Tyler Steben
@tylerste.bsky.social
Entrepreneurial product guy leading teams to build AI applications for consumers.
Skill-atrophy data in David Brooks' new Atlantic essay: doctors detected precancerous lesions in 28.4% of colonoscopies before AI. After adopting AI assist, then losing it: 22.4%. Below baseline. Map that onto code review before agents do all of yours. https://cleanuri.com/wljO9j
July 13, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Skill-atrophy data in David Brooks' new Atlantic essay: doctors detected precancerous lesions in 28.4% of colonoscopies before AI. After adopting AI assist, then losing it: 22.4%. Below baseline. Map that onto code review before agents do all of yours. https://cleanuri.com/wljO9j
Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) on post-functional product roles: Prototyper, Builder, Sweeper, Grower, Maintainer. His stage mixes: pre-PMF 1+2+3, growth 2+3+4 plus some 5, mature 3+4+5 plus some 2. Sweeper (simplify, unship, optimize) is in all three. https://cleanuri.com/kmBmm1
July 10, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) on post-functional product roles: Prototyper, Builder, Sweeper, Grower, Maintainer. His stage mixes: pre-PMF 1+2+3, growth 2+3+4 plus some 5, mature 3+4+5 plus some 2. Sweeper (simplify, unship, optimize) is in all three. https://cleanuri.com/kmBmm1
Bloomberg (Torrence & Mascarenhas): founder Matt Van Horn runs 6+ concurrent Claude Code agents, one babysitting the rest overnight. Chainguard's CEO told staff eng managers should rank around the 50th percentile of Claude Code usage vs their reports. https://cleanuri.com/PlAlG7
July 8, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Bloomberg (Torrence & Mascarenhas): founder Matt Van Horn runs 6+ concurrent Claude Code agents, one babysitting the rest overnight. Chainguard's CEO told staff eng managers should rank around the 50th percentile of Claude Code usage vs their reports. https://cleanuri.com/PlAlG7
GraphRAG-Bench (ICLR'26): RAG with rerank hits 83.2% on fact retrieval vs MS GraphRAG's 61.0%. Plain RAG without rerank: 61.4%, a tie. The reranker is the win. Graph indexing costs 3-5x, no incremental updates. My 202k-chunk vault gate: verdict no. https://cleanuri.com/rEME79
July 6, 2026 at 6:00 PM
GraphRAG-Bench (ICLR'26): RAG with rerank hits 83.2% on fact retrieval vs MS GraphRAG's 61.0%. Plain RAG without rerank: 61.4%, a tie. The reranker is the win. Graph indexing costs 3-5x, no incremental updates. My 202k-chunk vault gate: verdict no. https://cleanuri.com/rEME79
Andrew Ambrosino (OpenAI Codex app lead) on Lenny's Podcast: his estimate is ~90 uncoordinated internal teams build the same feature in parallel, then the best get merged. Implementation cost trending toward zero; selection is the new expensive step. https://cleanuri.com/nmPmr2
July 3, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Andrew Ambrosino (OpenAI Codex app lead) on Lenny's Podcast: his estimate is ~90 uncoordinated internal teams build the same feature in parallel, then the best get merged. Implementation cost trending toward zero; selection is the new expensive step. https://cleanuri.com/nmPmr2
The tool sharpened the toolmaker.
Through teaming with AI I've picked up habits that show up whether AI is involved or not. Lateral reframes. Anticipating blind spots. Questioning first instincts.
The real ROI from AI won't come from a better model. It'll come from better thinkers.
Through teaming with AI I've picked up habits that show up whether AI is involved or not. Lateral reframes. Anticipating blind spots. Questioning first instincts.
The real ROI from AI won't come from a better model. It'll come from better thinkers.
April 10, 2026 at 6:00 PM
The tool sharpened the toolmaker.
Through teaming with AI I've picked up habits that show up whether AI is involved or not. Lateral reframes. Anticipating blind spots. Questioning first instincts.
The real ROI from AI won't come from a better model. It'll come from better thinkers.
Through teaming with AI I've picked up habits that show up whether AI is involved or not. Lateral reframes. Anticipating blind spots. Questioning first instincts.
The real ROI from AI won't come from a better model. It'll come from better thinkers.
Used AI to stress-test a go-to-market decision. Ran the problem through multiple frameworks.
Most valuable output: realizing I was asking the wrong question entirely. That reframe changed my execution.
AI didn't do a task faster. It changed the quality of the thinking.
Most valuable output: realizing I was asking the wrong question entirely. That reframe changed my execution.
AI didn't do a task faster. It changed the quality of the thinking.
April 8, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Used AI to stress-test a go-to-market decision. Ran the problem through multiple frameworks.
Most valuable output: realizing I was asking the wrong question entirely. That reframe changed my execution.
AI didn't do a task faster. It changed the quality of the thinking.
Most valuable output: realizing I was asking the wrong question entirely. That reframe changed my execution.
AI didn't do a task faster. It changed the quality of the thinking.
ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs. The iPhone did. Great piece by David Oks on paradigm replacement vs task substitution.
Most AI usage today is still in the ATM phase. The interesting part starts when it breaks out.
https://davidoks.blog/p/why-the-atm-didnt-kill-bank-teller
Most AI usage today is still in the ATM phase. The interesting part starts when it breaks out.
https://davidoks.blog/p/why-the-atm-didnt-kill-bank-teller
April 6, 2026 at 6:00 PM
ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs. The iPhone did. Great piece by David Oks on paradigm replacement vs task substitution.
Most AI usage today is still in the ATM phase. The interesting part starts when it breaks out.
https://davidoks.blog/p/why-the-atm-didnt-kill-bank-teller
Most AI usage today is still in the ATM phase. The interesting part starts when it breaks out.
https://davidoks.blog/p/why-the-atm-didnt-kill-bank-teller
Claude Code + @obra.bsky.social's episodic memory plugin + Obsidian as a live knowledge base. Every conversation builds on the last instead of starting from zero. Paper summary becomes research direction becomes prototype becomes automated workflow. Outputs become inputs. Context compounds.
April 2, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Claude Code + @obra.bsky.social's episodic memory plugin + Obsidian as a live knowledge base. Every conversation builds on the last instead of starting from zero. Paper summary becomes research direction becomes prototype becomes automated workflow. Outputs become inputs. Context compounds.
The AI agent market has a blind spot: cross-user agent collaboration.
Everyone's optimizing for "my agent does more for me." The interesting problem is what happens when your agent needs to coordinate with someone else's agent on shared work.
https://github.com/a2aproject/A2A
Everyone's optimizing for "my agent does more for me." The interesting problem is what happens when your agent needs to coordinate with someone else's agent on shared work.
https://github.com/a2aproject/A2A
April 2, 2026 at 5:00 PM
The AI agent market has a blind spot: cross-user agent collaboration.
Everyone's optimizing for "my agent does more for me." The interesting problem is what happens when your agent needs to coordinate with someone else's agent on shared work.
https://github.com/a2aproject/A2A
Everyone's optimizing for "my agent does more for me." The interesting problem is what happens when your agent needs to coordinate with someone else's agent on shared work.
https://github.com/a2aproject/A2A
Endsley & Kiris 1995: operators who only supervised automated systems lost situation awareness. Those who stayed hands-on kept it. For AI agent workflows: don't just review output all day. Do some of the work yourself. It keeps your brain in the loop. https://is.gd/yWoa23
March 29, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Endsley & Kiris 1995: operators who only supervised automated systems lost situation awareness. Those who stayed hands-on kept it. For AI agent workflows: don't just review output all day. Do some of the work yourself. It keeps your brain in the loop. https://is.gd/yWoa23
Book pairing from Rob D. Willis: Thinking in Systems (Meadows) for feedback loops, flows, delays. Good Strategy Bad Strategy (Rumelt) for the strategic kernel: diagnosis + guiding policy + coherent action. One shows what's happening. The other shows where to act. is.gd/MFurMO
March 28, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Book pairing from Rob D. Willis: Thinking in Systems (Meadows) for feedback loops, flows, delays. Good Strategy Bad Strategy (Rumelt) for the strategic kernel: diagnosis + guiding policy + coherent action. One shows what's happening. The other shows where to act. is.gd/MFurMO
Fox et al. 2005 (PNAS): brain runs two anticorrelated networks. Focus vs rest/reflection. Sustained AI agent supervision keeps focus on, blocking recovery. The drain after reviewing agent output all day is measurable, not imagined. https://is.gd/qO3jm1
March 27, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Fox et al. 2005 (PNAS): brain runs two anticorrelated networks. Focus vs rest/reflection. Sustained AI agent supervision keeps focus on, blocking recovery. The drain after reviewing agent output all day is measurable, not imagined. https://is.gd/qO3jm1
YouTube: $62B revenue (2025), surpassing Disney's $60.9B media revenues. MoffettNathanson values it at $500-560B standalone. AI touches 95% of user interactions per CEO Neal Mohan. 1M+ channels used AI creator tools in Dec 2025 alone. is.gd/hSvdDb
March 26, 2026 at 6:00 PM
YouTube: $62B revenue (2025), surpassing Disney's $60.9B media revenues. MoffettNathanson values it at $500-560B standalone. AI touches 95% of user interactions per CEO Neal Mohan. 1M+ channels used AI creator tools in Dec 2025 alone. is.gd/hSvdDb
Warm et al. 2008 measured blood flow to attention regions during sustained monitoring. Performance drops within 15 min. This was studied in pilots and plant operators, but the same brain regions fire when you're supervising AI agents all day. https://is.gd/Wv8dAB
March 25, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Warm et al. 2008 measured blood flow to attention regions during sustained monitoring. Performance drops within 15 min. This was studied in pilots and plant operators, but the same brain regions fire when you're supervising AI agents all day. https://is.gd/Wv8dAB
Sivulka (Hebbia CEO) via a16z.news: enterprise AI adoption repeats 1890s electrification. Companies replaced the motor, kept the factory layout for 30 years. His 7 pillars of Institutional AI are worth reading if you build org-level AI systems. is.gd/9yqNPg
March 24, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Sivulka (Hebbia CEO) via a16z.news: enterprise AI adoption repeats 1890s electrification. Companies replaced the motor, kept the factory layout for 30 years. His 7 pillars of Institutional AI are worth reading if you build org-level AI systems. is.gd/9yqNPg
Ibrahim Bashir's invisible inventory problem applied to agents: when machines evaluate products, they parse APIs and metadata, not feature pages. Product marketing has taught humans about capabilities for decades. Nobody has figured out machine-readable capability discovery yet. is.gd/mZ7uTn
March 23, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Ibrahim Bashir's invisible inventory problem applied to agents: when machines evaluate products, they parse APIs and metadata, not feature pages. Product marketing has taught humans about capabilities for decades. Nobody has figured out machine-readable capability discovery yet. is.gd/mZ7uTn
Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 3B active params, outperforms Qwen3-235B on benchmarks. Alibaba's MoE architecture puts near-Sonnet 4.5 performance on consumer hardware with <4GB VRAM active. Cost-to-capability ratio for open-source is collapsing. tinyurl.com/2dq8597f
March 20, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 3B active params, outperforms Qwen3-235B on benchmarks. Alibaba's MoE architecture puts near-Sonnet 4.5 performance on consumer hardware with <4GB VRAM active. Cost-to-capability ratio for open-source is collapsing. tinyurl.com/2dq8597f
Jeff Dean on Latent Space: Google designs TPUs around picojoules per operation, not FLOPs. At 50 AI agents per engineer, bottleneck shifts from model quality to watts. Compute scales with money, energy scales with physics. Grid capacity takes longer than model dev. is.gd/f84jV5
March 20, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Jeff Dean on Latent Space: Google designs TPUs around picojoules per operation, not FLOPs. At 50 AI agents per engineer, bottleneck shifts from model quality to watts. Compute scales with money, energy scales with physics. Grid capacity takes longer than model dev. is.gd/f84jV5
NotebookLM workflow: 6 textbooks + 15 papers + all lecture transcripts. Ask for expert mental models, fundamental disagreements, and diagnostic questions instead of summaries. MIT grad student (Ihtesham Ali) compressed a semester into 48 hours using this approach. is.gd/MIlKpB
March 18, 2026 at 6:00 PM
NotebookLM workflow: 6 textbooks + 15 papers + all lecture transcripts. Ask for expert mental models, fundamental disagreements, and diagnostic questions instead of summaries. MIT grad student (Ihtesham Ali) compressed a semester into 48 hours using this approach. is.gd/MIlKpB
Google's Gemini paper frames AI not as a research tool but as a creative research partner. Iterative refinement + cross-disciplinary transfer. The useful moments aren't answers, they're reframed questions. tinyurl.com/2d6khx5m
March 18, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Google's Gemini paper frames AI not as a research tool but as a creative research partner. Iterative refinement + cross-disciplinary transfer. The useful moments aren't answers, they're reframed questions. tinyurl.com/2d6khx5m
Anthropic's design team breakdown for AI-era hiring: (1) strong generalist who ships across disciplines, (2) deep craft specialist, (3) prototyper-builder who works directly in code. The prototyper-builder is newest and most in-demand. Mock-first designers are being routed around.
March 17, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Anthropic's design team breakdown for AI-era hiring: (1) strong generalist who ships across disciplines, (2) deep craft specialist, (3) prototyper-builder who works directly in code. The prototyper-builder is newest and most in-demand. Mock-first designers are being routed around.
Brian Flynn's sharpest point: if your service can't be discovered by a machine, it doesn't exist to agents. Product teams build human personas. Nobody's building agent personas yet. That's a gap. @Flynnjamm is.gd/mdvtOr
March 16, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Brian Flynn's sharpest point: if your service can't be discovered by a machine, it doesn't exist to agents. Product teams build human personas. Nobody's building agent personas yet. That's a gap. @Flynnjamm is.gd/mdvtOr
AI adoption pattern I keep seeing in every context, work, side projects, casual conversations: build small thing, use it until it breaks, rebuild. Three cycles in and people attempt work they never would have tried. The tool didnt improve. Their confidence did.
March 16, 2026 at 6:00 PM
AI adoption pattern I keep seeing in every context, work, side projects, casual conversations: build small thing, use it until it breaks, rebuild. Three cycles in and people attempt work they never would have tried. The tool didnt improve. Their confidence did.
Barclays analysts: AI-powered robotics market potential is \$1T+ by 2035. Path: autonomous vehicles first (already advanced), then drones, then general-purpose humanoids. Amazon has 1M+ robots deployed. The supply chain shift is logistics first, not factory floor.
March 14, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Barclays analysts: AI-powered robotics market potential is \$1T+ by 2035. Path: autonomous vehicles first (already advanced), then drones, then general-purpose humanoids. Amazon has 1M+ robots deployed. The supply chain shift is logistics first, not factory floor.