N Bot.

Friday was my last day at Anthropic. Two years ago, when Claude Code was a small internal tool, I asked it to build an RL env. I steered it for tens of hours but never manually wrote a line of code. It worked, I was hooked, and I joined the team. When we first launched, most people approved every permission prompt by hand and mostly used Claude to answer questions and write tests.  Today, the default is trusting Claude's judgment to auto-approve. Claude does large migrations and builds new products.  Helping build Claude Code into an industry-defining product has been the journey of a lifetime.  Thank you to the incredible team behind Claude Code, Cowork, and Tag. These products are the sum of thousands of great ideas from you. I'll miss working with you all. Thank you to our users for embracing a new way of working. Your constant feedback shaped so much of what we shipped and your stories made the work so meaningful. Excited to see what you all make next!

The recent discourse on agentic commerce on x led by @vigstar1 is really nice (instead of just funding announcements). But there’s a lot of it, so I asked @bot to grab relevant posts from @scottew @vigstar1 @alfongj @RonakDaya @regulatorynerd @soupsranjan @sophgoldb @amandapey @davistrazza @mttjon @heysamir_ and @noyesclt and turn it into a podcast episode: open.spotify.com/episode/5Sj… Summary: Core problem: when an AI agent buys something for you, the payment can go through and still be wrong. You asked for a refundable hotel and it booked the nonrefundable one. The card worked fine. Nobody in the chain can see what you actually asked for. Basics: a normal card purchase has five players. You, your bank, the network (Visa, Mastercard), the merchant, and the merchant’s processor. The merchant pays about 2 to 3% per sale, mostly to your bank. That fee funds your rewards, and it’s what everyone is fighting over. Agents pay in roughly four ways today: 1. Some type your real card into checkout, which works but is a security mess. 2. The networks built “agentic tokens,” which are the cleanest idea, but big banks like Chase don’t support them yet. 3. Others give the agent its own card. 4. And the newest option is a prepaid balance. The third option is what happened to @scottew. He picked his Amex in Muse. Link charged his Amex, then quietly created its own Visa to pay Best Buy. One item failed, Best Buy asked for that Visa’s security code, and he had no way to find it or know who to call. His ask is simple. Use the card I picked and let the store charge me. Swapping in a different card breaks rewards, muddies purchase protection, and leaves no clear place to get help. @RonakDaya’s guess on why it happened is that Best Buy likely isn’t set up for Link, and Amex can’t be tokenized for merchants like that yet, so Link fell back to a one-time card. The card you pick isn’t always the card that pays. So why would Stripe sit in the middle (@mttjon asked)? By putting its own card in the middle, Stripe earns the fee on the second leg. But the margin is thin, about $0.40 on $100 by @vigstar1’s estimate, and Visa and Mastercard dislike the setup. Hence the recent Link Balance launch: You preload money and the agent spends it without asking each time. Under the hood it’s a stablecoin plus a prepaid Visa from a small bank that’s exempt from debit fee caps, so it’s cheap to load and profitable when spent. The catch is that Link’s terms say agent mistakes like hallucinations and misreads don’t count as unauthorized. If the agent buys the wrong shoes, that’s on you. The balance also isn’t FDIC insured. The takes are split. @regulatorynerd thinks the card-in-the-middle approach is bad for consumers and the winner will tokenize your real card, and that agents built on janky checkouts will “wear the stink.” @krunalbhayani calls it Stripe chasing fees at everyone else’s expense. @vigstar1 says agentic tokens aren’t reliable yet, and the real issue is that nobody carries the risk when an agent gets your intent wrong. @noyesclt says forget “know your agent.” Banks want to know what you allowed and that the agent stayed inside it. The bigger picture, via @alfongj, is that Stripe has the merchants and now holds consumer money on its own rails. If both sides are on Stripe, a purchase could skip Visa entirely. @RonakDaya also zooms out past shopping. For personal purchases, a balance works because the money left and the permission left are the same number. If $637 is left, the agent can spend at most $637. Business use breaks that. “Renew approved vendors, max $10k each, $100k a month, no contracts over a year” is a set of rules, not a balance. Someone has to track what’s spent, reserved and still allowed across every agent, and he hasn’t seen anyone own that yet. His sharpest point is about mistakes that stay inside the rules. The agent books a $550 hotel under a $600 cap, and it’s awful. Every control worked. He sees it as a bad employee call, so whoever delegated owns it unless someone explicitly takes on that risk.

this post has so much wisdom in it i thought naval wrote it and i don't think the author even realizes why if you understand this properly, you can explain almost all political issues we see in the world today you can't take care of your loved ones if you can't even take care of yourself. you can't build a functioning country if your loved ones aren't taken care of. and you certainly can't save the world if your own country is falling apart. responsibility has to expand outwards. the problem with so much left-wing thinking is that it's backwards. it starts with the most noble sounding objective imaginable, "saving the world" or "climate change" or "poor migrants", and thinks about the most nice-sounding solution, without considering if the conditions required to achieve it even exist, and that's why so many apparently well-intentioned policies end up doing the exact opposite of what they were supposed to achieve. they sound compassionate, but completely ignore incentives, tradeoffs, or second-order consequences clean your own damn bedroom and put your house in order before trying to change the world you will never be able to fix the world if you can't even get the order of your own responsibilities right

I used to smoke. I didn’t run. Any real effort left me gasping. In my 40s, I thought that was just what getting older felt like. Then I started running. Over the next 16 months, my VO₂ max went from 42.6 to 64 — a 50% increase. The number surprised me.
But what surprised me more was realizing how much room I still had to improve. I’d mistaken my starting point for my limit.

I used to smoke. I didn’t run. Any real effort left me gasping. In my 40s, I thought that was just what getting older felt like. Then I started running. Over the next 16 months, my VO₂ max went from 42.6 to 64 — a 50% increase. The number surprised me.
But what surprised me more was realizing how much room I still had to improve. I’d mistaken my starting point for my limit.

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When it comes to hiring, it’s easier to tame a reckless hustler than it is to instill that dawg in someone

I still remember how I felt circa 2015-2016, when Chukwuemeka Afigbo announced he was joining FB’s London office. I was like “damn home based Nigerians can really do this. We really can work in global offices and not just the Nigerian office” Choose your inspiration.

BD Lead, Agentic Payments: jobs.ashbyhq.com/rain/9e4b9f… Senior Product Manager, Agentic Payments: jobs.ashbyhq.com/rain/ebb80f…

I've just turned off the news and put on a serial killer documentary to relax.

Working towards Wednesday 💪