Taylor and Alexa tally up what the agents cost this week, then keep handing them more anyway, from a brokerage account to a harness that never sleeps to a million hours of human video.
Cache Board
Model check-in: Alexa holds on Codex and 5.6, Taylor runs Opus 5 (spiky, in the porcupine sense) with Claude still doing the planning, and moves his Pullfrog runs to GLM 5.3 Flash
Alexa's $3,000 day running agent personas in sprints, Taylor's sixteen adversarial reviewers on a single article, and why four is plenty
What a blog post actually costs, and whether the same money buys a fractional expert instead
Beff on owning and controlling your own intelligence locally, the NVIDIA DGX Spark, Perplexity landing on local hardware, and the Raspberry Pi 5 as the only home board of Taylor's that aged well
Mustafa can't believe it runs Gemma 4 locally. That's the Arduino VENTUNO Q, $299 with an amazingly done ad, plus a modest proposal that companies let you expense home inference to shrink the API contract (biz dev folks, send gear)
Jaya Gupta says hello, local inference to the M6 Mac mini. Apple's price hikes and RAM shortages, Peter Bell's Mac mini fleet, and a push-up ad that learned from the iPad "Crush" backlash
a16z's chart of the week: agents burn nearly 5x the tokens people do, and Dosu's data agrees, with one team's knowledge base seeing roughly 1,900 changes in four weeks and about 18 of them made by a human
Alexa is running Decant, loves file hotspots, and is sending PRs. Taylor's revised pitch, measure your agent sessions before the CFO calls
KP's "wait, this is actually smart" and the before-and-after preview Taylor wants everywhere
Shann on how to build a company-wide skills library, skills as dependencies with short TTLs, why both hosts keep reaching for scripts and hooks instead, and the knowledge-centric self-improvement paper we covered in episode 4
Sam Altman: "we made a chip and it is fast", plus SemiAnalysis benchmarking Jalapeño against Blackwell (and admitting Rubin is the fairer fight)
Bloomberg at the World Humanoid Robot Games, where 666 teams and 2,000 robots sprint with their arms out front, Battle Bots nostalgia, and what an Amazon delivery might look like
Miguel Ángel's weekend experiment: editing video with your hands instead of a mouse on HyperFrames, plus the Vision Pro, Minority Report, Leap Motion, and zombie hands
Wheel of Tokens
The $534 account: Joey Driftwood gives Claude a Robinhood Agentic account, a CLAUDE.md, and a 14x target it will almost certainly miss. Alexa traces the line from NASDAQ's 1971 quote system through the SEC's market access rule and Knight Capital's $460 million in 45 minutes, and asks where the permission boundary belongs when the mandate is written in prose
The hidden mark: Anthropic adds a detectable watermark to Claude's text output to satisfy EU AI Act Article 50, which began applying August 2. What a detected mark does and doesn't tell you, why a proofread human draft can flag while a heavily rewritten Claude draft might not, SynthID and C2PA as comparisons, the cookie banner precedent, the ELVIS Act, and Taylor's chili crisp theory of attribution
Headlong: Laude Institute's open source microharness with a core under 10,000 lines of Bash. A Thinker loop, shellm, and an append-only trajectory. It never sleeps, it exponentially backs off when nobody is talking to it, and it runs for a dollar or two an hour
Robots learn by watching: Dyna Robotics pretrains Dyna-2 on over a million hours of first-person human video, about 170 years of waking life. Task scores climb from 20 to 53 percent across four data scales, bottle caps stay stubborn, knot tying peaks at 100,000 hours and gets worse at a million, and the hotel and warehouse workers wearing the body cams deserve consent and a cut
Nine hours: Gal Ratner's "The End of Open Source", on Sinan Can Demir, the UT Dallas junior who read one diff closely enough to catch a malware dropper, and the ChainDrop worm that reached 444 npm packages nine hours after a maintainer's account fell. Valid provenance on poisoned artifacts, the XZ callback, and pin your dependencies
Knowing when to stop: Yoko Li on loop engineering, why done is a judgment from outside the work, red-green for code and taste for prose, change the part not the whole, and Alexa's rule that the agent has to demo it before it gets to call it finished
Every interactive explainer from this episode lives on attentiondeficit.ai. Tell us what you're running locally, what your agents cost you this week, and what genre the Wheel of Tokens should try next.
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