good tokens

Good Tokens 2026-04-17

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

  • AI is less popular than ICE. From an NBC News March 2026 poll, via Roy Bahat's excellent "This is Not a Newsletter."

  • As an adult human, our odds of dying double every eight years.

  • There's only one European company more valuable than Home Depot, which is itself only the number-four American retail company.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Good Tokens 2026-04-02

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?

Good tokens 2025-04-03

2025-04-04

Some shameless self promotion

Apollo by James Edward Dillard.

Worth your time

  1. Good conversations have door knobs.
  2. David Burns on relationships and blame on the Clearer Thinking Podcast. This one was great.
  3. The potency of jokes by Ian Leslie
  4. Torpedo bats are taking Major League Baseball by storm. Yet another reminder that the efficient market hypothesis is a lie. We experiment less than we should.
  5. How silica gel took over the world. I need to start compiling a list of these stories about how materials are adopted.

Things I learned

  1. Paul Skenes makes history
  2. Half of recorded history came before the Old Testament — the Literature and History Podcast
  3. Facts about mushrooms:

    4. A single fungal organism can ~live for thousands of years~ and ~span over miles~. Their vast underground webs are largely invisible to us but ~communicate impossibly complex information~ we barely know how to decode. They are among the oldest life forms on earth, ~predating plants by more than 300 million years~.

Good tokens 2025-03-28

2025-03-29

Worth your time

  1. Do not end the week with nothing by Patrick McKenzie

  2. The Internet of Beefs by Venkatesh Rao

  3. How to run major projects by Ben Kuhn, via Mark Larson

  4. The Decline of Industrial American Science was an interesting read. It actually made me think of this conversation about stagnation in beauty ingredients that’s happening in the beauty industry. I wonder if they’re related!

  5. Uri Bram on 80/20 weight loss: “Still, as with ~other entries in this series~, the people who care deeply about stuff are often unwilling to write up an 80/20 version of it, so you get me instead.” Petition for Uri to become the 80/20 guy. This is a good lane for you, Uri!

  6. How to be good at dating <- applicable to things besides just dating! Breaking the problem down and then actually changing behavior to get different results works surprisingly well provided you’re willing to do it. Often success doesn’t come to us the way we want to receive it. I can’t remember where I read this, but somewhere someone posted about how Harry Potter ruined a generation of children because he just wakes up one day and finds out that he’s this ridiculously special wizard, when in reality it’s Hermione we should be admiring because has to work to be great. If you know who wrote this and can point me to it, come find me!

Musings

Good tokens 2025-02-07

2025-02-07

Worth your time

A deep dive on how a clothing brand prices their clothes.

Ethan Mollick on Deep Research. I’ve been working with it quite a bit this week and generally speaking been impressed with it.

Musings

“All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen” — Sidney Lumet, via The Browser

An underrated truth about the modern world is that everyone reads their @mentions and sees who likes their posts

The Luka trade is a reminder that even at the highest levels, mistakes genuinely do happen. You would think that evaluating the market for one of the 5 best basketball players in the world would be an efficient market… but it appears that it wasn’t!

Reflecting on the ROI of marketing efforts I’ve done recently

  • Print isn’t that useful unless it’s with a writer with a voice (e.g., a substack)

  • Audio and video really make an impact. You want to be inside someone’s EarPods.

  • Speaking at trade shows is helpful in expanding your network

Asking good questions is more important than ever

On the modern internet, one should never be self congratulatory. It’s totally okay to accept compliments from your audience, but the moment you start saying or implying you’re great at something or have it figured out, you begin to sew the seeds of your downfall.