microcosm for one of the most pressing debates of our time: what happens when advanced technology clashes head-on with human livelihoods? The advent of driverless cars, once a distant sci-fi fantasy, is now a tangible reality, and in cities like Boston, its arrival is sparking intense conflict. This isn't just about innovation; it's about jobs, freedom, safety, and the very definition of what it means to be a "driver."

The story unfolds in a series of heated city council hearings, where the promise of a robotic future meets the raw reality of human struggle. At its heart are three distinct voices, each representing a different facet of this complex equation: the veteran driver fighting for his profession, the impassioned politician defending her constituents, and the disabled advocate seeking a new form of liberation.

The Driver's Odyssey: From Taxi King to Union Warrior

Our journey begins with Abdi Aziz, a man whose career on Boston's roads spans three decades. Back in the 1990s, being a taxi driver in Boston was a "decent job," a career protected by a system of medallions – expensive, city-issued licenses that limited competition and ensured stability. Abdi Aziz drove a limo, then a taxi, for years, building a life around his profession.

Then, in 2011, men from the future arrived at Logan Airport with a plan to change everything. "When Uber came," Abdi Aziz recalls, "they came to the airport... and they say, 'Hey, you know, we are introducing you a company that will do same as a taxi, but it's an app.'" He saw through the veneer instantly. "I say it is good, but you didn't come here to help us. You come here to kill this business."

Abdi Aziz understood the impending wave. The medallion system, a de facto monopoly, was about to be shattered by Uber's app-based model, which bypassed the need for traditional licenses. He knew the industry, as it existed, was doomed. His strategy? "If you cannot beat them, join them." He became an early Uber recruiter, signing up fellow drivers, and one of the first 100 Uber Black drivers in Boston, investing in an expensive car. For a time, it was even better than the job Uber had disrupted.

But the honeymoon didn't last. After a few years, Uber's generosity waned. In 2022, a significant change was rolled out: instead of a set percentage, an algorithm began offering variable rates, which drivers like Abdi Aziz believed significantly increased Uber's take. "Uber, once it stopped showing them its take, raised that take by a lot," he states, echoing the sentiment of many drivers who felt like it was a "bait and switch."

Faced with diminishing returns, Abdi Aziz found himself once again recruiting, but this time for a different kind of disruptive force: a union. He became an early organizer for the App Drivers Union, fighting for better pay and conditions. They were making progress, collecting signatures for a ballot initiative in Massachusetts to secure the right to unionize.

Then, a new specter appeared on the horizon: Waymo, the driverless car company. When Abdi Aziz first heard about their testing in San Francisco in 2022, he knew what was coming. "When Uber came, their aim was to kill taxi business. Now Waymo is to kill the drivers." This time, there was no "joining them." This was an existential threat, demanding a different kind of fight.

Boston: A Union Town Draws a Line in the Sand

This fight landed squarely in Boston's City Hall. Last summer, city councilors began meeting to discuss preemptively banning Waymo from their streets. The stated agenda for "docket 1141" was dry: "to evaluate autonomous vehicle operations." But what unfolded was anything but.

"Boston is one of the oldest major cities in the country," explained one councilor, highlighting its "narrow one-way street alleys, and the lack of a traditional grid system." Even for human drivers, Boston’s labyrinthine streets were a challenge. Yet, the core of the debate quickly shifted from safety to something far more contentious: jobs, particularly union jobs.

"We need to address potential layoffs for our union drivers with the introduction of self-driving cars," declared a Teamster representative. Boston is a "union town," a truth repeated over and over by politicians and labor leaders alike. This deep-seated union identity, a legacy stretching from horse-drawn teams to modern trucks, meant that the city council was primed to defend its workers. The App Drivers Union, still in its nascent stages, found powerful allies in the Teamsters and other historic unions, forming a formidable coalition: "Labor United Against Waymo."

Councilor Julia Mahia, a former MTV reporter with a noticeable edge, emerged as a vocal champion of the drivers. "I'm still in shock that I have to even have this conversation that here we are in this day and age trying to defend ourselves from robots taking over our jobs," she stated. For Mahia, the issue was deeply personal and moral. Having grown up with an undocumented mother who cleaned offices, she understood the vulnerability of low-wage workers. She drew parallels to self-checkout machines in supermarkets, which replaced jobs often held by retired individuals, high school students, or people with disabilities. "We are not thinking about other people. We're often just thinking about ourselves and what is the quickest way to get out."

Mahia grilled Matt Walsh, Waymo's regional head of state and local public policy, on job displacement. Walsh, looking every bit the tech executive, tried to pivot to safety statistics, citing Waymo's record of being "five times less in injury-causing crashes than human drivers." But Mahia was unyielding. "What we are doing is creating an opportunity for people to choose to not support humans and the workforce. That is the choice that we're giving people." When Walsh referred to the autonomous system as a "Waymo driver," Mahia retorted, "Waymo is not a driver. Waymo is a robot. So let's be really clear about what it is. It's an apparatus."

Walsh struggled to provide concrete answers about job opportunities for displaced drivers, offering only vague "workforce efforts" within the autonomous vehicle industry. To Mahia, his responses lacked "humility and humanity." "He could have won me over a little bit if he gave me a little bit more heart," she later mused, before adding with a laugh, "No, nobody could win me over." For Boston, the outsider tech giant, valued at $126 billion, was seen as a threat to be repelled, not a partner to embrace.

The Unseen Battle: A Quest for Autonomy

Yet, amidst the chorus of union solidarity, another voice was waiting to be heard—a voice that spoke not of jobs lost, but of freedom gained. Carl Richardson, almost completely blind and significantly hearing impaired, attended the first hearing as a private citizen. He arrived early, signed up to speak, and watched as union protests filled the plaza and the hearing room. He felt "far outnumbered," noting that many disabled attendees left, discouraged by the overwhelming opposition.

Carl, accompanied by his guide dog Dayton, waited nearly four hours to speak, slotted almost at the very end. By the time he was called, most city councilors had already departed for another union event, leaving him to address a largely empty room.

Carl’s testimony was a stark counterpoint to the prevailing narrative. He spoke of the "impact on the union and the drivers and the workforce," but then asked, "Let's talk about the communities I think it would impact in favor of not only people with physical disabilities like myself but people with mental..." He highlighted the staggering unemployment rate in the disability community, twice as high as the general workforce, largely due to transportation barriers. "Do you know how many jobs I've turned down because I can't get there or how many interviews?"

He recounted the frequent discrimination he faced from human drivers. "At least once a week, I get denied access to Uber and Lift because they refuse to take me because I have a service dog and they end denying me my civil rights." He also mentioned drivers refusing rides beyond city limits to maximize revenue, limiting his life to the confines of Boston.

Carl was born with Usher syndrome, a genetic condition that gradually claimed his vision and hearing. He drove until he was 30, only stopping when he realized he was a danger to himself and others. "I know what I've lost," he said, "I want that feeling that I used to have when I drove of freedom and independence and mobility... I want that back." He never thought he would get it, but autonomous vehicles offered a beacon of hope. He envisions a future where the elderly, teenagers texting, or anyone who loses their license could regain their independence. He even has a savings account where he puts aside a few hundred dollars a month "just for the ability for me to buy an autonomous vehicle someday."

He shared a deeply personal story of an emergency: his mother, receiving a scam call about being arrested, needed him. He was denied three rides in a row, unable to reach her. "All I wanted the ability was to be able to go home to my mom and say, 'You're okay and I love you.'" He concluded, "Definitely think about the human component and the people component, but think about it for the whole community at large, not just the union."

Carl's powerful plea, delivered to an almost empty room, underscored the profound complexity of the debate. While one group fought to protect existing jobs, another saw the technology as a pathway to a more inclusive, autonomous life.

The Unfolding Future: Can Compromise Be Found?

The Boston hearings, and the proposed ordinance that would effectively ban driverless cars without a human safety driver, represent a critical juncture. The tension between job protection and technological advancement is palpable, and Boston's "union town" identity provides a stark contrast to cities in "red and purple states like Austin and Phoenix [that] mostly welcome Whimo."

Waymo, through its Northeast policy manager Anthony Perez, acknowledged that "over time there would be what he called transition for app drivers," but insisted it wouldn't be a one-to-one displacement, citing new jobs in cleaning, maintenance, and repair. Yet, the estimate of one job created for every five robo-taxis offers little comfort to those facing direct displacement.

The question remains: are our politics ready for this challenge? Can cities like Boston find a compromise that protects workers while embracing innovations that could profoundly benefit others? The emotional and economic stakes are incredibly high. Abdi Aziz's fight for his livelihood, Councilor Mahia's defense of the working class, and Carl Richardson's yearning for independence all highlight the human dimensions of a technological revolution. As driverless cars roll out across the nation, Boston's fierce debate serves as a powerful reminder that the road ahead is not just about algorithms and sensors, but about people, their jobs, and their fundamental right to autonomy.

Based on "How Stripe deploys 1,300 AI-written PRs per week" from How I AI Watch the original video

Stripe's Silent Army: How AI Minions Are Rewriting Software Development's Future

Imagine a software company where the majority of new code isn't written by humans, but by an army of autonomous AI agents. This isn't a distant sci-fi fantasy; it's the present reality at Stripe, the global financial technology giant. With a staggering 1,300 AI-generated Pull Requests (PRs) — proposed code changes — landing weekly with "no human assistance besides review," Stripe is pioneering a new era of "agentic engineering."

At the heart of this revolution are what Stripe engineers affectionately call "minions." These aren't just intelligent chatbots; they are sophisticated AI agents capable of provisioning their own development environments, understanding complex prompts, and executing code changes across Stripe's massive codebase.

From Idea to Code: The Minion Magic

The journey of a new feature or fix at Stripe often begins in familiar, human-centric spaces: a Google Doc outlining a new feature, a Jira ticket, or even a casual conversation in Slack. But instead of an engineer immediately diving into a text editor, a simple emoji click can now kick off an AI minion.

Steve Khaliski, a software engineer at Stripe, describes this shift as a dramatic reduction in "activation energy." "I don't remember the last time I started work in the text editor," he admits. Instead, the minion "will sort of attempt to one-shot resolving that prompt using all the tools that are available at Stripe." This includes internal documentation, continuous integration (CI) systems, and test data, allowing the agent to loop through and attempt to solve the prompt autonomously.

For larger organizations, this streamlined approach is a game-changer. Claravel, host of the "How I AI" channel, highlights the inherent friction that often plagues big companies: "Not only can I have one of these, but I could have many, many of these running in parallel in isolated environments making isolated changes all at the same time." This eliminates bottlenecks caused by lack of technical expertise, operational coordination, or siloed thinking, allowing good ideas to quickly translate into tangible code.

The Virtuous Loop: Developer Experience Powers AI

The success of Stripe's minions isn't just about advanced AI models; it's deeply rooted in the company's long-standing investment in developer experience (DX). Stripe has a history of providing engineers with excellent tooling, including hosted development environments that can be spun up with all necessary code and services pre-configured.

"What's good for the developer is good for the agent," notes Zach from Launch Darkly, a sentiment echoed by Khaliski. If a human engineer struggles with poor documentation, complex setup, or unreliable tools, an AI agent will face the same, if not greater, challenges. Conversely, a robust, well-documented, and easy-to-use developer environment creates a "blessed path" for agents to follow. "If there's a very blessed path for 90% of the common activities... that makes the propensity that the agent succeeds really high too," Khaliski explains. This creates a virtuous cycle: investing in DX for human engineers directly benefits AI agents, and improving "agent experience" in turn optimizes the development process for humans.

This synergy also extends to the physical limitations of traditional development. Even the most powerful personal laptops, affectionately nicknamed "Big Boy" by some engineers, buckle under the strain of running multiple "work trees" (isolated code environments). "It starts to sound like an airplane taking off," Claravel quips. Stripe circumvents this by leveraging cloud-based virtual environments. This not only allows for the parallel execution of countless minions without taxing local machines but also enables engineers to kick off complex tasks from anywhere – even on a subway commute – and jump in once the AI has completed the initial heavy lifting.

Beyond Coding: Agents as Economic Actors

Stripe's vision for AI extends far beyond internal code generation. The company is exploring a groundbreaking concept: AI agents as "economic actors" — entities capable of spending money to achieve their goals. This is part of Stripe's three-pronged approach to AI: accelerating internal development, supporting businesses that leverage AI, and enabling agents to transact financially.

Kaliski illustrates this with a compelling demo: planning a birthday party for a colleague. The prompt given to the AI agent is simple: "Research Jen Lee, figure out a good idea for her birthday, find a place... send invites... donate to Stripe Climate." What unfolds is a series of micro-transactions, facilitated by a "machine payment protocol" co-designed with Tempo.

  1. Research: The agent pays Browserbase a fraction of a cent to spin up a temporary browser session, navigate to the colleague's website, and discover her interest in matcha.
  2. Venue Search: It then uses Parallel AI to search for matcha-themed venues in New York.
  3. Invitations: The agent interacts with Postal Form, a service that takes a PDF and mails it physically. The AI writes the code to generate the PDF invite locally, then "pays" Postal Form to send it.
  4. Carbon Offset: Finally, to account for the energy consumed by its 70,000 token usage, the agent makes a $1.65 contribution to Stripe Climate, offsetting 4.44 kilograms of carbon.

This demo showcases a future where AI agents don't just consume tokens from large language models, but also seamlessly pay for third-party services as needed. This "agent receipt" makes the economics of AI explicit, showing the token cost alongside the dollar cost of external services. Khaliski notes, "The token and the currency that backs it, like they feel closer than ever." This opens up entirely new business models focused on providing hyper-useful, ephemeral API interactions directly to agents, rather than building extensive dashboards or administrative panels for human users.

The Evolving Role of the Human Engineer

With AI handling so much of the coding, what becomes of the human engineer? Khaliski believes the focus will shift. "If coding becomes easier and coding historically has been the bottleneck in product development, it's just going to shift to other areas." Engineers can reallocate their time to more high-value tasks: deeply reviewing AI-generated code, engaging with users, and generating innovative ideas.

Moreover, the natural language interface of these agents means that non-engineers — product managers, designers, or anyone with a clear idea — can now initiate development work with a simple prompt. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry, enabling a broader range of company personnel to contribute directly to product development.

The Art of Prompting an AI

Even with advanced agents, human guidance remains crucial. Khaliski shares his personal "prompting strategy" for when an AI minion doesn't "one-shot" the solution:

Stripe's journey with AI minions is a powerful testament to the transformative potential of agentic engineering. By leveraging strong developer tooling, cloud environments, and an innovative economic framework, Stripe is not just accelerating its own development but also laying the groundwork for a future where AI agents are not only code generators but active, transacting participants in the digital economy. The silent army is growing, and the future of software development is being rewritten, one AI-generated PR at a time.

Based on "Are Higher Energy Prices Here to Stay?" from New York Times Podcasts Watch the original video

The Energy Earthquake: How Gulf Attacks Sent Global Prices Soaring – And Why They Might Stay There

For weeks, the global conversation around energy prices has been dominated by the escalating conflict in the Persian Gulf. Initially, many, including President Trump, suggested that rising costs would be a temporary blip, a mere inconvenience tied to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But a series of devastating strikes last week on critical natural gas facilities in Qatar and other Gulf nations have fundamentally reshaped this outlook, transforming a short-term transit problem into a years-long crisis of production capacity.

"Instead of talking about the impact in terms of days and weeks, now we're talking about it in terms of months and years," explains Patricia Cohen, a New York Times colleague, highlighting the profound shift in the energy landscape. The economic ripples from these attacks are already being felt worldwide, promising a future of elevated energy costs and far-reaching consequences.

From Transit to Destruction: The New Phase of Conflict

The initial focus on the Strait of Hormuz centered on a transportation bottleneck. If the strait, a vital choke point for oil and gas shipping, were closed, prices would spike due to uncertainty over when it would reopen. While still a major concern, recent events have introduced a more insidious threat: direct damage to the infrastructure that extracts and processes energy.

The conflict escalated rapidly. Israel struck a major Iranian gas complex, prompting swift retaliation from Iran. Among the most significant targets was Qatar's Ras Laffan, the world's largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility. An Iranian missile strike severely damaged this critical hub, targeting its gas fields and, crucially, destroying two "LNG trains."

These "trains" are not what their name suggests. They are highly complex, multi-billion-dollar industrial plants designed to process natural gas. Here, gas is super-chilled to a staggering 240 to 260 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, then compressed, reducing its volume by 600 times and turning it into a liquid. This process makes it feasible to transport vast quantities of natural gas across oceans in specialized containers. Building such facilities is an arduous and time-consuming endeavor.

The destruction of these trains in Qatar is a monumental blow. Qatar is the globe's largest producer of LNG, supplying approximately 20% of the world's liquefied natural gas. While production had been temporarily suspended earlier in the conflict due to transit issues in the Strait of Hormuz, the recent attacks destroyed nearly 20% of Qatar's actual ability to produce LNG. This isn't a matter of simply reopening a shipping lane; it's a matter of rebuilding complex industrial plants, a task that could take as long as five years.

The Indispensable Role of LNG

Liquefied natural gas plays a pivotal role in the global energy mix. Many countries have shifted from dirtier fossil fuels like coal to LNG because it's significantly cleaner – about 30% cleaner than oil. This makes it a crucial component in their energy diversification strategies, particularly for nations aiming to reduce their carbon footprint while maintaining robust energy supplies.

Asian powerhouses like Japan and South Korea are heavily reliant on LNG. Japan, for instance, has reduced its dependence on nuclear power and coal, with LNG now constituting about 21% of its total energy supply and generating 30% of its electricity. In South Korea, LNG accounts for 20% of its total energy and 25% of its electricity, with usage increasing by over 200% in the last 25 years. This energy powers homes, businesses, and industries, from charging cell phones to running massive factories.

Beyond direct energy generation, LNG processing yields critical byproducts essential for industrial production and the global food supply:

A Global "Double Whammy": Ripple Effects Across Continents

The destruction of LNG capacity, layered on top of existing oil price volatility, has created a "double whammy" for economies worldwide.

Vulnerable Nations Bear the Brunt: Developing countries and fragile economies are facing dire consequences. In Pakistan, skyrocketing fuel prices have led to widespread power shortages, accompanied by the closure of schools and government offices. Sri Lanka faces similar challenges. Thailand has implemented extreme energy-saving measures, ordering government workers to suspend overseas trips, work from home, take stairs instead of elevators, and even shortening the work week to four days. These actions underscore the profound fear that these nations harbor regarding the conflict's prolonged impact.

Rich Countries Are Not Immune: The crisis is also reaching affluent nations. South Korea has imposed a fuel cap for the first time in 30 years and launched an energy savings campaign, urging citizens to take shorter showers and ride bicycles. In Europe, gas prices have more than doubled since the conflict began. Leaders are scrambling to introduce measures to help consumers afford soaring heating bills, often through tax cuts on energy. In Britain, natural gas prices have surged by 40% since the war with Iran started. Many households and businesses are now forced to ration heating, leaving rooms unheated to manage costs.

Even the United States, the world's largest oil producer and a significant LNG exporter, is not insulated. While America supplies much of Europe's LNG, energy prices are set on a global market. When global prices rise, Americans feel the pinch, both directly through higher utility and fuel costs, and indirectly through broader economic impacts.

The Indirect Fallout: Inflation, Interest Rates, and AI

Patricia Cohen emphasizes that the repercussions extend far beyond direct energy costs, creating a cascade of "knock-on effects":

  1. Erosion of Trust and Investment: The Persian Gulf has historically been a magnet for investment, perceived as a safe region for business and residence. The recent attacks, however, have introduced a palpable sense of instability and risk. This "rumbling underneath" threatens to deter foreign investment, undermining years of effort by Gulf States to attract capital.

  2. Inflationary Spiral: Higher energy prices translate directly into increased costs for nearly every product and service. The cost of growing an avocado or producing a pair of sneakers isn't just about raw materials; it's also about the increasingly expensive transportation required to move them. This pervasive increase in costs fuels inflation across the board.

  3. Interest Rate Hikes: Central banks, tasked with controlling inflation, may respond by raising interest rates. While a necessary tool, this makes borrowing money more expensive for consumers and businesses alike, potentially slowing economic growth.

  4. A Threat to the AI Boom: The burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) industry, a key driver of the US economy and stock market, is particularly vulnerable. AI data centers are enormous energy hogs, and their construction requires massive loans. Rising energy costs directly impact their operational expenses, while higher interest rates dramatically increase the cost of building these facilities. Wall Street analysts warn that AI development is highly sensitive to interest rate increases, potentially stalling a sector that has been propping up the economy.

  5. Recessionary Fears: The combination of sustained high energy prices, rampant inflation, and increased borrowing costs paints a grim picture. If oil prices were to climb to $180 a barrel or higher, "then it's going to be very difficult to avoid a recession," Cohen states. Consumer spending, which drives 70% of the US economy, tends to falter when uncertainty reigns, and businesses become reluctant to invest, creating a "crisis of confidence."

The Long Road to "Normal" – Or a New Normal?

Even if the war were to cease tomorrow, the path back to pre-conflict energy stability is long and fraught with challenges. The head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that it would take at least six months just to restore existing production that was halted due to the conflict, let alone rebuild the damaged infrastructure. The full repair of Qatar's LNG facilities, as noted, could take years.

To ease the immediate crunch, some levers are being pulled. The US and the IEA have released supplies from strategic petroleum reserves. More controversially, the US has lifted sanctions on Russian oil exports, a move that provides funds for Russia's war effort in Ukraine, and also lifted sanctions on Iran's oil exports – an ironic "multi-billion dollar war to buy oil from Iran."

The most sustainable, albeit long-term, solution lies in the accelerated development of alternative and renewable energy sources. Significant upfront investment in solar, wind, and potentially nuclear power could decrease global dependence on natural gas and oil, diversifying supply and ultimately lowering costs. However, as Cohen cautions, "the world is an interconnected place," and even energy independence cannot fully insulate a nation from global market dynamics.

The Looming Threat of Escalation

The true depth of this crisis is underscored by the potential for further escalation. Despite being relatively weaker than the US and Israel, Iran has demonstrated an alarming ability to exert enormous leverage over the global economy. This speaks to the changing nature of modern warfare, where a single, well-placed attack on critical infrastructure can have devastating, far-reaching consequences. "One guy on a speedboat with a bomb in the Strait of Hormuz could screw up all international shipping," Cohen observes.

The worry is not just about rebuilding what's been lost, but preventing further damage. What if more gas fields or processing facilities in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or other regional players are targeted? The Iranian regime, viewing this conflict as an existential threat, may be willing to take extreme measures to ensure its survival. This miscalculation, coupled with the profound ripple effects felt across the globe, has led the head of the IEA to label this period "the greatest global energy security threat in history."

As the conflict enters its fourth week, the future remains highly unpredictable. The question is no longer if higher energy prices are here to stay, but for how long, and what further economic and geopolitical shocks await a world grappling with unprecedented energy insecurity.