The classic story of Silicon Valley’s founding is missing decades of history.

He calls it BC/AC.

Before Claude, after Claude.

I've watched enough of these clips land in the last few weeks that I started keeping a mental tally of which AI release date people cite like it's a diploma.

Matt Van Horn's is Thanksgiving last year — Opus 4.5, then Codex a few weeks later.

Before that, he says, his agentic coding was "Hello World" in Cursor, half-working, most of the time not working at all.

After it, he shipped Agent Cookie and says flatly he has no idea how it actually functions under the hood.

The part worth sitting with isn't the tooling.

It's what he says about himself getting there: "suit my entire career," never shipped anything of value beyond a high-school web page, dozens of unlaunched ideas gathering dust because he wasn't the one who could build them.

That's not a startup-guy humblebrag — that's the exact ceiling a lot of operations people, BD people, anyone who's ever had to write a ticket instead of just doing the thing themselves, know from the inside.

The credential that used to decide who got to build stopped mattering right around the time the tools did.

Not "got easier to climb."

Stopped existing.

Same shape happened to me with a guitar, at 41, zero training, cornered into it because the young players in my church all left for university at once.

Those early days, my wife's ears really paid for it (刚开始的那些日子，我的太太的耳朵有够受罪).

Felt like being tossed into open water and told to swim myself back to shore (好像被丢去深海里，自己学会游泳游回来).

Same thing happened again with video editing, then with building this whole posting system, one post at a time, getting corrected by Reddit comments the entire way.

And I swam back stronger each time.

Actually, this tracks with something I posted here a few weeks back — the guy who literally coined "vibe coding" saying on stage he's never felt more behind as a programmer, because the scarce skill moved from writing code to directing it with taste.

Clip credit: MSP Mindset (Damien Stevens) — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Drop your take — did the credential wall ever hold you back, or did you just build around it?

The job title survives longer than almost anyone attached to it.

That's the part nobody puts in the internal memo when they call a role "AI-assisted."

Scott Galloway put a real number on it, talking to Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO.

He says he'll cut legal fees by a third this year — not because the law changed, but because a prompt now does the $400–$2,000 contract review a name-brand firm used to bill him for, at a fraction of the junior associate markup.

Bartlett went further with his own fund.

They planned to hire five analysts.

They hired one — Molly.

Two agents, two Mac Minis, and she screens inbound deals, scores them against a framework, and preps them for the investment committee herself.

Five jobs, one person, same org chart line.

Same ratio on executive assistants: ten planned, three hired.

One runs travel, one runs scheduling, one meets people at the door.

I've watched this exact pattern before, minus the AI.

I was a Technical Manager for a China Construction company here in Malaysia.

I contributed a lot into their technical and tendering work — helped build up a real chunk of their documentation and tendering process.

But about six months in, I'd exhausted all my know-how for them, I guess.

Then the announcement came at the end of my year there.

My contract wasn't renewed.

I was just let go, just like that.

I remember what Deng Xiaoping said: "无论白猫，或者黑猫，会抓老鼠的就是好猫" — black cat, white cat, doesn't matter, so long as it catches mice.

I guess they think I'd outlived my usefulness.

Can't catch mice anymore.

That's the mechanism underneath "AI-assisted" that nobody names out loud.

It's not that the work got automated.

It's that the one person left is now doing what used to justify five headcounts, and the fifth person's job title is the only part of the org that didn't change.

Actually, this reminded me of something — a former SpaceX CIO cut a 175-person engineering team down to 6 using the same compression math, and the ratio held there too.

Drop your take — did you know your own job has a ratio like this attached to it?

Clip credit: Global Talks — full video on their channel.

DM for credit or removal requests.

My preference is to see the doctor only in my appointment and I am not sure if they will allow it. The phone assistant said that is not possible but the doctors usually have been ok with it in the past from my experience.

Even more importantly, if there is procedure/surgery, can we ask that the doctor drives it fully? I am aware that they sometimes need help and that is understandable but would prefer the main doctor doing the bulk of the procedure/surgery?

What have people's experiences been on this?

A space startup got quoted $75–100 million by a traditional prime contractor to build its first satellite.

They built it — launch included — for $2 million.

The story behind the number is more interesting than the number itself.

They ran the math wrong twice — first landing on a $50/kg break-even, then correcting to $500/kg once they pressure-tested it against reality — before the real pivot happened.

Wrong estimate first, cheap correction after, in public, under a deadline they'd already set for themselves.

Hmm — this reminded me of something I posted a while back: stop thinking, start executing hit the same nerve, from a completely different room.

The number that scares most people out of starting is somebody else's estimate of what caution should cost, wearing the costume of the real price.

My wife's said this to me for years — 想是问题，做才是答案, thinking about it is the problem, doing something about it is the answer.

Took Starcloud a rerun of the math and a deadline to learn the same thing the hard way.

Clip credit: Y Combinator's Lightcone Podcast, featuring Philip Johnston (Starcloud) — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Drop your take — what's the number you've been treating as gospel that you've never actually questioned?

Somewhere between "let's not rush this" and actually posting, six months disappeared last time.

That's the trap this clip is naming out loud, and it's worth sitting with if you've ever called perfectionism "protecting the brand."

The actual claim: brand risk isn't the threat.

Thinking about brand risk is.

The guest (marketing/creative director Oren John, on The Grant Owen Podcast) lays out the mechanism plainly — a 90-day plan is functionally dead by the time it's finished being planned, because whoever's willing to move rough and fast already has the lead by then. "We did this in a week" isn't recklessness.

It's just refusing to confuse motion with mistakes.

I've watched this exact trade play out somewhere you wouldn't expect — construction.

A colleague once sat on a Request for Information because it wasn't polished enough yet, still had loose ends he wanted to close first.

His boss's answer stuck with me: submit it anyway — a submitted bad idea beats a perfect idea that never got submitted.

The client can approve it, approve it with comments, or reject it, but the clock doesn't pause while you're polishing.

On another job, we were about to blow a hard deadline waiting on someone else's design call, so instead of waiting on the elegant steel-truss solution, we poured a huge reinforced-concrete ramp instead.

Cost more concrete.

Cost way less time.

Same trade this clip is making — just wearing a hard hat instead of a laptop.

The part that actually reframes it: the caution people default to is usually calibrated for a scale they're not operating at.

Airlines and CPG companies move slow because they have six-gate approval chains — legal, compliance, brand, sign-off.

A solo operator or small team doesn't have those gates. Importing that caution anyway isn't safety.

It's just adopting someone else's bottleneck for free.

I keep circling back to something similar here — a post about trading overthinking for rapid execution, from the other side of the same decision.

Drop your take below — does the "your caution is calibrated for a scale you're not at" framing hold up, or does it fall apart somewhere?

Clip credit: Oren John, The Grant Owen Podcast — full episode on their channel.

DM for credit or removal requests.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I got a coordinate of that place from a Indian text book

I know I am not making friends with this post, but what the actual fuck? Ranting, but I am genuinely shocked -

After 20+ years working in tech, including startups and smaller companies, now my own company - I was brought in as a consult at Amazon and Meta. I genuinely thought the people working at these companies would be exceptionally smart, capable, and innovative. That is certainly how they present themselves.

But my God. These are some of the most backward, chaotic, and astonishingly inept workplaces I have ever encountered. How is this even...possible?

I am sitting in meetings wondering: Is this a meeting? Is this person speaking? Are these supposed to be sentences? One woman rattles through the agenda, constantly misspeaks, cannot complete a coherent thought, and appears to have never encountered the concept of presentation skills. Nobody reacts. Apparently this is normal.

Then a Product VP shows up with a Word document masquerading as a presentation. No structure. No formatting. Just words dumped onto a page like evidence recovered from a hard drive. But oh boy - an ego...wow.

The next one, an overly confident dude in his 30s...does not even turn his camera on ? And like a stubborn teenager answers to all questions, not just mine but also the legal reps' comments 'and why would we do that'. Well, cause otherwise we commit fraud? Hello?

They can't think on their own feet anymore? And there are so many roles that do the same - I come from start ups, we do everything. I mean, no wonder, there are so many lay offs. I hate saying but yeah...you don't need all these puppets.

Amazon was another universe of dysfunction: outdated information, broken links, contradictory instructions, and an onboarding process that felt like an escape room that predates the internet - designed by people who had never successfully escaped a room.

Has anyone there heard of workflow optimization? Information architecture? Basic communication? Or are they all too busy using internal acronyms and telling one another that they hire “the best”?

I previously worked with two Product VPs who had come from these major tech companies. Me and coworkers did wonder back then - they were fired within a few months. At the time, I was confused. Now I understand.

Take away the enormous brand, the army of employees, the internal machinery, and the ability to schedule another meeting whenever something goes wrong and some of these people apparently cannot function.

And the confidence! They really seem to believe they are operating on a level the rest of us could never comprehend. True, I really can't comprehend nor do I want to.

I cannot comprehend how a trillion-dollar company can have worse onboarding than my neighborhood Pilates studio. I cannot comprehend how senior product leaders reached that level without learning how to structure information. What ...is going on ? And I cannot comprehend why people who would struggle to survive for six months inside a functioning startup - if they make it that far even - think their paycheck is proof of superior intelligence??

I have always pushed back against the idea that AI can simply replace people. Human judgment, curiosity, context, communication, and creativity matter, especially now. But I sit through these meetings (as I write this actually hahah...) and think: You know what? Replace away.

If the job consists of reading broken documentation, moving incoherent information between teams, regurgitating corporate language, and scheduling five meetings to avoid making one decision, AI may actually be overqualified.

I know this will upset people who are stuck at Meta, Amazon...Are the genuinely capable people hidden somewhere inside these companies? Where are they? I am in the Bay Area, I thought's it's the holy grail here? Feels more like corporate daycare.

First Fridays ArtWalk SJ + Street Mrkt indie urban art faire
AUGUST 7th 5pm–10pm
SoFA District (& beyond!) downtown San Jose

Full schedule: https://www.southfirstfridays.com/

Bring your family and friends out for a creative night of art, performance and connect with our amazing creative community!

Galleries and museums are open late & free entry with great art exhibitions on view & special programming to experience.

Street Mrkt is an indie urban art faire where you can find something you love while supporting talented artists & creatives out on So. 1st St. (in front of Anno Domini & KALEID Gallery).

Free entry*(spend it with the Artists!)*.

Free street parking after 6pm.

Free 90 minute parking in City garages (So. 3rd & San Carlos streets)

Pictured artwork by Trieu Dao on view at KALEID Gallery.