Thoughts from San Francisco

A Ben's Bites newsletter offered reflections from a week in San Francisco, describing roughly four groups of AI users: everyday people who treat it as a better Google and may never want more; curious computer users who try tools like Lovable or Replit (about 70% of Lovable signups say they are non-technical) and quit after hitting a database bug; non-engineers who can steer a coding agent; and developers.

The author said curiosity comes from seeing other people's examples, and renamed a talk to "how I build and play with AI." On personal agents, the author called them the interface of the future but not yet, sold to everyday people as doing computer work while others see them as a way to do more with computers. Pet peeves listed: one thread for everything, with Wabi the only tool tried that does a version of ephemeral side threads; invisible memory, addressed by syncing every memory to a Google Doc; and loops that never close across Gmail, Slack or calendar. The author said they are tempted to build their own on primitives like Pi rather than from scratch, and quoted Alex from OpenRouter saying everything looks the same because these are new primitives. Speed matters because the author steers agents all day rather than speccing overnight work, and Microducks and Ghost both sold out in hours.

Headlines included that Claude Code can now be modded like a video game, with mods installed as plugins, including Anthropic's first official mod that flags things in Claude's replies. Karpathy shared tips on understanding LLM outputs. Google Docs now opens Markdown files without converting them, rolling out over the next two weeks. Instinct can now join group chats to plan trips, split tickets, and run fantasy leagues, without friends needing to be on Instinct. Keshav said Instinct was much better than ChatGPT at an annotated interactive map. Also mentioned: a16z's 7th top 100 consumer AI apps report claiming consumer AI is wide but shallow, Devin maintaining memory of how you work in an open format, Era as a fake company to test enterprise agents, and boat offering virtual machines for agents from $20/mo.