Special Projects Lead + LLM Whisperer @tenex_labs
Joined March 2025
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CJ Hess retweeted
"code used to arrive one drop at a time. soon, if not already, code will be written as if it were a continuous stream, like a violent river twisting and turning as it pleases."
we will need to rebuild and rewrite much of software to adapt to a new, faster pace.
code used to arrive one drop at a time. soon, if not already, code will be written as if it were a continuous stream, like a violent river twisting and turning as it pleases.
this is not a new thing: big tech cos have had to deal with this with the enormous scale of their engineering teams. but now ai has brought an incredibly elastic and capable workforce wielded by every engineer. this is your problem now, and the only way to adapt is to evolve your systems so agents - even and especially the ones with little context about the right way of doing things - can thrive. make the easy thing the right thing.
your codebase is becoming organic architecture. agent contributions grow around the constraints and guardrails you’ve designed. good software engineering matters even more now! and no, the continuous stream of code is not something you have to watch helplessly. be more ambitious and design systems, frameworks, and languages to control the chaos.
the time for mourning coding is long over
RT @businessbarista: Spoke to an AI leader recently.
The biggest thing they’re wrestling with: what do they do with the AI laggards in th…
CJ Hess retweeted
Speed is the most important moat in tech.
Yesterday I said every vertical AI company will fail. It's because models can do things today that weren't possible 3 months ago.
Companies can make a lot of money building on that edge. Adding harnessing, evals, application logic, and other guardrails will allow you to live on the cutting edge.
But in a few years, models will eat all of that harnessing, and any differentiation you've created is gone.
So as everyone discusses moats, I think the most important one is the build a business that gets better with the models. Meaning that you ride that cutting edge -- which requires speed.
The comfort of "focus" is gone in a world where everyone has to do everything. You used to be able to build a moat around complexity, and complexity compounded with focus. That will kill you in 2026+
CJ Hess retweeted
Vertical AI startups are all going to fail.
It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology and the pace of progress.
Remember Jasper AI? When they were founded, they were on the cutting edge, so they were valuable. But 3 years later and what WAS the cutting edge is no longer even a full feature of an otherwise sellable product.
The way to build a company in 2026 is to orient around the cutting edge. Build a machine to stay on the cutting edge -- or better yet, to push it further.
Every decision we make at @tenex_labs is to optimize toward that.
Orb out tonight folks
You've heard of orbin' time, but have you ever just been in flow state orbin' out???
AI made CJ Hess faster—and hourly billing meant he earned less for the same work. Tenex built an engineering organization around paying for output instead.
@businessbarista and @seejayhess of @tenex_labs join @swyx at @aiDotEngineer New York to discuss story points, agent workflows, enterprise AI, and what happens when you build your own software.
0:00 Cold open
3:17 Paying engineers for outcomes
7:20 Inside MetaHarness
19:29 The enterprise AI adoption gap
23:22 You can’t automate a process that doesn’t exist
24:42 The debate over vertical AI
30:32 Kill My SaaS: build vs. buy
35:23 AI and jobs
38:18 New York’s AI ecosystem
Full writeup, show notes and audio: latent.space/p/tenex
Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=Vki6cklF…
CJ Hess retweeted
AI made CJ Hess faster—and hourly billing meant he earned less for the same work. Tenex built an engineering organization around paying for output instead.
@businessbarista and @seejayhess of @tenex_labs join @swyx at @aiDotEngineer New York to discuss story points, agent workflows, enterprise AI, and what happens when you build your own software.
0:00 Cold open
3:17 Paying engineers for outcomes
7:20 Inside MetaHarness
19:29 The enterprise AI adoption gap
23:22 You can’t automate a process that doesn’t exist
24:42 The debate over vertical AI
30:32 Kill My SaaS: build vs. buy
35:23 AI and jobs
38:18 New York’s AI ecosystem
Full writeup, show notes and audio: latent.space/p/tenex
Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=Vki6cklF…
CJ Hess retweeted
Judge for yourself whether @seejayhess just made "orbin' out" happen
youtube.com/watch?v=Vki6cklF…
CJ Hess retweeted
AI Agent Sprints have blown up since we launched them a few weeks ago.
Have received interest from hundreds of enterprises including:
- Tesla
- Airbus
- SharkNinja
- Amazon
- Palo Alto Networks
- Samsung
We have a few spots left, before we close the October cohort.
These 5-day, free intensive bootcamps for enterprise leaders are the perfect way to FINALLY get agents to production.
At @tenex_labs, we've helped dozens of midmarket cos, F2000 enterprises, and PE portcos deploy agents into production. With bootcamps, we're lowering the friction of experiencing the power of an agent within your company's workflows to ~zero.
3 phases of the sprint:
1) Find Opportunities - We interview the people closest to the work to identify where agents could have the biggest impact.
2) Map Workflows - We map workflows step by step, including the systems involved and expected business impact.
3) Prototype Agents - We build prototypes on your data, demonstrate the results, and recommend what to take live first.
Sprints are led by our world-class FDEs & strategists, on the ground, working with your teams and systems.
What do you get?
1) A clear AI roadmap with ROI per opportunity
2) Up to 8 mapped opportunities
3) Up to 4 working prototypes
Who are agent bootcamps for & how much do they cost?
VP-level & up decision makers at midmarket & enterprise companies doing >$100m in revenue or funding. Bootcamps are free. They're an opportunity to see what AI agents can do for you before committing.
Why are we launching this now?
Many companies are in the messy middle of AI transformation. They've rolled out LLMs companywide, perhaps done some AI enablement work, coding agents are being used widely in engineering, and that's it.
The next obvious step in the AI journey is bringing agents to the workflows of an organization, but most companies are getting stuck.
Taking agents to production is complex and nuanced and we've built a repeatable process for handling the final mile of applied AI, which allows us to take agents into production in ~2 weeks.
How do I sign up?
Join the Agent Sprint waitlist here: form.typeform.com/to/vk5i1x9…
CJ Hess retweeted
If you’re a non-linear thinker, builder or engineer and while reading this you felt an urge to contribute in diffusing this technology positively and safely to people.
Please reach out to me, @BrettFranklin_ , @ArmanHezarkhani or @businessbarista with the hardest problem you would like to solve if you’re unleashed with full autonomy.
@tenex_labs is NOT a consultancy, we :
- bridge the gap between people and ethical AI
- help organizations transform so they don’t get left behind
- have the smartest, kindest humans collaborating to solve critical problems at scale
We’re actively looking for bright minds like yourself — so feel free to apply directly: tenex.co/careers
This window of opportunity won’t last long!!
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Being adaptable is more important than ever / might become the only thing that matters.
You must let go of the past and embrace the future cause we're already moving too fast to stay on the bleeding edge of everything. And we're just getting started
There's some senior engineers on here who, in the face of AI changing the very structures this industry is built on, present themselves as Stewards of the Craft of Programming.
Bugs the hell out for me.
They keep alluding to the virtue of doing things by hand, the value of Good Code and of craftsmanship, saying that yes, AI might change some things, but hey it won't ever change the value of something done with proper care, by hand, just like in the olden days of 2024. Most everything that was Good back then is still Good now: deep knowledge of languages and systems, good code, great architecture. You know the sermon.
And, yes, some of that *is* true. At least I think so. But we don't know, because no one truly knows what will be important in the future.
We're going through times of great change and I think the best advice to give to young people and others who want to have a job and provide value is: keep your eyes open, rethink from first principles, derive from what businesses value what you can provide; the digital world is more malleable than ever, you should rethink how you can help shape it.
All this pounding on the Bible of Good Code seems to me to be doing the opposite: it lets people feel comfortable -- what I've valued all my life is still valuable, I can rest easy -- in times when one shouldn't feel comfortable. This is a bumpy, exciting, strange ride. If you lean back you might fall off the waggon.
Let's not delude ourselves and others that we can keep doing what we've been doing. Rethink it all.
And, like I said, it bugs the hell out of me seeing senior engineers (that are secure in their career) talking as if there's nothing *really* to change, because the Fundamentals will still be valued. They might!
But it's the wrong advice to not rethink everything right now.
CJ Hess retweeted
Funniest thing I heard this week was a member of the team being surprised by how cool the people we met at last night’s NYC meetup were compared to typical tech meetups.
“There were people drinking martinis!”
At the end of the day, you gotta still use your brain. At this point, the model is a reflection of your brain.