Hello, and happy July 4th to those of you in the US! It's been quite a while since the last newsletter—work and family has kept me busy 😅—but I have a couple brief updates on recent work:

Understanding is the new bottleneck

This past week I gave a talk at the AI Engineer conference in San Francisco about why it's important for humans to still understand the code that our agents are writing, and how we can efficiently achieve that goal with thoughtful tooling.

I published a written version of the talk on my blog and also as a tweet thread. (No recording yet but I'll share once it's out.) If you have thoughts on this topic, please just reply via email here, I'd be curious to hear from you!

Since I'm now (very happily!) employed at Notion as of last year, I also share a few snippets in the talk about how our app is evolving to become a richer medium for hosting explorable explanations of all kinds. In particular, this past week we launched a new HTML block which I'm excited about.

Overall it was a fun conference with an impressive speaker roster, and I enjoyed many of the other talks as well, especially Max Drake on agents on the canvas in TLDraw and Charlie Holtz, founder of Conductor, on orchestras over factories.

Small Talk podcast

My longtime collaborator and now-colleague Max Schoening and I have started a podcast called Small Talk (heh). The rough goal is to have calm, in-depth conversations at the intersection of AI and malleable software, trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world without falling into breathless hype.

It's still an experiment and we've only done a few episodes so far. I don't know if anyone is listening, but we are having fun.

In our last episode, Is chat the final form of UX for AI?), we covered:

• what does "chat" mean?
• when is chat optimal?
• chat++: artifacts, mini-apps
• what's the next form factor?

You can listen on Spotify and Youtube. Or subscribe via RSS in any podcast player.

Let me know if you have any feedback. The format may yet evolve and I'd be curious to hear any reactions.

That's all for now. Happy 4th!