Eric Bahn 💛
10/10 recommend @mattshumer_ as your investor. He is an absolutely legit founder, and I've seen him eat so much glass as a builder. Matt works his butt off for his people. And, he's a delightful human.
Matt Shumer: Reminder for founders:
- I put in super small checks, so tiny dilution
- I will go to war for you if you want me to
- Otherwise, I stay out of the way… I’ve had my own bad experiences with shitty, harmful investors… if you don’t need my help, just do your thing
If you want SF rent to be $10K/mo for a 1BR (you're a NIMBY landlord and you hate newcomers and young people)
only then would you vote for Connie Chan
The Dem machine smokescreen to try to force Chan into Congress is shameless and must be repudiated
Armand Domalewski: Connie Chan has voted against building housing her entire time in office:
-She opposed the Family Zoning Plan
-She opposed turning a Nordstrom parking lot into housing
-The only housing project in her district I've ever seen her support was only possible because of a law
alex peysakhovich
what is happening here:
claude used existing open source tools and orchestrated them together to do a protein design campaign (with a big guide prompt!)
this is a win for claude because doing this orchestration requires a lot of biological judgement and knowledge
however, the tools are doing A LOT of the lifting here so it is just as important to give credit where it is due to the open source academic community. this is not just typing into claude "hey give me a binder to X" and have it spit out a protein sequence.
this also means that the limitations of these tools need to be thought about, and in particular we know that all of these tools fall down when faced with targets that are outside of the range of their training data (so we can't really design binders against most targets with them)
so... this is cool but you really need to think about it in context
Anthropic: Many drugs work by binding to a specific target in the body and blocking or changing what it does. An important first step in the drug development process is designing a molecule that can bind tightly to its target. Traditionally, that's meant weeks or months of expert work per
Peter Yang
Over 40K product teams use @Linear so their report on AI usage is pretty interesting.
Some observations:
1. PM AI adoption is rising the fastest
All functions increased their AI adoption, but product grew the fastest, from 12% to 34%.
When I was a PM, I had a lot of busywork like monitoring Slack, updating docs, summarizing feedback, and more - all stuff that agents are great at.
📌 Link to report: https://linear.app/data
Linear: Teams building with coding agents in Linear now ship 6.5x as much as those that don't.
That's one stat from a much bigger look at how teams build with AI, from analyzing real usage data in Linear.
Read the full story at https://linear.app/data
Over 40K product teams use @Linear so their report on AI usage is pretty interesting.
Some observations:
1. PM AI adoption is rising the fastest
All functions increased their AI adoption, but product grew the fastest, from 12% to 34%.
When I was a PM, I had a lot of busywork like monitoring Slack, updating docs, summarizing feedback, and more - all stuff that agents are great at.
📌 Link to report: https://linear.app/data
Linear: Teams building with coding agents in Linear now ship 6.5x as much as those that don't.
That's one stat from a much bigger look at how teams build with AI, from analyzing real usage data in Linear.
Read the full story at https://linear.app/data
Re 2. Non-engineers are shipping more code
PMs attaching pull requests rose from 3% to 10% in two years. Designers went from 1% to 8%, and founders are second only to engineers at 23%.
I'm actually surprised that designers are slightly behind PMs on this, given the rise of design engineer roles.
Re 3. AI has landed on top of existing work rather than replacing it 😭
Teams now spent more time chatting with AI and delegating to agents but didn't spend any less time on existing work.
I think this is because expectations for what any function can accomplish are simply much higher now.
Kenneth Roth
That Trump officials ignored their own investigators showing elite universities did NOT violate the law shows the wisdom of Harvard's legal challenge to Trump and the mistake of Yale in rushing to try to make a deal that might compromise academic freedom. https://trib.al/WjaABQm
Nathan May
There are 4 huge AI newsletters and then a big gap between them and everyone else.
Have a feeling we’re about to see a 5th :)
Matt Shumer: Six months ago, I wrote Something Big is Happening.
The most widely-read AI article ever. Over 100M views.
Tomorrow, I’m soft-launching my follow up newsletter.
Sign up (free) tonight to get Founding Member status: https://somethingbig.ai
If you know me, you know I don’t do anything halfway.
Something Big is going to be the best and biggest AI newsletter in the world, full stop.
Nathan May: There are 4 huge AI newsletters and then a big gap between them and everyone else.
Have a feeling we’re about to see a 5th :)
Ravid Shwartz Ziv
How Anthropic's new results post would read without the PR:
Claude orchestrated open-source protein design models, PXDesign, RFdiffusion, Genie, BoltzGen, from a 30k-token expert prompt and 12,500 H100-hours of compute, and designed binders against 14 of 15 targets. Hit rates of 22–35% against a 10–15% baseline, where some of those tools already report similar numbers on their own.
The orchestration is genuinely impressive. But the open-source models did most of the lifting, and they came from the Baker lab, Columbia, MIT, ByteDance Seed, and most of them were already wet-lab validated before Claude touched them.
Which also sets the ceiling. All these generators share a single PDB-shaped training distribution, so calling four of them doesn't diversify away the blind spot, since they fail together. The targets that worked are the well-studied ones.
So the valid claim is that an agent can now drive this stack competently in the regime where the stack already works.
Instead, we got this announcement:
Anthropic: Many drugs work by binding to a specific target in the body and blocking or changing what it does. An important first step in the drug development process is designing a molecule that can bind tightly to its target. Traditionally, that's meant weeks or months of expert work per
Oh, and another one of my portfolio companies is about to break out like crazy.
Can’t wait for you all to see.
Matt Shumer: I’ve only backed ~20 companies total. I’m super picky.
Backed both @OpenRouter and @Etched at seed.
This week has been fun :)
I should build an app (or an agent?) where you get and maintain a streak for how many days you avoid bringing the phone to the bedroom.
Have been leaving it downstairs for 3 days now and it has noticeably improved my sleep.
It's the hardest thing to stay disciplined about. Always an excuse just waiting ("let me see what my agents are up to in bed!)"
alex peysakhovich
inspired by the anthropic post, i made a protein font!
how does it work? when you design by differentiating backward through a folding model like esm-fold2 you can ask that the distogram of the folded protein looks like something you want.
a little bit of help from @ChatGPT and now we have a protein font (fable, of course, didn't want to help me).
this was not fully automated, i had to dial in some details like the protein sizes etc, but jointly me and codex got it working.
i put the whole pipeline on my github below so you can mess with it too. bring your own gpus, its kind of expensive.
@Ryancampbell: Latest peak at MoonBase One, playable in the browser with @threejs.
I started this project with Opus 5, and now Grok 4.6…
Kenneth Roth
A majority of Americans believe Trump and his family have inappropriately profited from cryptocurrency since his return to power and that his policy decisions are influenced by his private business dealings, a new poll found. https://trib.al/5OIvHpu
ApoStructura
AI dadacenters just don’t use that much water, there’s a panic over almost nothing.
Here is a short animation to put AI water use in context:
Headquarters: Jason Kelce asks fans to send their pee to AI data centers in new video.
Emily Forlini
Exclusive: Replit taps OpenAI’s low-cost Luna model for new Free Mode
“We’re working more and more closely with OpenAI, and we’re really excited about it,” said Replit president Michele Catasta. “This is the first of many launches we’re doing together.”
https://fortune.com/2026/08/19/exclusive-replit-taps-openais-low-cost-luna-model-for-new-free-mode-subscription-tier/
Steve Rattner
Trump promised to bring down the government’s debt.
Instead, it’s continued to grow, passing 100% of GDP and on track to exceed its WWII record in the next few years.
My @nytopinion Chart:
Replit ⠕
Replit Free Mode, powered by @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna.
Let’s make intelligence accessible to everyone.
Replit ⠕
Replit Free Mode, powered by @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna.
Let’s make intelligence accessible to everyone.
Derek Thompson
Really cool at the top of the WSJ homepage today:
"An experimental mRNA-based vaccine succeeded in preventing cancer from coming back or spreading in a study of high-risk melanoma patients, Moderna and its partner Merck said Wednesday"
Last year, an mRNA cancer vaccine was also shown to stop the recurrence of pancreatic cancer after surgery.
It feels like we're just starting to pry open the heavy door of a new field: personalized mRNA cancer therapies that teach the body to fight cancers after initial treatment
Amjad Masad
Agents made software cheaper but made coding expensive.
Today, together with @OpenAI, we’re changing this:
Replit ⠕: Replit Free Mode, powered by @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna.
Let’s make intelligence accessible to everyone.
Agents made software cheaper but made coding expensive.
Today, together with @OpenAI, we’re changing this:
Replit ⠕: Replit Free Mode, powered by @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna.
Let’s make intelligence accessible to everyone.
Chubby♨️
This is freaking huge: For the first time, a AI-assisted personalized mRNA cancer treatment has succeeded in a Phase 3 trial.
Moderna and Merck sequence each patient’s tumor and compare it with their healthy DNA. AI then helps identify which of the tumor’s mutations are most likely to trigger an immune response.
From those targets, Moderna produces an individual mRNA treatment encoding up to 34 neoantigens, The earlier Phase 2 trial followed patients with surgically removed high-risk melanoma for five years:
- 68.8% remained cancer-free, compared with 49.1% on Keytruda alone
- 49% lower risk of recurrence or death
- 59% lower risk of distant metastasis or death
Now the much larger Phase 3 trial involving 1,137 patients has also succeeded.
Absolutely incredible. Dario was right: cancer will be cured in just a few years!
Matt Calthorpe-Byrne
Re @mattshumer_ unlocked something special. Spent the last week or so iterating with gauntlets. Atmospheric grimey city, 10+ playable missions, reactive AI, great physics. If there's interest i'll share my approach.
ApoStructura
“If they had a cure for cancer they wouldn’t sell it”
Yes they would, because it would make them rich
I wrote about my mom, her battles with breast cancer, and how we’re using AI to navigate the healthcare system.
I'm grateful to @MaorShlomo and the team at the Sijbrandij Foundation for sharing their time and advice.
📌 Read my new essay here: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/my-mom-survived-breast-cancer-three
Peter Yang
I wrote about my mom, her battles with breast cancer, and how we’re using AI to navigate the healthcare system.
I'm grateful to @MaorShlomo and the team at the Sijbrandij Foundation for sharing their time and advice.
📌 Read my new essay here: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/my-mom-survived-breast-cancer-three
Rahm Emanuel
Last year at this time, Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy terminated 22 mRNA research contracts worth $500 million. Same cost as Trump’s gifted Qatari plane.
Today, Merck and Moderna announced that an experimental breakthrough vaccine treatment — developed through mRNA research previously funded by NIH — has shown signs of preventing cancer from returning or spreading in a study of high-risk melanoma patients.
Thank god the NIH funded this before Kennedy and the Trump administration showed up to degrade America’s health and leadership.
Which Republican senator has the courage to tell Secretary Kennedy that his decisions are making Americans sicker and letting China take the lead on research, science, and technology?
I’ll save you the time and give you the answer: none of them.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/merck-moderna-say-melanoma-vaccine-promise-prevent-recurrence-cancer-rcna593316
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
Remember, this is the technology that RFK and Trump are trying to kill.
The Kobeissi Letter: BREAKING: Moderna stock, $MRNA, surges over +110% after announcing the first ever positive Phase 3 results for a personalized cancer vaccine.
When ideology creeps into reporting it actually has an impact: it moves the Overton window and votes
If you wonder how it is a school district could willingly choose to stop teaching Algebra to middle school kids over “equity,” this is exactly how (yes this happened in SF)
The Voice of San Francisco: The Chronicle's education reporter apparently thinks our education writer is some sort of menace. She has thoughts on this. Absence of measurement isn't equity; it's the illusion of equity - The Voice of San Francisco https://thevoicesf.org/absence-of-measurement-isnt-equity-its-the-illusion-of-equity/
rachael 💫
I was shocked by how much Free Mode is capable of, actually gasped in internal staff testing.
I remember the early days, and the app I was able to build *entirely for free* was more capable and functional than what the entire Agent could build when I joined Replit.
Congrats to the team on the launch 🚀
Replit ⠕: Replit Free Mode, powered by @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna.
Let’s make intelligence accessible to everyone.
Replit ⠕
Replit Free Mode, powered by @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna, helps you maximize making while minimizing token costs.
Samuel Spitz
For $20/mo, Replit now gives you enough free credits to:
1) Build & deploy 10+ apps
2) Make 100s of designs with AI
3) Create dozens of decks for free with Replit Slides
…and still have enough credits to automate your day job.
Replit ⠕: Replit Free Mode, powered by @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna.
Let’s make intelligence accessible to everyone.
"Irresponsible AI Data Centers"
Who writes this stuff?
Governor Josh Shapiro: BREAKING: I just signed an Executive Order implementing the strictest standards in the nation for AI data centers — because I will not allow Pennsylvanians to be bullied by greedy developers and bulldozed by the lawyers working for these big tech companies.
Effective
Farhaj Mayan
Absolutely love this.
The internet is the fastest growing economy.
The best way to increase your surface area for luck is to build something on the internet.
You can now do that for free.
Replit ⠕: Replit Free Mode, powered by @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna.
Let’s make intelligence accessible to everyone.
Jared Friedman
Take a minute to watch this video; it's a cool one. This is not some AI generated video; this is the actual robot the Grip founders built, sorting real trash, at 1x speed.
Grip: Grip builds intelligent robots that pick the trash existing sorting machines can't.
Robotic manipulation just started working. Foundation models can now grasp the deformable, entangled, never-before-seen objects that waste streams are full of, on hardware that's finally cheap
Chris Barber
I asked people: "which AI data startups are most interesting?" The focus was on startups that sell data to labs, excluding the massive ones (Mercor, Surge, Handshake, Turing):
22 votes: Mechanize
12: Proximal
11: Fleet
9: AfterQuery
8: Datacurve
5 each: Bespoke Labs, Preference Model
4: Abundant
3 each: Andon Labs, Latch, microagi, Prime Intellect, Snorkel, XDOF
2 each: Build, Datology, Design Arena, dmodel, Good Start Labs, hillclimb, HUD, Inheritance, Mecka, Sieve, Taste Labs, Trajectory, Vmax
1 each: 37 companies, info in image and below
Disclosure: I'm a small angel in Abundant, Fleet, Inheritance, Latch, Trajectory, and Vmax. I didn't vote.
Ankit Gupta
Moderna is a great example of what happens when people are bold enough to ignore the haters and invest in technology platforms.
In 2019 this company was widely assumed to die. But in COVID they likely saved several tens of millions of lives, bought themselves a financial lifeline to go after cancer, and now they’re going to save many million more.
Incredible (Cambridge based!) company
The Kobeissi Letter: BREAKING: Moderna stock, $MRNA, surges over +110% after announcing the first ever positive Phase 3 results for a personalized cancer vaccine.
Excited for our partnership with OpenAI
FORTUNE: Vibe coding company Replit debuted Free Mode today, a new feature powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna model. The joint announcement, shared exclusively with Fortune, heralds an enhanced partnership between the two tech companies that will see them work on several future products.
Haya Odeh
💕Replit <>openAi 💕
Together, making creation more accessible to you.
Replit ⠕: Replit Free Mode, powered by @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna.
Let’s make intelligence accessible to everyone.
shaunbjohnson
It was great to be back at @bloomberg studios to chat with @TimStenove1g.
We covered quite a bit, but there's one thread worth amplifying for founders: the growing importance of having a non-consensus view. Essentially, an idea that doesn't seem plausible at first. People disagree with you. Investors leave the conversation disagreeing with the premise. But as the discussion progresses, the hypotheses that need to be tested become clear — and the result can be a category-defining company.
When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startups raced to embrace the technology and build applications that weren't possible before. Fairly obvious applications, like note-taking, were pursued by many. But we're almost four years into this inflection point — the same ideas have been pursued by dozens (hundreds?) of teams — and yet 99% of entrepreneurs still have consensus ideas.
To be clear, you can pursue note-taking. Companies like @WisprFlow recently launched a note-taking app with clear reasons to win. But a consensus idea needs some special sauce — a unique angle that will open up, or create, a new category for your company.
We're always connecting with founders to discuss their ideas. Send me a dm.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-08-14/beyond-chatbots-the-next-wave-of-ai-video
PSA: http://fx.sh has free GLM-5.2 for 2 weeks from @blackboxai, and 50% off @ChatGPT Sol for a month if you use ▲ AI Gateway. Sol is a brainiac, GLM-5.2 is a workhorse.
Usage is much higher than we anticipated. We're working on adding more GLM capacity!
Braden Hancock
It's felt like harness month on Twitter. We're seeing much faster and cheaper gains on a bunch of benchmarks by focusing on harness improvement rather than model improvement.
Allowing the harness to be updated during use is just another form of continual learning. The common issue with continual learning is catastrophic forgetting. But a lot of us have an 80/20 situation where most of our agent usage is in the same domain, so it's kind of wasteful to not specialize the harness for the environment it's being used in.
I like the implicit bet the Exo project makes -- allowing specialization beyond just memories and skills may lower the floor, but I think it raises the ceiling more. Excited to have it in the next (not yet announced) @LaudeInstitute Slingshots batch.
@AlexKrentsel is also an absurdly natural podcast guest. The motivations for the project are well explained on @swyx's recent Latent Space podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lFD-34dhqE
Alex Krentsel: Introducing Exo 🦋 – an open-source agent that can rewrite every part of itself. It learns new environments, adapts policies, even optimize costs (and play games!!)
We've been hacking away at this project with @martin_casado from @a16z and @ankrgyl from @braintrust and friends.
Kim-Mai Cutler
The tragedy here is that UC Berkeley screwed her over not once, but twice. She spent several decades cultivating a high school mathematics program based on Eastern European math circles and university administrators destroyed it with an overzealous interpretation of a new state law for anti-predator fingerprinting requirements so world-class mathematicians could no longer easily give lectures to advanced math HS students. https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/genius-producing-math-program-lost-to-uc-berkeley-fingerprinting-requirements/article_e909f495-7bf7-4662-ab15-5cda7bbcd773.html?s=09
Fireside Alpha: UC Berkeley Professor Zvezdelina Stankova reveals the semester she first watched a third of her calculus class collapse, having to lower grade cutoffs and redesign her syllabus on the fly
"In spring 2023, I'm teaching calculus two, second semester calculus at Berkeley."
"I had
Amrit Shenava 🏴☠️
I used this today and it’s too damn good. Was able to do a ton of productive work. Highly recommend using Replit to build out your ideas.
Replit ⠕: Replit Free Mode, powered by @OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna.
Let’s make intelligence accessible to everyone.
SF has breathtaking views
Ankit Gupta
YC invented the SAFE a decade ago, simplifying the process of raising seed money for founders across the world.
Today, we’re releasing a SAFE tool to make it even easier to raise your seed round on SAFEs. And it’s free!
Y Combinator: In 2013, @cjoneslevy created the SAFE at YC. It's since been used by YC founders to raise $15B+ and has become the standard way startups raise money.
So we're launching Send a SAFE: a free tool to generate, sign, & send one in ~2 minutes, built to be used by founders (and their
Tyler Bosmeny
Jesus. Pocket (W26) just hit $100M annualized revenue run rate
...and they were in YC 6 months ago 🤯
Just wildly impressed by how well this team is executing
akshay: Pocket just crossed $100M in Annualized Run Rate.
We went from $1M → $100M in just 7 months, making us the fastest YC hardware company to reach this milestone.
There are now 270,000+ Pocket devices out in the world.
Morgan J. Freeman
5 million fewer people enrolled.
Premiums more than doubled for millions.
Republicans didn’t “reform” anything.
They just pulled the ladder up and called it freedom.
This wasn’t an accident.
It was the plan.
The November VOTE BLUE to #RestoreACATaxCredits
wei-wei
2013: garry tan builds bookface, a literal book of faces for YC founders
2026: 4m lines running applications, interviews, startup school, cofounder matching, work at a startup, launch yc, and 350+ internal AI tools on one postgres
over 2m of those lines showed up since march.
they also got the whole thing onto the latest rails and react, first time since 2013.
YC still isn't a software company.
it just happens to run on 4m lines of its own, and that's the direction every company is walking in, whether or not they sell any.
https://x.com/snowmaker/status/2088122446880870435?s=20
Jared Friedman: The size of YC's codebase, over the last 14 years.
Who is the Tampa Bay Wave marketing department because this is amazing
Sheel Mohnot: TIME Magazine’s list of “best” accelerators is your regular reminder that ALL media rankings are bullshit
Their formula:
• 40% alumni recommendations
• 45% alumni category ratings
• 10% track record
• 5% expert recommendations
Tampa Bay Wave beats YC 😂
Jared Friedman
YC built software that all our founders have used to send SAFEs for the last few years. Today, we're opening it up to everyone and giving it away for free.
Y Combinator: In 2013, @cjoneslevy created the SAFE at YC. It's since been used by YC founders to raise $15B+ and has become the standard way startups raise money.
So we're launching Send a SAFE: a free tool to generate, sign, & send one in ~2 minutes, built to be used by founders (and their
Logan Dobson
*grasping at straws to make data centers look bad*
"what if they... pay TOO MUCH in taxes??"
Richard Hanania
New argument against data centers: They make you too rich and make your public amenities too nice.
we support business privacy!
https://openai.com/index/offering-zero-data-retention-for-frontier-models/
Ryan Walker
Most founders copy/paste their privacy policy from Stripe or ask Claude to draft an MSA at 2:00 AM, then pray they don't get sued.
You can stop doing this.
We built a free, CC0-licensed legal template library for startups:
-MSAs
-Employment agreements
-Privacy policies
-More...
And because many of you on here asked, here is an agent-friendly link to where these are posted on GitHub:
https://github.com/General-Legal/legal-templates
I love @𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚌𝚎𝚕 on Slack. Incredible ship
Vercel: Vercel Agent can now join Slack with the full production context of your apps and agents.
▪︎ Add @𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚌𝚎𝚕 to any thread
▪︎ Create plans and PRs
▪︎ Roll back deploys and update configs
https://vercel.com/blog/introducing-vercel-for-slack
Rafael A. Mangual
The anti-ALPR/Flock push is basically a replay of the anti-Gunshot Detection/ShotSpotter debate: Anti-police leftists (with the enthusiastic help of a handful of left-libertarians that almost always agree with them) are pushing this b/c they think policing is racist. DSA slop.
Alfred Lin
All leaders need to do frontline IC work again, if they and their teams want to make it through the AI transition.
On a similar note, I've heard of several GTM execs who fully left their jobs, just so they can dedicate 6 months to get ahead with all the new tooling and capabilities. Things are moving that fast.
Stanley Tang: .@andyfang @bcherny on why engineering leaders need to experience the full process of building and shipping again. You have to build with AI to understand where engineering is going and avoid being out of step with your teams. That bias for action is a big part of our culture at
Bart Mol
Me explaining AI to friends
New loop acquired
mRNA vaccines to treat cancer seems extremely promising although ChatGPT tells me there are no active mRNA trials for breast cancer.
How does this process work? It has to finish clinical trial for melanoma first then start another trial for another type of cancer?
Eric Topol: The mRNA vaccine success vs melanoma in a Phase definitive 3 randomized trial today is on top of signs of success for personalized mRNA neoantigen vaccines vs pancreatic cancer, triple negative breast cancer, and non-small cell lung cancer https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/moderna-merck-vaccine-succeeds-in-preventing-melanoma-from-returning-540e9e18?st=gfUmoY&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences
Berkeley's NIMBYs have fought to block every one of these buildings using the argument that students wouldn't be living in them and that the greedy capitalist investors would just keep them empty.
You know, for profits.
Tyler | Kenji Capital: Berkeley just added housing for 265 student across the street from UC Berkeley.
And it's already 98% leased. Sheesh 😮
The Valiant just opened on Durant Ave (right next to Top Dog)...replacing a 12-unit apartment and surface lot building with:
• 83 apartments / 265 beds
•
