2026-06-20
Shameless self-promotion
Why isn't your codebase in English? Holden and I had a great time chatting with Kasey Klimes, who is really thinking deeply about how AI changes software development.
Worth your time
How Stealth Works
If America's So Rich, How'd It Get So Sad?
The Post-Christian Condition
"Every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive." Appearing Productive in the Workplace Not so at Good Tokens.
Megan Gafford on Brutalism. Perhaps I'm imagining it, but it seems to me there's something Puritan about the modernist drive to remove ornamentation.
Jehan on the parable of the Rogue Wave. Jehan's blog is on fire right now.
Things I learned
Musings
There is a grain of discovery in the solution of any problem.
— George Pólya, via solve.it.com
The best argument I've heard against the consciousness of LLMs: no one ever claims that AlphaFold or Midjourney is conscious. (Kasra)
LLM Corner
Tyler Cowen on the future LLMs will create, and how to make peace with it.
If AI is so great, why isn't it working?
2026-04-17
This edition of Good Tokens is best enjoyed while listening to the Phil Collins version of You Can't Hurry Love.
Shameless Self Promotion
Introducing AgentCAD: About a month ago I became obsessed with the idea of a command line tool for creating CAD drawings as a way to empower coding agents (Claude, Codex, etc) to be better at designing 3D objects. The first version of it is here and I'd be lying if I didn't say I had a delightful time building it. Try it out by firing up your favorite coding agent, grabbing the starter prompt from here, and giving it something to design for you. You and your agent can send me feedback directly from the CLI app or email me here: hello@jdilla.xyz
Dangerously Skip Permissions: In other command line news, my friend Rami, the head of Product for Stripe's new command line product Projects.dev stopped by Dangerously Skip Permissions to talk about CLI tools and what it's like to be a PM in the age of AI. If you need any more reason to check it out, Rami is one of the 5 best PMs I've witnessed up close. Full episode is here or a taster is here.
Worth your time
Henrik Karlsson — How to Walk Through Walls Reminiscent of Derek Sivers's There's No Speed Limit. Henrik is really cooking right now.
The Kranz Dictum: If this one doesn't get you going, please have someone check your pulse because you might be dead.
The Creation of Instant Coffee I always love a good "how X came to be" piece. I was surprised by how many of these chemical processes I recognized from my time at Macro Oceans.
Rented Virtue The connection between culture and value creation is underrated. So are the Quakers!
We are called to be faithful, not successful. Ryan Burge preaches.
Why Are American Passenger Trains Slow? There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
ChinaTalk's Best Books Q1 2026 is out. Always a good list to mine for your reading queue.
Things I learned
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AI is less popular than ICE. From an NBC News March 2026 poll, via Roy Bahat's excellent "This is Not a Newsletter."
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As an adult human, our odds of dying double every eight years.
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There's only one European company more valuable than Home Depot, which is itself only the number-four American retail company.
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During Pangea, whole sections of the earth went without rain for thousands of years. The megamonsoon cut off the interior from atmospheric moisture for stretches of geological time.
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Consumers aged 55+ now drive 45.3% of all U.S. spending (Unusual Whales).
Musings
"Such is the blindness of men, that they even glory in their blindness." — Augustine
"The life of man is like a game with dice; if you don't get the throw you want, you must show your skill in making the best of the throw you get." — Terence. Literature and History continues to delight me.
"Does an idea belong to those who use it or those who find it? I've decided to think that ideas belong to those who use them, thus to everyone." — Blek le Rat. See also: you don't own the story; you do own the execution.
LLM Corner
Agentalent.ai: A marketplace where companies hire verified, human-supervised AI agents. Each agent has a human handler. It's like a staffing agency for AI. The future is weird and it's already here.
ElevenLabs Secures AI Agent Insurance: First AIUC-1-backed insurance policy covering AI voice agents. They passed 5,000+ adversarial simulations to get it. This is a big deal for enterprise adoption — insuring against hallucinations and unauthorized actions is the kind of boring infrastructure that actually unlocks deployment.
2026-04-02
Worth your time
Craft is the Antidote to Slop — Will Manidis is in my internet top 5. I hope I'm not insulting him when I say he has great taste (link: https://minutes.substack.com/p/against-taste)
Backseat Software I am so sick of being interrupted for feedback.
Speed Can Reindustrialize America Austin Vernon is also in my internet top 5.
Fraud Investigation — Shorter patio11: Fraud is a policy choice.
Robot Soldiers Are Reporting for Duty — Armed ground robots serve a fundamentally different purpose than drones. Drones are light artillery — great at inflicting casualties. But the hard problem in warfare is holding terrain, and that's where ground robots start to matter. The Ukraine conflict is making this real fast. See also: NASA's Perseverance Rover Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars.
Things I learned
It worked for me
Alpha-Bots — Consistently one of my kids' favorite toys. Most likely to get the 3 and 5 year old playing together for 20+ minutes at a time while I'm not in the room.
No Knead Bread — My friend Chris introduced me to this No Knead Bread recipe late last year and it has quickly become a part of my family's weekly routine. Who knew fresh bread could be this easy?