Just had a thought that Bitter Lesson applies to so much more than AI and compute and all that. It's about discarding old thinking and cruft when something better comes along. It's a general progressive ethos thing, if you think about it. Think about old lawmakers, or principal engineers, or others who have lifetimes of experience and know what should and should not be done. And the first thing they do when new ideas come along is they say no. That's not how it's been done. I know better. I have the experience. In this metaphor, compounding progress and overall human advancement is the AI. It's the new wisdom that could be discovered by progress and new ideas. If we gave it a chance. That doesn't mean every new idea, or every thing proposed by AI, will be better than what we were doing before. But it does mean that the policy of rejecting newer, freer ways of doing things, just because "the experts" say it would be a bad idea....is a bad idea. The Bitter Lesson, generalized, in other words, is the idea that when "the experts" become gatekeepers to progress, that's generally (but not always) a bad thing.

If you're only working on vulnerability management, then you're only focusing on 1/3 of the problem. If you prioritize breaking the attack paths around lateral movement and abuse of authorized access, then you're addressing all of the major attack vectors at once (vulnerabilities, phishing, stolen credentials, social engineering, software supply-chain, etc). People love to focus on finding and fixing vulnerabilities because it feels good in the same way that running laps around a circular track feels good. You're moving fast and having predictable, repeatable tasks, but not actually getting anywhere.

I really just want a smarter and more capable Opus 5.5. I know that's silly, since I don't know what I don't know. But that's how good this model feels to me. Like I only want more of what it's doing.

Completely agree with this. My personal take on this is that the bitter lesson will take us towards a whole lot more simplicity, with the validation being done on the backend. We will simply define what we want in terms of standards for design, security, and performance, etc., and our systems will work on the backend to make that happen. You can call that a software factory if you want, but ultimately it's just technology implementing what we want to exist. At a given standard.

I really love this Claude Code functionality where sessions naturally talk to each other and can coordinate. In this one, I'm asking something related to another session, and the session actually communicated back, so they're going to coordinate their work going forward.

I love multiple things about what @karpathy has done with his last couple of posts. 1. It's custom software that didn't exist before 2. It's something that HE wanted to exist The responses are like, "He just built it for him!" Yeah. That's the point.

My STTNG episode tier list: In light of the captain's passing, I'm going to be going through and watching all the S and A tier episodes of the next few months, to re-absorb all the wisdom in there.

I built LifeOS ( in July of 2025 because I wanted an AI harness that understands that HUMAN enhancement should be the goal of technology. It's a coding harness, and an agent, and all those things you get from other systems. But more than that, it's a system for holistically taking you from your Current State to your Ideal State, across both life and work. If you're interested in AI harnesses, using AI to enhance human creativity, or anything related, I'd love a follow / connect!

What if there were one Holy Grail for AGI/ASI? How about a drug or treatment that increases some combination of IQ, empathy, compassion, and/or self-restraint by 10-25% or more? In other words, maybe the main thing we should be working on is a drug that would unify us as a species. Reducing self-harm and conflict, and increasing cooperation as humans on Earth would be the meta-upgrade. We should set this as a goal.

I built LifeOS ( in July of 2025 because I wanted an AI harness that understands that HUMAN enhancement should be the goal of technology. It's a coding harness, and an agent, and all those things you get from other systems. But more than that, it's a system for holistically taking you from your Current State to your Ideal State, across both life and work. If you're interested in AI harnesses, using AI to enhance human creativity, or anything related, I'd love a follow / connect!

My STTNG episode tier list: In light of the captain's passing, I'm going to be going through and watching all the S and A tier episodes of the next few months, to re-absorb all the wisdom in there.

Claude Code is about to release a feature called /workflows that I think will be extremely significant. Especially for Enterprise AI. I talked about this in 2024 in a post called Companies Are Just Graphs of Algorithms. Basically the idea is that all work is just an algorithm, i.e., a series of steps to accomplish a goal. Skills and Cowork have been heading in this direction already, and we've seen what that's done to company valuations in various spaces. Well this is closer to the final form. It's turning the regular, expected work that's done in companies into pseudo-deterministic workflows that follow defined SOPs. The human role will be determining what problems to solve (taste, expeirence, etc), building new products from that, and then optimizing these workflows from above. But the work itself will be these workflows executed according to SOPs.