just as a vibe shift temperature check: after writing this article i am getting 70-year-old retirees from Tucson in my work inbox wanting to talk about recursive self improvement

Starting to wonder if the smartest way to reduce slop is just to produce less code Force code review to continually reduce code while ALSO keeping cyclomatic complexity low Less code means less code to maintain, fewer bugs

We’re ending our partnership with Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX. Under our proposal, Cursor’s direct access to our models would end on November 12. We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care about their experience in this transition and we’re ready to go above and beyond to support them.

“It’s just doing the work and I’m just reviewing it.” — Todd Whitcomb, Managing Partner at Whitcomb & Sheridan. For the past few months, we’ve been building Basis for Small Firms with a community of small firm owners across tax, CAS, and audit. Accountants in our community beta are already getting 10–20 hours back each week. Today, we’re inviting more firms in. Firm leaders can join the beta here:

A lot of custom post-training work being done today will be deprecated in favor of smarter models and continual learning 10-100x intelligence with continual learning is around the corner Compute, time and effort to heavily customize models is not a great use of resources while these capabilities are emerging. They will disrupt the assumptions people are building around today. It analogizes to adapting open source BERT variants to build models for language in 2019. LLMs disrupted this by solving the same problem through in-context learning with much less data and effort. 1. The base model will become fundamentally smarter, there are 10-100x improvements to be made in pre-training alone. 2. Continual learning algorithms fundamentally change the interface by which models are updated, how easy they are to maintain and use, and how much effort is required to adapt them to your domain and context. 3. The context and data sources from the domain, and the judgment of what good looks like will of course continue to matter. But even there, the level of data curation and feedback needed will shrink dramatically. Of course, it's not possible for folks to sit around and do nothing, but it's good to understand the challenges the current stack might be up against in the near future.

“Basis is the end all be all,” one of our customers told us. It’s only possible because our customers built Basis with us. At our first customer conference, accounting leaders kept returning to three ideas: 1. Capacity no longer has to constrain growth. 2. Change management makes or breaks a transformation. 3. Firms have to redesign how they train and upskill their teams. Thank you to every customer who shared their perspective and challenged our thinking. You are building the future of accounting. We are grateful to get to do it with you.