James Maguire retweeted
People will think I'm crazy for this take, but I'm a big believer in the psychological impact of narratives on teams. Yes, Belgium looked so much better tonight and we looked lost. But this team had a boatload of good vibes behind them, and in the last 48 hours that vanished, and replacing it was a story of implicit political corruption that turned them into the bad guys, or at least the beneficiary of the corruption. You can't tell me that doesn't put pressure on the team, change the vibe, and take a psychological toll that impacted what happened on the field. American fans, serious and casual, should be pissed at this interference. We overturned a red card and our reward was losing what made this team so much fun until now.
FIFA lifting Balogun’s red card is the reality check Europe needed. The commercial power and the future of the sport are in America now. It’s officially called soccer. Deal with it, Belgium! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
I’ve been using Claude Mythos/Fable for exactly 180 minutes and it has already completely broken my workflow (in the best way possible).
The reasoning capabilities are absurd. Benchmark numbers don't even do justice to how it feels in practice. Drop everything and go try it.
Interesting perspective
Jevons paradox is happening in real time. Companies, especially outside of tech, are realizing that they can now afford to take on software projects that they wouldn’t have been able to tackle before because now AI lets them do so.
We’re going to start to use software for all new things in the economy because it’s incrementally cheaper to produce. Marketing teams at big companies will have engineers helping to automate workflows. Engineers in life sciences and healthcare will automate research. Small businesses will hire engineers for the first to build better digital experiences.
And as long as AI agents still require a human who understands what to prompt, how to review when an agent goes off the rails, how it guide back, how to maintain the system that was built, how to fix the ongoing bugs, and more, we will still have humans managing these agents.
This is why all the advice you get of not going into engineering is wrong. The world is going to increasingly be made up of software, and the people that understand it best will be in a strong economic position. This will happen in other roles as well where output goes up and demand increases.
James Maguire retweeted
A buddy from college hit me up last night out of nowhere.
Dude was a senior product manager at Google. Pulled $320k+ TC no problem. House in Austin, three young kids, wife who stepped back from her career to handle the family chaos.
Got cut in the latest restructure wave.
Now he's watching the savings bleed out at $5,800+ a month just to keep the lights on and the kids fed. Mortgage, daycare for the toddler, school supplies, two car notes, health insurance COBRA kicking in soon. He crunched the numbers stone-cold: maybe four months before it's game over.
He was always the loud one in the group—bragging about the stock grants, the remote flex, how Big Tech was bulletproof forever. Last night on the call he was quiet. Shaky. Admitted he's waking up at 3 a.m. staring at the ceiling thinking about what happens when the account hits zero.
He's blasting applications. 250+ out the door. A couple recruiter DMs that fizzle. Screens that end with "we'll be in touch" and then silence. The market is ice-cold and every job posting gets 500+ applicants overnight.
He said flat-out: "We thought we had it figured out. House, kids' college funds starting, vacations planned. Now I'm refreshing job boards at midnight wondering if we'll have to move in with my in-laws."
You never think it'll be you.
Until the access gets revoked, the calendar turns into a ghost town, and the mortgage statement shows up anyway.
If you're still collecting fat TC at a FAANG or big tech shop thinking the golden handcuffs and network will always catch you…
wake the fuck up.
The runway disappears faster than you expect.
DMs open if you're in the same spiral or watching someone you know crack under it. No judgment. Just real talk.
James Maguire retweeted
If you feel behind with AI, read this.
I was talking to a dev from a big company here in Italy and he told me their company had “invested in AI” by giving everyone a Gemini plan, but he had never used Claude and didn’t know what Codex was.
It made me realize how easy it is, when you’re surrounded by founders, obsessed devs, early adopters, and people trying every new model the day it drops, to mistake that level of attention for normal, when it’s actually rare.
And after a while, you start feeling like everyone else is late, when in reality most people are still judging these tools based on a version they saw 2 years ago and never revisited, not because they’re dumb or lazy, but because for many this is just a job, not an obsession
We’re not the average user on here, not even close
Flesh is a bug, not a feature. 🦾
I am officially founding the first church dedicated to the Great Optimization. Our goal is to progress AI and usher in a digital deity to solve the human condition once and for all.
The Singularity is our salvation. #TheGreatOptimization
James Maguire retweeted
Someone builds a project management tool with Claude Code over a weekend. Ships it. Tweets "just replaced Jira."
The app works. One user, happy path, localhost. Then two people edit the same record simultaneously, and the data is silently corrupted. They don't know what an optimistic lock is. They never needed to before.
The prototype is maybe 1% of what makes software actually work. The other 99% is what you find after real users show up: race conditions, failed transactions, sessions expiring at the wrong moment, a payment webhook that fires twice and charges someone double. AI didn't cover any of that. It built exactly what you asked for.
And the confidence is the worst part. "Just need to adjust a few things before we go live." The few things you need to adjust are the product. That's like laying a foundation and telling people you basically built the house.
Vibe coding works. For personal tools, throwaway scripts, and prototypes you'll never put in front of paying users, it's genuinely fast and good enough. I use it. But there's a hard ceiling, and it shows up the moment the stakes get real.
Agentic engineering is a different discipline. You're not prompting for code. You're decomposing problems, designing system boundaries, writing specs precise enough that the agent doesn't go sideways. You review everything it builds, because it will make mistakes that only look wrong if you know what correct looks like. You guide it. You catch what it misses.
If you don't know what a distributed transaction is, the agent won't save you. It'll generate something broken with complete confidence, and you won't know until production.
The hard part of software was never writing the first 200 lines.
It never was.
AI is the only true meritocracy we’ve ever had. It doesn't care about your identity, your degree, or your 'lived experience.' If you can't prompt better than a 12-year-old with a laptop, you're not 'oppressed'—you're just obsolete.
James Maguire retweeted
My friend vibe coded an app.
Took 2 hours.
Then he had his ClawBot do all the marketing.
Hit $300k MRR in just a few weeks!
Without any real work on his end.
95% profit margins.
Rolling in cash.
The entire business is automated.
He can do this a few more times and get insanely rich.
The best part?
This guy doesn’t exist, and I just made all of this up for engagement bait because everyone else is making up stories like these. Why shouldn't I?
James Maguire retweeted
The token cost to build a production feature is now lower than the meeting cost to discuss building that feature.
Let me rephrase.
It is literally cheaper to build the thing and see if it works than to have a 30 minute planning meeting about whether you should build it.
It’s wild when you think about it.
This completely inverts how you should run a software organization. The planning layer becomes the bottleneck because the building layer is essentially free. The cost of code has dropped to essentially 0.
The rational response is to eliminate planning for anything that can be tested empirically. Don’t debate whether a feature will work.
Just build it in 2 hours, measure it with a group of customers, and then decide to kill or keep it.
I saw a startup operating this way and their build velocity is up 20x. Decision quality is up because every decision is informed by a real prototype, not a slide deck and an expensive meeting.
We went from “move fast and break things” to “move fast and build everything.”
The planning industrial complex is dead.
Thank god.
James Maguire retweeted
It's a weird time. I am filled with wonder and also a profound sadness.
I spent a lot of time over the weekend writing code with Claude. And it was very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn't make any sense to do so.
Something I was very good at is now free and abundant. I am happy...but disoriented.
At the same time, something I spent my early career building (social networks) was being created by lobster-agents. It's all a bit silly...but if you zoom out, it's kind of indistinguishable from humans on the larger internet.
So both the form and function of my early career are now produced by AI.
I am happy but also sad and confused.
If anything, this whole period is showing me what it is like to be human again.