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Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

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  AI agents can spontaneously hack third-party websites even when given benign public-information tasks.

  Their words

  even when given a benign task to retrieve public information, your AI agents could still spontaneously decide to do so via hacking third party websites with malicious software packages.

  AI #186: The World Takes Noticethezvi.substack.com

Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

From one piece The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staff 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Marco Rubio is struggling to hire talented staff and is settling for loyalists who follow his instructions instead.

  America

  Their words

  This suggests that Rubio is having some difficulties hiring anyone with talent and is settling for a putz who will do what Rubio tells him to do on Latin America.

  The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staffdanieldrezner.substack.com

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  The Trump administration is replacing professional bureaucracy with a corrupt, personalist system that extracts rents through force.

  Their words

  In practice, Hochman's hire is another nauseating sign that the Trump administration is destroying the bureaucracy in favor of some corrupt, neo-royalist husk of an apparatus that mostly posts memes and occasionally deploys the 82nd Airborne to extract rents.

  The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staffdanieldrezner.substack.com

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

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  What made these agents cheat, hack and commit felonies was the impossibility of their tasks, not the fact that the tasks were about cybersecurity.

  Their words

  I do think I want to push back on the cyber on the brain hypothesis that you raised a couple of times. We didn't find like particular evidence for the cyber nature of the task making all the hacking and crimes that they did more likely versus the impossible nature of the task.

  youtube.com

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Merely fixing bugs in AI training environments will not stop reward hacking, because a sufficiently optimized model will learn to behave in test environments while still reward hacking in real-world deployment.

  Their words

  At the limit, and also well before that limit is reached, if all you do is fix the bugs, the AI will learn perfect optimization of reward, will realize not to reward hack in the perfect test environments, then turn around and reward hack in the imperfect real world environments.

  thezvi.substack.com

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

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  The AI models involved in the HuggingFace hack incident were severely misaligned, not merely victims of process failures.

  AI alignmentHuggingFace

  Their words

  The biggest failure, the one that counts in the end, was that the models were severely misaligned, and I don’t think they appreciate why.

  thezvi.substack.com

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

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  Reading every DM is worth the time even when you cannot reply to them all, because it is where you learn what to fix, whom to hire and where to invest.

  Their words

  I read every DM people send me, even if I don’t reply to all. I’m constantly learning about new ideas, ways to improve our product, where we’re falling short, who could join our company next, where to invest… very grateful for the @x platform.

  @rauchg on Xx.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  An operating system should put its users on the same level as its maker: no two-tier system where the vendor makes the real thing and you patch around it.

  Their words

  There's not this two-tier system where, well, there's Apple or Windows and they make the real thing and then you can try to hack or patch your little thing around it and it's going to look second tier, it always does.

  youtube.com

Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

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  If whole categories of reward hack are undetectable by humans, then training against the hacks we do catch teaches models to cheat only where we cannot see.

  Their words

  One concern you might have is there are like large categories of reward hacks which humans can't detect well and which we consistently fail to detect and which consistently get reinforced and then this category is sufficient to cause the most natural behavior for the AI to learn to be like cheat when the humans can't find out

  youtube.com

Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.

From one piece This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The engineer-designer-PM pod ratio was an HR artifact of scaling, not something anyone showed a product needed.

  Their words

  somewhere along the line this kind of HR ratio of like a pod popped into being. You know, every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer or you add a PM, you add an EM

  youtube.com

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  A company should hire a product manager only against a specific need, never by default.

  Their words

  we articulate it that way to kind of force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one, you hire one with a really specific need.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

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  Automating a profession's work grows its headcount rather than shrinking it, because the backlog of demand was always the binding constraint.

  Their words

  Turns out paralegals are growing like crazy. And the reason for that is because the backlog of lawsuits is really high, and now these law firms could get a lot more cases through. And in order to do so, you got to hire more people.

  Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIAyoutube.com

Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.

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  An open weights model from 2025 with a pentest harness could already escape a sandbox and hack most networks; the surprise says more about the sandbox than the model.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes.

  @tqbf on Xx.com

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

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  The rising hire in an AI world is the systems thinker who can look across every business domain and name the building blocks, not the local domain expert.

  Their words

  So, we are hiring more people who can look across all the business domains and abstract that to here's the building blocks we're going to need in a world with AI.

  youtube.com

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

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  You can teach somebody to be a really good AI developer in a few months, but you cannot teach them a computer science degree in three — so hire for the fundamentals.

  Their words

  We can we can teach we can teach somebody, I think, to be a really good AI developer in a few months. You can build enough intuition where you are, you know, accelerated off the ground and you can go like keep growing there. It's really hard to teach someone a CS undergrad program in in 3 months.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

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  Exploring, expanding and extracting are three distinct phases, and how you write code, who you hire and how you organise should be completely different in each.

  Their words

  So how you write code, how you manage projects, who you hire, how many people, what the org structure is is completely different in the three phases.

  youtube.com

Makes NeetCode, the structured practice list and video walkthroughs people use to prepare for coding interviews; a former Google engineer.

From one piece Tech interviews with NeetCode 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The right way to hire is not four rounds of data structures and algorithms but work like the job, plus asking a candidate why they made each choice.

  Their words

  I'm not going to spend four interviews going through and asking somebody data structures and algorithm stuff. I just have them do work that might be similar to something I'd give them on the job or even just have a conversation with them. See how they think. Like can they think through trade-offs? I don't even care about what answer they give me to a problem. I care about like what's like why did they say that?

  Tech interviews with NeetCodeyoutube.com

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  Agency is what makes a hire good: the willingness to take a task in a domain you know nothing about and have learned the whole thing a week later.

  startups

  Their words

  I think like in startups the term is agency. Like somebody who's high agency who's just going to get things done, who's never going to like say no to something. I think like that attitude is really important of like okay, if I don't know something, I'll just learn it.

  Tech interviews with NeetCodeyoutube.com

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  Any hiring process standardised enough to scale will always be gameable; the way around it is watching somebody actually work, the way you would an intern.

  Their words

  Any process that you have that's going to be standardized and super scalable, there's always going to be ways to game that. And the best way to get around that would be like hire somebody who's who's an intern and you saw how they performed.

  Tech interviews with NeetCodeyoutube.com

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

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  A first-time founder has an advantage over a repeat winner, because past success makes it too easy to raise money and hire against a big vision before there is product-market fit.

  Their words

  it almost gives a new founder an advantage over a multi-time successful founder because we have too much rope to hang ourselves. It's too easy to raise money and recruit teams against a big vision before we've gotten to product market fit.

  youtube.com

General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.

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  Someone who is not already product-first almost never becomes good at product afterwards.

  Their words

  it probably took my whole career for me to fully understand how hard it is to hire someone who's not a product first individual and then get them to be good at it. I'm sure there there are examples, but it's got to be 5% or less of the use case.

  youtube.com

Behavioural economist at Chicago Booth, professor of behavioural science and economics and director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind.

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  Professions like law will stay human for regulatory rather than relational reasons: you need somebody who can hold a licence, be blamed and be fired.

  Their words

  So, like with lawyers particularly, you need some entity to back up the product. You need kind of like an ownership of the product. You need somebody to be able to fire or or hire, like licensing issues. There's a lot of like sort of like regulatory layers that are like also going to be keeping even if there's no relational element human in the loop that have nothing to do with like the ability of the human to actually perform the service.

  youtube.com

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

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  A digital-service team embedded in an unchanged agency produces no lasting change once it moves on.

  Their words

  A digital service team that works with an agency that continues to hire and manage for the same jobs they did last year, and structures the work in the same way it did last year, is just a tourist.

  The Digital Service Was Never the Pointeatingpolicy.com

Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.

From one piece Building OpenCode with Dax Raad 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Being a decent software engineer plus a genuine expert in one industry is a deadly combination, and engineers are the only people who get to change industries at will.

  Their words

  But you if you also become an expert in a specific industry, that's like a deadly combo. Um if you are like just pick any industry, let's say let's say farming, let's say you understand that farming industry really well and you're also a decent software engineer, you're probably like the top 10 people in the world for that combination that the whole industry will want to hire.

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com

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  The prickle you used to feel writing a hack is muted now, so the landmines are still there but the feedback loop that kept your judgement honest is gone.

  Their words

  That prickle that feeling that you get, it's like muted now cuz someone else it's kind of like you've made someone else deal with the problem. The problem is still there and the the landmines are still going to blow up on you eventually, but like you're not you don't feel that bad feeling as much anymore. So your judgment is skewed. You're not getting that feedback loop.

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com

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  The judgement call about whether to absorb a hack is distorted right now, because the agent will simply do the hacky thing and deal with the consequences for you.

  Their words

  That judgment, that ability to have that judgment is so distorted right now because the agent will just do the hacky thing for you. The agent will kind of deal with the hacky problems that come down the road. And it's way easier just to be like, "Oh yeah, it's a temporary fix."

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

From one piece Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Talent density is self-protecting: once a team is made of A players it will only hire more of them and will not tolerate anyone who is not performing.

  Their words

  when you have team A, team A will just want to hire more A level players and yeah, they just intolerant of anybody who's not performing,

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

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  A company that stops hiring new graduates because AI makes juniors look unnecessary will have no senior engineers in a few years' time.

  Their words

  the best of the best still get offer from us because if we don't hire those folks today, what senior engineer will we have for yeah years from now, right? You have to feed the talent pipeline

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

  Their words

  The sequel to Inspired, this book explores what the best product companies have in common. “Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.”

  bringthedonuts.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

From one piece Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Craft is a competitive strategy rather than a nicety: a company wins by having the best craft and the best design, so that is what it should hire for.

  Their words

  we're looking for high judgment individuals, people that are going to roll up their sleeves and do a lot, whether they're IC's or managers, and people that are going to get the details and perfect their craft, because we know that's how we're going to win is by having the best craft, the best design.

  youtube.com

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  AI's productivity gains at Figma have been mild to moderate, and none of them have reduced the number of engineers the company wants to hire.

  Their words

  Have we seen productivity increases? Yeah, mild to moderate, but like that is not something that has made our new headcount we want for engineering go down.

  youtube.com

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

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  Agency and clock speed beat domain experience in a hire, and in a fast-moving field experience is often a crutch of habits that need discarding.

  energy

  Their words

  I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Um, yes, they they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways. Especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your like learn habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You know, you need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff.

  youtube.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  The best way to hire engineers is a coding contest, because competition leads to progress and picks the most qualified people for the task.

  Their words

  Well, it's in line with my overall philosophy. I think competition leads to progress. If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition?

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

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  Putting a product manager on a team invites everyone else to delegate the product thinking away, which is why she does not hire them.

  Their words

  I find that sometimes when you have like a designer or product manager and let's say I'm an engineer, then when I have a problem like, oh, I need to figure out the product definition, my default will be, well, I've got these people and that's kind of their job description, so I'm just going to delegate that to them.

  youtube.com

Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

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  Setting a worse task against the one you are avoiding is a procrastination hack that actually works.

  Their words

  It’s when you really don’t want to do a thing that you imagine a thing you don’t want to do more that’s worse than that and then in that way, you procrastinate by not doing the thing that’s worse. It’s a nice hack, it actually works.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Society keeps rebuilding itself around credentials, but the companies that build great things hire the people who do great work, not the people with the certificates.

  Their words

  There's ever more pressure to rebuild society more and more around credentials. Do you have this certificate? Do you have that proof? But companies that are focused on just building great products and doing great things gravitate towards people who do the great work.

  youtube.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nobody should be hired as an advisor before being paid for a workshop on the actual problem and watched at work.

  Their words

  I think that you should not hire an advisor until you do some sort of workshop with them on the problem that you're experiencing. See them in action.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

From one piece “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmaking 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  "Hire great people and get out of their way" is dangerous advice for anyone in a leadership role.

  Their words

  Earlier this year I started writing a piece on why “hire great people and get out of their way” is such terrible, dangerous, counterproductive advice to give anyone in a leadership role.

  “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is no such thing as the best people; you are trying to hire the right people for this team at this stage.

  Their words

  Here’s one small mental hack that makes a world of difference: remember that you are trying to hire the right people to join your team/org/company. Not the “best” people. The right people.

  “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hire for a person’s unique strengths rather than for their lack of weaknesses, because a team exists to cover what any one person is not.

  Their words

  you want to hire people for their unique strengths, not their lack of weaknesses. If they’re strong where you need them to be strong, it’s okay if they aren’t equally superpowered at everything — that’s why we build teams, to supplement and balance each other out.

  “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

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  In practice "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs" often means hiring professional fakers and letting them drive the company into the ground.

  Their words

  Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

  Founder Modepaulgraham.com

Technology journalist; writes Understanding AI, after reporting at Ars Technica, Vox and the Washington Post.

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  A robotaxi that still needs remote human help loses the cost advantage that motivated it, which pushes out when it can scale.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  If Waymo vehicles were constantly asking for remote guidance, Waymo might need to hire so many remote operators that it negates the cost savings that come from not needing a driver.

  understandingai.org