From cofounding LinkedIn to backing OpenAI early, Reid Hoffman is in the habit of being right about the future, so we wanted to know what he saw coming in 2026.
In his third appearance on AI & I, Hoffman lays out his predictions for where AI will go in the 12 months ahead. He talks to Dan Shipper about how agents will break out of coding into other domains and who’s winning the coding agent race. They also get into how Hoffman defines artificial general intelligence, the way he believes enterprises will use AI, and why public debate on AI might turn more negative, even as the technology becomes more empowering for individuals.
Hoffman’s other bets on the future include cofounding AI drug discovery startup Manas AI, investing at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, writing books, and hosting the Masters of Scale podcast. He’s also an investor at Every.
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To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:00:52 - Introduction
00:02:20 - The future of work is an entrepreneurial mindset
00:05:22 - Creation is addictive (and that’s okay)
00:09:22 - Why discourse around AI might get uglier this year
00:17:03 - AI agents will break out of coding in 2026
00:24:18 - What makes Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 such a good model
00:28:46 - Who will win the agentic coding race
00:36:13 - Why enterprise AI will finally land this year
00:43:16 - How Hoffman defines AGI
00:55:33 - The most underrated category to watch in AI right now
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Tomorrow is the first day of 2026, and to give our listeners a view of the trends that’ll shape the year ahead, Dan Shipper had Every COO Brandon Gell on AI & I to discuss their predictions for what’s next. They discussed how software will be built, who will build it, and what it will take for truly autonomous AI agents to become a reality.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
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Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps:
00:00:00 — Start
00:01:05 — Introduction
00:01:34 — Reflections on Every’s growth over the past year
00:09:38 — What changes when a company grows from 20 to 50 people
00:11:55 — How agent-native architecture will change software in 2026
00:17:13 — Why designers are slated to become power users of AI
00:23:24 — The new kind of software engineer who will direct AI agents
00:33:42 — Why the next wave of AI training will focus on autonomy
Learn how to use philosophy to run your business more effectively.
Reid Hoffman thinks a masters in philosophy will help you run your business better than an MBA.
Reid is a founder, investor, podcaster, and author. But before he did any of these things, he studied philosophy—and it changed the way he thinks.
Studying philosophy trains you to think deeply about truth, human nature, and the meaning of life. It helps you see the big picture and reason through complex problems—invaluable skills for founders grappling with existential questions about their business.
I usually bring guests onto my podcast to discuss the actionable ways in which people have incorporated ChatGPT into their lives. But this episode is different.
I sat down with Reid to tackle a deeper question: How is AI changing what it means to be human?
It was honestly one of the most meaningful shows I’ve recorded yet. We dive into:
- How philosophy prepares you to be a better founder
- The importance of interdisciplinary thinking
- Essentialism v. nominalism in the context of AI
- How language models are evolving to be more “essentialist”
- The co-evolution of humans and technology
Reid also shares actionable uses of ChatGPT for people who want to think more clearly, like:
- Input your argument and ask ChatGPT for alternative perspectives
- Generate custom explanations of complex ideas
- Leverage ChatGPT as an on-demand research assistant
This episode is a must-watch for anyone curious about some of the bigger questions prompted by the rapid development of AI.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house!
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - START
00:04:35 - Why philosophy will make you a better founder
00:08:22 - The fundamental problem with “trolley problems”
00:14:27 - How AI is changing the essentialism v. nominalism debate
00:29:33 - Why embeddings align with nominalism
00:34:26 - How LLMs are being trained to reason better
00:44:52 - How technology changes the way we see ourselves and the world around us
00:46:24 - Why most psychology literature is wrong
00:52:46 - Why philosophers didn’t come up with AI
00:56:30 - How to use ChatGPT to be more philosophically inclined
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Reid Hoffman: https://twitter.com/reidhoffman
The podcasts that Reid hosts: Possible (possible.fm) and Masters of Scale (https://mastersofscale.com/)
Reid’s book: Impromptu https://www.impromptubook.com/
The book Reid recommends if you want to be more philosophically inclined: Gödel, Escher, Bach https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567
Reid’s article in the Atlantic: "Technology Makes Us More Human" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/chatgpt-ai-technology-techo-humanism-reid-hoffman/672872/
The book about why psychology literature is wrong: The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich https://www.amazon.com/WEIRDest-People-World-Psychologically-Particularly/dp/0374173222
The book about how culture is driving human evolution: The Secrets of Our Success by Joseph Henrich https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178431/the-secret-of-our-success
We recorded someone guide himself into a Jhana live on our podcast. And he narrated the whole process from start to finish.
Jhanas are meditative bliss states and they traditionally require thousands of hours of practice. But Stephen Zerfas and his team at Jhourney are changing that—creating retreats where most participants hit a Jhana in their first week.
Dan Shipper went to one of their retreats earlier this year, and it was by far the best he’s been to. So we had Stephen on AI & I to show us how he gets into a Jhana and what the future of super wellbeing might look like.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:00:56
A primer on Jhana meditation: 00:01:18
Zerfas guides himself into a Jhana: 00:05:47
Why Jhana is about resting into what already exists: 00:36:04
Approaching meditation with play and curiosity: 00:39:30
The potential pitfalls of Jhana meditation: 00:45:04
How to hack your personality through memory reconsolidation: 00:48:21
Why Jhana won't let you numb yourself to real problems: 00:53:10
How Jhana meditation has changed Zerfas: 00:55:36
How Jhourney is using AI to make Jhanas more accessible: 01:09:41
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Sarah Rose Siskind is incubating two types of intelligence at once: her unborn child, and FetusGPT—an LLM trained on nothing but what she hears and says throughout the day.
This includes Seinfeld episodes, YouTube videos about lemurs, eight hours of snoring per night—and even conversations with me, all condensed into MP3 and text files that are used to train the AI. Since FetusGPT is learning English from such a narrow, idiosyncratic slice of the world, it mostly babbles right now, and if she swears, it picks that up too.
FetusGPT is one zany example of how Siskind uses humor to make a bigger point: AI is what we make of it. It’s an approach that feeds through her comedy writing and work as the founder of science and technology communications agency Hello SciCom.
We had Siskind on AI & I to talk about how she uses AI in her creative process as a comedian, and the unexpected support it's become, both practical and emotional, as she navigates pregnancy.
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Pitch is the AI presentation platform that helps professionals collaborate on, create, and deliver winning slide decks — all while staying on brand: https://pitch.com/use-cases/ai-presentation-maker/?utm_medium=paid-influencer&utm_campaign=every
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:01:54 - Introduction
00:02:03 - How Siskind is running an experiment between her unborn child and an LLM
00:07:34 - A demo of Siskind’s FetusGPT
00:15:16 - Siskind’s pick for the funniest LLM
00:17:12 - How Siskind uses AI in her comedy writing
00:24:41 - Dan and Siskind use ChatGPT to write a joke together live on the show
00:37:21 - Why AI is useful even when you don’t use its output directly
00:44:15 - How Siskind used a ChatGPT project to biohack her energy levels
00:57:09 - A question we fundamentally couldn’t have asked in pre-ChatGPT times
01:05:29 - How ChatGPT is a source of emotional support for Siskind in pregnancy
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Sarah Rose Siskind: https://sarahrosesiskind.com/
Siskind’s agency Hello SciCom: https://www.hellosci.com/
Siskind’s book recommendations: I Forced a Bot to Write This Book, The Let Them Theory, Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History
The world changed last week—Opus 4.5 is the best coding model Dan has ever used.
It can keep coding and coding autonomously without tripping over itself—and it marks a completely new horizon for the craft of programming. The dream is here: You can write English, and make software.
We had Paul Ford on AI & I to talk about it. Ford is the co-founder of Aboard and also a prolific writer. He authored one of Dan’s favorite pieces of technology writing What Is Code?—so he’s the perfect person to unpack this with him.
We talk about the wonder—and genuine unease—that comes with using tools this powerful. We also get into what people who love technology should care about as the ground under us shifts faster than we can imagine.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribeFollow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Head to ai.studio/build to create your first app
Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house!
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:01:57 - Introduction
00:03:28 - How Claude Opus 4.5 made the future feel abruptly close
00:08:12 - The design principles that make Claude Code a powerful coding tool
00:10:57 - How Ford uses Claude Code to build real software
00:20:12 - Why collapsing job titles and roles can feel overwhelming
00:22:56 - Ford’s take on using LLMs to write
00:24:09 - A metaphor for weathering existential moments of change
00:25:45 - What GLP-1s taught Ford about how people adapt to big shifts
00:49:36 - Why you should care what your LLM was trained on
00:52:15 - Ford prompts Claude Code to forecast the future of the consulting industry
00:59:18 - Recognize when an LLM is reflecting your assumptions back to you
01:12:39 - How large enterprises might adopt AI
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Paul Ford: Paul FordFord’s company Aboard: https://aboard.com/The piece Ford wrote for Bloomberg in 2015: What Is Code?Alan Kay’s concept of a personal computer for children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook
If you had millions of people using a product you spent years building, would you kill it?
That’s exactly what The Browser Company did with Arc.
Originally recorded in July before The Browser Company’s acquisition by software giant Atlassian earlier this year, we’re republishing this episode because its lessons are truly timeless. Today, the team continues to operate independently under Atlassian’s umbrella.
The internet backlash when the company killed Arc in May 2025 was intense, but cofounders Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal saw that AI was about to make the web something you talk to, not just click into. The best home for that assistant was the thing that's already between you and the internet—the browser. And they realized they couldn’t just duct-tape it on to Arc.
One year of heads-down work later, the team launched Dia in beta, and people are raving about it. Dia is a sleek, fast, browser with AI at its core—it gets better with every tab you open, becoming more and more helpful with time.
And even though it’s still early, Josh and Hursh’s big pivot looks like one for the ages.
In this episode of AI & I, Josh and Hursh spoke for the first time in a full-length podcast about their pivot from Arc to Dia. We talked through their decision-making process, the very public backlash the company faced, and the grit it took to stay the course.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:00:48 - Introduction
00:02:22 - The story of how Dan might've been the CEO of The Browser Company
00:09:40 - The moment Josh and Hursh knew they had to walk away from Arc
00:16:59 - How to handle the weight of the unknown in a pivot
00:23:24 - The prototype-driven culture that kept The Browser Company alive
00:25:06 - Why having a product loved by millions of users isn't enough
00:32:12 - The architectural decisions underlying how Dia was built
00:46:04 - How Dia almost shipped without its best feature
00:50:45 - The best ways people are using Dia in the wild
01:07:27 - How Josh and Hursh think about competing with incumbents
01:17:13 - How romanticism informs the product decisions behind Dia
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Hursh Agrawal: @hursh
Josh Miller: @joshm
More about Dia: https://www.diabrowser.com/
Writer and investor M.G. Siegler’s essay about the AI browser wars: https://spyglass.org/ai-browser-wars/
Note: This episode is a rerun from our archives.
If you’re using AI to just write code, you’re missing out.
Two engineers at Every shipped six features, five bug fixes, and three infrastructure updates in one week—and they did it by designing workflows with AI agents, where each task makes the next one easier, faster, and more reliable.
In this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper interviewed the pair—Kieran Klaassen, general manager of Cora, our inbox management tool, and Cora engineer Nityesh Agarwal—about how they’re compounding their engineering with AI. They walk Dan through their workflow in Anthropic’s agentic coding tool, Claude Code, and the mental models they’ve developed for making AI agents truly useful. Kieran, our resident AI-agent aficionado, also ranked all the AI coding assistants he’s used.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Head to ai.studio/build to create your first app.
Pitch is the AI presentation platform that helps professionals collaborate on, create, and deliver winning slide decks — all while staying on brand: https://pitch.com/use-cases/ai-presentation-maker/?utm_medium=paid-influencer&utm_campaign=every
Timestamps:
Episode start: 00:00:00
Introduction: 00:01:16
Why Kieran believes agents are turning a corner: 00:03:18
Why Claude Code stands out from other agents: 00:06:36
What makes agentic coding different from using tools like Cursor: 00:11:58
The Cora team’s workflow to turn tasks into momentum: 00:15:20
How to build a prompt that turns ideas into plans: 00:23:07
The new mental models for this age of software engineering: 00:34:00
Why traditional tests and evals still matter: 00:39:13
Kieran ranks all the AI coding agents he’s used: 00:42:00
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Try Cora, our AI email assistant: https://cora.computer/
Kieran Klaassen: @kieranklaassen
Nityesh Agarwal: @nityeshaga
The book that helps Nityesh form mental models to work with AI agents: High Output Management
Henrik Werdelin wants to launch a million businesses that each make $1M—and he’s doing it with AI.
After helping launch Barkbox and Ro Health through his incubator Prehype, Henrik is distilling everything he knows into Audos, a platform that helps you use AI agents to turn your idea into a profitable, lasting company.
We had him on AI & I to talk about “portfolio entrepreneurship”—a new breed of entrepreneurship shepherded in by AI, where founders build families of products around the same customer, instead of one moonshot idea. It’s a philosophy we hold close to our hearts at Every.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Head to ai.studio/build to create your first app.
Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at https://www.framer.com/, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house!
Pitch is the AI presentation platform that helps professionals collaborate on, create, and deliver winning slide decks — all while staying on brand: https://pitch.com/use-cases/ai-presentation-maker/?utm_medium=paid-influencer&utm_campaign=every !
Timestamps:
00:01:33 - Introduction
00:02:50 - Dan and Henrik on the new breed of entrepreneurship that AI makes possible
00:11:08 - Why Henrik believes the future belongs to a million $1M companies
00:16:14 - How to build “relationship capital” with your customers
00:21:35 - Why “customer-founder fit” shapes lasting companies
00:23:01 - Everything Henrik learned about himself from a decade of building companies
00:31:44 - How Henrik finds focus and meaning in the daily chaos
00:34:17 - How Henrik is parenting two kids in the age of AI
00:50:33 - The way AI can fix what social media broke
00:56:59 - What happens when AI agents become part of how we tell stories
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
37signals makes tens of millions in profit every year but Jason Fried isn’t all that interested in running a business.
Instead, he cares most about making great products—like Basecamp, HEY, and Ruby on Rails—products that are centered around a single, coherent idea. These products are complete wholes, where each piece matters—like a Frank Lloyd Wright house or a vintage car.
But how do you create products like that?
In this conversation, we talk to Jason about what two decades of building 37signals has been like—and how to build products that have soul.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Listen to Working Smarter wherever you get your podcasts, or visit workingsmarter.ai.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:00:32 - Introduction
00:02:06 - What architecture, watches, and cars teach us about software
00:10:54 - How Jason thinks AI plays into product-building
00:20:58 - How developers at 37signals use AI
00:25:47 - Jason’s biggest realization after 26 years of running 37signals
00:29:58 - Where Jason thinks luck shaped his career
00:32:41 - What Jason would do if he were graduated into the AI boom
00:37:22 - Dan asks for advice on running a non-traditional company like Every
00:46:39 - Why staying true to yourself is the only way to build something lasting
00:49:38 - Wholeness as the north star for building products—and companies
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
This episode contains sponsored content in partnership with Salesforce.
At Dreamforce 2025, Every CEO Dan Shipper sat down with Silvio Savarese, chief AI scientist at Salesforce, to discuss how one of the world’s largest software companies is shaping the future of AI for the enterprise.
Together, Dan and Savarese explore how his team at Salesforce develops AI solutions that now power more than 13,000 businesses—including OpenAI, Dell, and FedEx—helping them become truly Agentic Enterprises that operate with greater scale, speed, and precision. Examples include a large language model built for Salesforce developers years before ChatGPT’s release, and Agentforce, the company’s agentic layer that enables a hybrid future of work where humans and AI agents collaborate to achieve more than either could alone.
They also discuss how Agentforce gives enterprises a deeply unified AI platform that connects their data with agent functionality—making it both powerful and practical. The conversation touches on how Salesforce builds trust with enterprise customers amid the jagged frontier of AI by ensuring consistency in results, while continuing to push the boundaries of what agents can do autonomously. Savarese shares how enterprise-grade simulation environments help them strike that balance, and reflects on how AI agents will ultimately transform how businesses and individuals alike get things done.
@Salesforce #SalesforcePartner #DF25
Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Timestamps:
00:00 – Start
01:16 – Inside Salesforce’s early AI innovations
02:50 – How Agentforce works and what it can do
07:03 – The real challenges of deploying AI at scale
08:57 – Why Salesforce builds simulation environments for AI
12:35 – The future of agents and enterprise AI
At Every, the team credits Claude Code with transforming the way they work.
They now ship to codebases they barely know, each new feature makes the next easier to build, and even non-technical teammates confidently use the terminal.
To explore how this happened, AI & I host Dan Shipper invited Claude Code’s creators—Cat Wu (@_catwu) and Boris Cherny (@bcherny) from Anthropic AI—to discuss what they’ve learned from building one of the most beloved AI engineering tools in the world.
This episode is a must-watch for anyone—technical or not—who wants to understand how to use Claude Code like the people who built it.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share.
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper
Build your first AI-powered app at [ai.studio/build](http://ai.studio/build).
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:01:26 - Introduction
00:02:25 - Claude Code’s origin story
00:07:03 - How Anthropic dogfoods Claude Code
00:14:06 - Boris and Cat’s favorite slash commands
00:15:49 - How Boris uses Claude Code to plan feature development
00:21:53 - Everything Anthropic has learned about using sub-agents well
00:26:16 - Use Claude Code to turn past code into leverage
00:33:14 - The product decisions for building an agent that’s simple and powerful
00:36:38 - Making Claude Code accessible to the non-technical user
00:45:12 - The next form factor for coding with AI
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
- Cat Wu: https://x.com/_catwu
- Boris Cherny: https://x.com/bcherny
- Claude Code: https://www.claude.com/product/claude-code
Good writing has always been downstream of good thinking. The average language model can help you write faster—but can it help you think better?
Danny Aziz wrestled with this question while building the new version of Spiral, an AI writing partner informed by our editorial taste at Every that launched yesterday.
The result is a product—and a philosophy—built by the ultimate craftsman who believes you can lean into AI without blunting your edge with slop. We had Danny on AI & I to talk about using AI without losing your craft. We get into the hidden alpha in AI tools that slow you down, how to code with AI without losing your craft, and everything Danny learned about cajoling AI to write well.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Start
00:01:00 – Introduction
00:05:26 – How Danny used Spiral to prepare for this podcast
00:08:29 – Why slowing down makes AI writing better
00:13:42 – The agents working under the hood for Spiral
00:14:46 – How Spiral helps you explore the canvas of possibilities
00:24:41 – Why Danny pivoted away from the old version of Spiral
00:31:51 – How to use AI without losing your craft
00:34:55 – Danny’s workflow for building Spiral as a solo engineer
00:40:39 – Code with AI while staying in control
00:45:26 – What Danny learned about getting AI to write well
00:47:52 – How Danny used DSPy to give AI taste
00:56:16 – Dan v. AI Dan: Can the machine match the man?
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
This episode is a little different from our usual fare: It’s a conversation with our head of AI training Alex Duffy about Good Start Labs, a company he incubated inside Every. Today, Good Start Labs is spinning out of Every as a separate company with $3.6 million in funding from General Catalyst, Inovia, Every, and a group of angel investors from top-tier AI labs like DeepMind. We get into how Alex learned some of his biggest lessons about the real world from games, starting with RuneScape, which taught him how markets work and how not to get scammed. He explains why the static benchmarks we use to evaluate LLMs today are breaking down, and how games like Diplomacy offer a richer, more dynamic way to test and train large language models. Finally, Alex shares where he sees the most promise in AI—software, life sciences, and education—and why he believes games can make the models we use smarter, while helping people understand and use AI more effectively.
If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share.
Want even more?
Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Timestamps
00:00:00 - Start
00:01:48 - Introduction
00:04:14 - Why evals and benchmarks are broken
00:07:13 - The sneakiest LLMs in the market
00:13:00 - A competition that turns prompting into a sport
00:15:49 - Building a business around using games to make AI better
00:22:39 - Can language models learn how to be funny
00:25:31 - Why games are a great way to evaluate and train new models
00:26:58 - What child psychology tells us about games and AI
00:30:10 - Using games to unlock continual learning in AI
00:36:42 - Why Alex cares deeply about games
00:44:37 - Where Alex sees the most promise in AI
00:50:54 - Rethinking how young people start their careers in the age of AI
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Aaron Levie is AI-pilled, but he’s one of the few CEOs who sees a future where AI agents work for us, instead of replacing us—helping us to do more than we could before.
Aaron’s been the CEO of Box for 20 years–long enough to see a few tech revolutions up close—and taking the company AI-first gave him a glimpse of what the next one means for us. We get into why jobs aren’t going away, the new shape of work, and what it takes to build an AI-first company from the inside.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:01:30 – Introduction
00:02:36 – Why AI won’t take your job
00:06:42 – Jevons Paradox and the future of work
00:10:40 – How Aaron’s experience with the cloud era shapes his view of AI
00:19:44 – Why every knowledge worker is becoming a manager of AI agents
00:25:21 – What Aaron’s learned from bringing AI into every corner of Box
00:33:57 – What’s overhyped in AI today
00:43:31 – How Aaron balances everyday execution with innovation
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
If your MCP server has dozens of tools, it’s probably built wrong.
You need tools that are specific and clear for each use case—but you also can’t have too many. This creates an almost impossible tradeoff that most companies don’t know how to solve.
That’s why we interviewed Alex Rattray, the founder and CEO of Stainless. Stainless builds APIs, SDKs, and MCP servers for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Alex has spent years mastering how to make software talk to software, and he came on the show to share what he knows. We get into MCP and the future of the AI-native internet.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Start
00:01:14 - Introduction
00:02:54 - Why Alex likes running barefoot
00:05:09 - APIs and MCP, the connectors of the new internet
00:10:53 - Why MCP servers are hard to get right
00:20:07 - Design principles for reliable MCP servers
00:23:50 - Scaling MCP servers for large APIs
00:25:14 - Using MCP for business ops at Stainless
00:28:12 - Building a company brain with Claude Code
00:33:59 - Where MCP goes from here
00:41:10 - Alex’s take on the security model for MCP
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
The future has a way of showing up early to some places. In software engineering, one of those places is Cognition—the startup that made headlines in early 2024 with Devin, the world’s first autonomous coding agent, and more recently with its acquisition of the AI code editor Windsurf.
Scott Wu, Cognition’s cofounder and CEO, has a front-row seat to what comes next. In this episode of AI & I, we talk with Wu about why the fundamentals of computer science still matter in an AI-first world, the direction he sees for the short- and long-term future of programming, and why he believes we may already be living with AGI.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Start
00:02:02 – Introduction
00:02:32 – Why Scott thinks AGI is here
00:09:27 – Scott’s personal journey as a founder
00:16:55 – Why the fundamentals of computer science still matter
00:22:30 – How the future of programming will evolve
00:26:50 – A new workflow for the AI-first software engineer
00:29:33 – How Devin stacks up against Claude Code
00:40:05 – Reinforcement learning to build better coding agents
00:50:05 – What excites Scott about AI beyond Cognition
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Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Try the world’s first autonomous coding agent: https://devin.ai/
Naveen Naidu built an app that found product-market fit backwards.
Most apps launch first and then try to find users. Monologue, Naveen’s AI voice dictation app that came out of beta yesterday, did the opposite. It built a following of thousands of users during its incubation period at Every—many of them switching over from venture capital-backed competitors—all while the app barely had a landing page.
The growth has continued in the 24 hours since launch, with an average of 1 million words being transcribed weekly, and in this episode of AI & I, we sit down with Naveen to talk about his journey as the single engineer behind a viral app. We get into the false starts and side projects that taught Naveen how to ship fast, the brutal feedback that kept Monologue honest, why Every decided to build in a crowded category, and the AI coding tools that let one developer do the work of a team.
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Timestamps:
00:01:27 – Introduction
00:03:51 – A live demo of Monologue
00:06:27 – Hard lessons from Naveen’s years in the wilderness
00:12:29 – Building a muscle to ship fast
00:21:11 – The spark that became Monologue
00:26:09 – Dogfooding your way to a killer feature
00:29:45 – Why the harshest product feedback is the most valuable
00:31:47 – Every’s strategy for launching an app in a crowded space
00:40:08 – Giving Monologue the Every “smell”
00:45:09 – Naveen’s one-person AI stack to build beautiful apps
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Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
https://www.monologue.to/
Noah Brier uses Claude Code as his second brain—it’s the coolest notetaking setup we’ve ever seen.
He has Claude running on a server in his basement hooked up to a VPN. It stores, reads, and writes to thousands of notes in his Obsidian vault. He does it all from his phone.
We had him on the show to tell us exactly how he’s pulling this off.
Dan and Noah get into:
This episode is a must-watch for anyone curious about who wants to learn how to use Claude Code to build a true second brain.
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Start building in Google AI Studio at ai.dev.
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Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.
To hear more from Dan Shipper:
Timestamps:
00:01:19 - Introduction
00:04:28 - How you can do deep work on your phone
00:06:14 - Why Noah thinks Grok has the best voice AI
00:11:39 - The nuts and bolts of Noah’s Claude Code-Obsidian setup
00:23:59 - Using an agent in Claude Code as a “thinking partner”
00:35:07 - Noah’s Thomas’ English Muffin theory of AI
00:44:04 - The white space still left to explore in AI
00:50:41 - How Noah is preparing his kids for AI
01:01:54 - How he brought his Claude Code setup to mobile
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
We had Dean Leitersdorf on the pod and he did something no guest had ever done.
Mid-sentence, he transformed from a startup founder in a black t-shirt to a wizard with light shooting from his hands. Then, he was in a white-walled game universe, and when he picked up the tissue box on his table, it morphed into a gun which he could shoot by moving his arm.
He did it with one of his products, Mirage: It takes any live video feed (like Dean on the pod) and instantly renders each frame into a new style of your choosing—40 milliseconds from input to output.
Dean is the co-founder and CEO of the creators of Decart which makes Mirage. They recently raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation to build a new era of real-time generative AI experiences like this.
Realtime generative video models are going to change video games forever, and Dean is on the forefront: imagine creating endless variations on existing titles, like GTA-V with a frigid winter filter, or taking a bare-bones vibe-coded prototype and using Mirage to texture it.
But games are just the beginning, Dean sees Mirage as opening the door to a new medium, a new experience created by AI.
In this episode, we take a look at how Mirage works under the hood, and what the Decart team learned about the future of software while wrestling with its toughest research problems. We also debate AGI—how close it really is, what counts as progress, and what kind of society it might create. This episode is a must watch for anyone interested in the future of gaming, creativity, or if you just want your mind blown by what’s already possible.
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Timestamps:
Links to resources mentioned in the episode: