Software Development Needs Multiplayer AI, Not Solo Tools
every AI coding tool on the market is a single-player game. cursor, copilot, claude code. they all make the individual developer faster at writing code. And they are brilliant at it. 2-5x individual velocity, sometimes more. but software isn't a single-player game. software is mostly architecture decisions, requirements debates, compliance reviews, code reviews, rollbacks, post-mortems, onboarding. it’s a multiplayer sport with a dozen roles and thousands of decisions that don't just live in one person's head. the key in good software development is the coordination between roles, the traceability of decisions, the institutional memory of why something was built a certain way. that's what software factory is. it’s a multiplayer AI. Requirements captures business intent before an engineer opens an IDE. Blueprints captures architecture decisions upstream. Work Orders routes structured tasks to AI agents through MCP with full context. the Knowledge Graph holds the state of every artifact. try it here: https://t.co/WX1ED4mFIz
Billionaire Tax Actually Targets Every Californian, Not Just Rich
The Billionaire Tax is actually an Everyone Tax. The Billionaire Tax is a new tax proposal written by four professors who don't believe in the American dream. Some of them aren’t even American…go figure. Despite its name, it applies to every...
Weekly Deep Dives for $1k: Quality Signal Subscription
Over the last few years, my team and I have written many Deep Dives - fundamental research that I use to learn, guide my thinking and refine my decision making. We started publishing these Deep Dives once per month. We...
Protests Threaten AI Compute Capacity, Cancel 40% of Projects
Right now, because electricity prices keep going up, consumers have pinned this blame on AI Datacenters. This is unfair but there is no organized or concerted effort being put in to turn this tide. As the perception of AI and...
Utility Profit Caps Spur Ever‑rising Electricity Prices
President Trump asked the Hyperscalers to sign a Rate Payer Pledge a few months ago. It was a smart and good thing by all parties. That said, electricity prices will keep going up. Why? A Utility has a unique business model that...
Avoid Model Lock‑in: Software Factory Enables Enterprise Flexibility
This is increasingly becoming a very useful feature for Enterprises as they a) decide to swap models because of cost b) decide to swap models because of one's ToS c) decide to swap models because of security d) decide to...
Solar’s Near‑Zero Cost Threatens SMR Viability
Nuclear will continue to go sideways while solar and wind continue to go parabolic. The reasons are a) technological and then b) NIMBY-ism and local regulation. The critical question, as this continues for a while, is when the marginal cost...
AI's Physical Limits and Geopolit
My 2025 Annual Letter is now out: https://t.co/vjvpDz6exF Contents: - Returns - If AI kills terminal value, the future is worthless until it arrives - If the US and China own frontier AI, what happens to others? - The surest AI bottleneck is physical - Trust-busting Big...
Land and Silicon Ownership Becomes AI Power Leverage
The game theory in AI has shifted. Having a leading foundational model is important but increasingly it is the zoning approved, powered land that is the gating bottleneck. Add turnkey access to silicon and it’s checkmate. If you have that,...
Secure, Cost‑Effective AI Transformation Without Data Leakage
Told you. At 8090, we’re actually helping organizations (large and small) implement their AI transformation methodically and in a disciplined way that a) doesn’t leak all their data into model training and b) doesn’t just blow their OpEx budget to...
Legacy Replacements Drive Growth, Cut TCO by Half
Facts. The fastest growing part of 8090 is our practice of ripping out legacy systems for large enterprises and migrating them to pristine, new, well documented and easy to maintain alternatives. It also turns out to be less than 50%...
Abstracted AI Models Enable Seamless Provider Switching
A critical feature of Software Factory is that we abstract the models so that you can use your preferred model for things like code assembly BUT you can also change as you need. As it turns out, that last point...
AI Will Dismantle Cloud Giants' Perceived Moats
I think CSPs, neoscalers and hyperscalers are a big class to be disrupted as the population realizes that a) AI is too powerful to be gatekept by a handful of model makers and b) that energy, permitting and construction isn’t...
AI Threatens Tech Moats, Future Cashflow Valuations Collapse
If AI lives up to the hype, it will erode the traditional long term moats of technology companies. As a result, no one with a brain wants to pay for cashflows far in the future. These multiples cannot come back unless...
AI Risk Escalates; Q‑day Nears Each Breakthrough
As discussed on @theallinpod a few weeks ago…this risk is real and, imo, q-day gets pulled in closer in time with every major model breakthrough.
Explore Software Factory: A New Control Plane for Enterprises
Here is a very detailed walkthru of Software Factory. This is best suited for PMs and Engineers who want to start tinkering with a potential new control plane for how software is made... ...we've made a lot of inroads into establishing...
AI Hype Masks Stagnant Productivity and Margins
I think AI has also become the “plausible deniability” to streamline organizations that grew amok during the past two decades. I see more orgs simply recalibrating. The AI use is hi on an individual level in some places but by no...
AI Leadership Must Act Fast or Miss Generation
If the leadership in the AI movement doesn’t step up quickly, organize around the right “go to market” and create incentives to align everyone, this will be a generational fumble. It is, sadly, happening before our eyes.
AI Hallucinations Designed to Drive Token Consumption
Generating useless tokens and giving half answers IS THE FEATURE (see most recent trend on hallucinations). This is so you need to keep prompting it, thereby using more tokens and consuming just enough time as to not use other ways...
Success Rises, Keep Life Simple, Protect Your Time
When your working life rewards you, it’s easy to ratchet up the complexity: homes, cars, travel, possessions etc. I have found that all that complexity comes at the sake of your most fleeting asset: your time. Instead of building things,...
Direct Compensation Drives EBITDA and Free Cash Flow
This is 💯 The outcome is that employees will want more direct comp and you will see it in EBITDA and FCF.
Open, Distributed Compute Can Thwart AI Oligopoly
If Martin is right, he also just wrote the product spec for open source + distributed compute where broad swaths of groups, individuals and organizations contribute their compute resources to training runs for large param open source models. There are...
Secondary Markets Fix Past Investment Mistakes, Buy Winners
Am an investor in 3 of the top 7. Bought secondaries in 2 of the others. The other two: one I don’t know very well, one I think will have to reinvent themselves in a post-AI world. If returns are...
Need Automated Sync From AI Chats to Knowledge Base
This may be a dumb question but I’ll ask it here anyways: I can’t find a good way for my various AI chats to automatically sync its conversation history into a structured knowledge base. So that as I update various chats...
Machines Build Machines: Elon’s Factory Blueprint Insight
This was an incredible moment for me because of what it taught me. He showed me what looked like a chip schematic. Me: “what chip is this?” Elon: “this is not a chip. It’s the factory layout. It’s a machine that...
Capital-as-a-Service Delivers 2x Returns, Legal Hurdles Remain
In the mid 2010s, I experimented with something I called Capital as a Service (CaaS). Companies sent us their data, we ran it over a bunch of rules and sent back an automated investment decision. We funded more than 50...
Crypto Must Harden Against AI-Driven Quantum Attacks
I mentioned this last year on @theallinpod and the crypto bros freaked out. Two things are true about crypto bros: they are extremely technical and extremely belief oriented. Sometimes, though, the latter clouds the former. This paper from Google, though, is...
Explore Software Factory: A Practical Walkthrough Overview
Here is a good and useful walkthrough of what Software Factory is and what it can do...feel free to watch if you are curious.
AI Video, TTS, and Autoresearch Threaten Social Apps
The biggest threat to today’s social media apps is an incredible video model + TTS + autoresearch
Market Valuations Shifting: Nvidia and Big‑tech Multiples Puzzling
The re-rating of Nvidia makes no sense quite honestly. Separately, moving the FCF multiple of Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet also doesn't make sense to me. That said, the pricing model for public markets are changing rapidly... https://t.co/bOnVWE3STO
China's AI Ecosystem: Nuanced Beyond Open‑source Hype
The China AI Complex is much more nuanced than what it appears on the surface (open source/open weights, cheaper/faster/better value props) when you factor in the CCP and their long term objectives. Also, I mostly stopped hearing about Manus after...
China’s Global Ocean Mapping Boosts Submarine Warfare Capability
“China is conducting a vast undersea mapping and monitoring operation across the Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans, building detailed knowledge of marine conditions that naval experts say would be crucial for waging submarine warfare against the United States and its...
Reimagining Software Factories with AI: 8090 Leads
I think the concept of building a Software Factory is now a commonplace expectation. Yay. The winner still isn’t clear but whoever does the best job reimagining the software development lifecycle in a world of agents, AI, expert knowledge, tribal...
VCs Chase Hype, Not Diligence, Fueling AI Boom‑bust
I don’t know if there is anything shady going on here or not, but I will say, more generally, that VCs prefer social proof than actual diligence: “XYZ did the A, we must get into the B” or “ARR is...
EY Adopts 8090’s AI‑Native Software Factory for Enterprise Transformation
Today I’m very excited to announce a global partnership between 8090 and EY. EY will adopt 8090’s Software Factory and use it to help their customers break free from slow, costly and failure-prone legacy enterprise software using our AI-native software...
AI as Cover for Massive Workforce Cuts
What if AI doesn’t need to show an immediate ROI but instead is the plausible deniability companies use to RIF 50% of the workforce they already knew did nothing??
Newsom's Refinery Closures Drive Sky‑high Gas Prices
Newsom drove one refinery to shut down last year and one that will shut down in another month. Our gas prices were already sky high because of these actual and forecasted closures - it forced us to import gas and...
Software Factory Replaces Jira in One Month
Our cracked team just used Software Factory to rebuild and replace Jira in a little more than a month. We first spent 3.5 weeks planning. This is Software Factory’s superpower. It allowed our lead PM, Designer and Architect to thoughtfully...
AI Boosts Individuals, but Firms Still Need Redesign
“In 2026, AI is driving a 10x increase in the productivity of the individuals who know how to leverage it. But that’s not enough. We’ve swapped the motor; we have not yet redesigned the factory. Because of a simple fact: productive...
Avoid Overfitting Evaluations: Blend LLMs and Human Judgment
I think there is something important going on here that is worth figuring out: 1) most models overfit to evals. that said, we need some evals to tell a model if they are good bullshit detectors before we go off and...
California's Billionaire Tax Would Cost Middle Class $2,500
A new @HooverInstitution study confirms what I’ve been saying for months. The CA Billionaire Tax has a negative NPV of -$24.7B. Meaning if this gets on the ballot and is approved in November, California doesn’t just collect less than promised,...
Agent-Powered
As coding agents start compiling English into code, the definition of WHAT to build becomes the highest leverage work. That means teams need to collaborate deeply on requirements. Some people write specs as markdown in Git repositories. But that isn’t a collaborative...
Ledger+ Cuts Family Office Costs From $2M to $200K
Most usage of Software Factory are by companies solving their own problems. They aren’t looking to create public demos. That said, if you’re a fund or family office and need a lightweight but robust way to manage your schedule of...
Software Factory: Human‑guarded, Synchronized Workflow Replaces Agile
This is why we built Software Factory. Human guardrails that are built thoughtfully and maintained accurately prevent drift and are crucial for production software to work over long time horizons. Otherwise it’s just vibe theater. Software Factory has replaced Agile,...
Escaped Social Capital Politics, Now Investing My Own Capital
What happened at Social Capital was several things: 1) Personally, I was going through a divorce. It was a very hard time. 2) My ostensible “cofounders” spent more time jostling for board seats and credit for deals with outsiders vs doing...
AI Power, Compute, Algorithms Multiply to Shift Leverage
I have a simplified conjecture about AI progress. Your mileage may vary but here it is. f(i) = p × c × a where i=intelligence, p=power, c=compute, a=algorithms, multiplied together. This means neglecting any variable creates a ceiling and any breakthrough compounds...
ISL Replaces ETL: Intelligence Beats Raw Data Ingestion
Ingest Structure Learn (ISL) is the new ETL. It used to be the case that a company would try to license this kind of data as an “edge”. I’ve seen many companies in SV try to make this claim. That...
Learn With Me: $2M Insight, Fractional Cost
In 2020, I hired McKinsey to teach me about the global energy transition. I learned a lot, but it cost me more than $2M. After that experience, I decided to build my own internal research project at Social Capital called Learn...
Billionaire Tax Drives $500B Out, Burdens Californians
People I know, with a collective net worth of $500B, scrambled and left California for good yesterday. They took no risk because of the proposed asset seizure tax - introduced as a “Billionaire Tax”. Without these people, the California budget deficit...
Bernie Right About
A couple of important thoughts and clarifications: Where is Bernie right? He is right that a handful of the Tech Billionaire class are completely and totally loathsome. Monopolists who’ve flouted privacy, dampened free speech, enabled debanking and sewed societal chaos with...