alexander

one day you wrote console.log("here") for the last time and didn't even know it

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the fireside between @gakonst (Paradigm) and @rauchg (Vercel). Guillermo shared so much valueable insight, specially: MCP events and multi-agent collaboration look promising. 1. The open-model flip. Ten months ago open-weight models were close to 0% of tokens on Vercel AI Gateway. Last month they were about 70% of tokens, with proprietary at 30%. Spend still skews proprietary. The pattern: plan with a frontier model, execute with an open one. 2. Open follows closed in weeks. When a new small, fast proprietary model launched on the gateway, it became the most requested model in its history. A few weeks later there were ten open alternatives. He called this the new normal. 3. "Everything is code." That's why every lab pivoted to coding agents. If the model can code, it can drive Blender, run a sandbox, automate anything. Vercel's answer to lab competition: real open source and developer choice, which labs are disincentivized to offer. Companies end up using 4 or 5 models and need a layer that cuts across them. 4. Agents are the new users. Vercel now designs for agents, markets to agents, and asks agents what they think. Their DX team is now "agentic developer experience" and its goal for the year is verifiability: linters plus skills, correctness loops. They shipped a site that tells you whether agents can read your website. Most can't. 5. Rust is thriving for the same reason. It was less palatable to humans; agents persevere through anything, and they benefit from the correctness loops a strict compiler gives them. Vercel is also exploring what you can add to TypeScript to make it sounder and faster for agent-written code. 6. "Everything hackable will get hacked." Vercel put $1M on a sandbox-escape challenge. One researcher with a decade of red-team experience, a custom harness, and a mix of open and closed models found a novel Linux kernel vulnerability. Agents are the ideal security researcher, but human skill plus a good harness still wins. 7. Evals are the new marketing. Don't outsource "which model is best" to benchmarks you don't understand. Keep your own traces, reflect on them, derive your own skills, and judge models on your own work. 8. Hiring never stopped, through COVID and AI. He interviews for systems depth (distributed systems, networks, data flow) and agent orchestration. Output measured in changelog entries grows exponentially while headcount grows linearly. 9. On the agent stack: MCP has basically won and is getting more stateless. MCP events and multi-agent collaboration look promising. He thinks identity, wallet and permissioning should belong to the individual, and a cross-harness solution is needed because the future is many agents, not one. Thank you @gakonst, @rauchg and @paradigm for a great session.

my 8 months review at @RelayProtocol (we are hiring!) > i joined relay because it feels like an underdog. no one talks about it much on CT, but every dev every crypto app i talked to uses relay. > in 8 months, our customer base grew so much in both crypto native and payment verticals > become one of the top bridges by volume > as a BD, i'm lucky to have a team i can count on and a product that just works. > both our reputation and data references make the pitch easy and obvious > we are hiring BD (and other roles!) to accelerate our growth > looking for someone who can talk to institutions, fintech, payment companies, high agency, good understanding of cross-chain/relay, preferably North America timezone My DM is open if you're interested. Apply via the link in the thread.

DHH is fundamentally right about Rust. For context, Vercel has been undergoing a Rust-ification (carcinization, technically 🦀) for a while. One of the first projects we migrated was Turborepo, from Go to Rust¹. The migration completed, but the RoI was actually quite controversial internally. While Rust was in our eyes better for low-level OS access, something crucial for a build system like Turbo, the human migration costs were very sustantive. Go is very fast. It's beautifully designed. It's easy to iterate on. We were very conflicted about the migration, because it was *humans* writing the code, *even if we knew Rust was a better choice*. The calculus has now changed. What's "best for humans" is no longer necessarily "best for business". FWIW, it's also quite unlikely that Rust is the end-all-be-all toolchain. I'm quite certain there's greener pasture ahead, because Rust itself was designed before the 'supersonic tsunami' of agents hit. ¹ https​://vercel.com/blog/how-turborepo-is-porting-from-go-to-rust

🚨 MUSE ECOSYSTEM ALERT 🚨 today we are announcing Muse Gadgets! this is an open-source ESP32 firmware and Linux SDK for anyone to make hardware that works with Muse we are also releasing our own gadget—Muse Home Link—to enable your muse to work with your smart devices (TV, speakers, etc.)

$GRAM is live on Relay. Swap GRAM to and from tokens on 85+ chains, in seconds. Available now in the app and API. relay.link/bridge/ton