I'm going to try to get into a cadence of writing link posts. Here are a few things I found interesting this month.

The rise and fall of agent civilizations

This incident is great fodder for the whole Substack sphere. It has made me update toward AI takeoff being riskier.

Still, I think the people closest to it, including people at the labs and AI safety organizations, are appropriately calibrated on how bad things are and what needs to be done. I don't find being preoccupied with it a very good use of my time.

Instinct and Stripe

Instinct users who make purchases spend more than $1,300 a month through the product on average. That made me update toward Instinct being much more interesting.

Once an agent gets past a certain threshold of usefulness, it becomes a valuable touch point for users. You no longer have to think so hard about subscription monetization if the agent sits between a user and their spending.

I had also wondered how they got card capabilities working consistently well. Non-residential IPs tend to get flagged, and most card integrations aren't very good. The answer appears to be a direct Stripe integration. Instinct can now request a one-time-use card from Link, authorized for the amount of a purchase.

I'm also curious how they trained their model. I'm doing some work here, so stay tuned.

Patriotism in music

Always a treat to listen to Rick Rubin and Tyler Cowen jam and listen to music. Self-recommending, as Tyler might say.

A reconstruction of Cursor's Grok Bot

I did some digging through this repository. What stood out is how much Cursor leaned into making the desktop app a thin client, with most of the logic living on the server.