Data, visualization, entrepreneurship—salted with Bitcoin and economics. CTO @QuiltData, manage data like code. YC S17.
Mountain View, California
Joined August 2008
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Proof of security work:
Every hardware wallet manufacturer must keep its entire treasury on their own devices using only the default settings. And publish the address for all to see.
Aneesh Karve retweeted
Thomas Sowell on the truth about the Great Depression:
“There’s this narrative out there that the reason we had mass unemployment in the 1930s was because the market failed.”
“It so happens that for the 12 months following the stock market crash, we never hit double digits of unemployment. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent two months after the crash and started going down.”
“The unemployment rate was down to 6.3 percent when the federal government figured it had to intervene. And that’s when the downward movement reversed and we never saw 6.3 percent again for the next decade.”
“It’s clear as crystal that the disaster came after federal intervention.”
Almost. Using AI “a ton” is not sufficient to give you intuition for its limits. You need to use it in a complex problem area that you know extremely well, argue with it, watch it flail, fail, and deflect.
CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.
So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents.
“Look I made this awesome product prototype”. Yes but you didn’t have to review the code before it went into production and fix a bunch of issues.
“Look I generated a contract”. Yes but you didn’t verify all the terms before it goes out to the counterparty and didn’t have to wire up all the past contracts to work with.
The best thing you can do as a CEO is to use AI a *ton* to figure out the real implications of agents in the enterprise, and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work that goes into them.
Aneesh Karve retweeted
Terence Tao is answering a fundamental question regarding the safety and reliability of modern AI: "How can we use a tool that is powerful, but unreliable?"
W = ∑(wᵢ ⋅ xᵢ) + b
AI isn’t just about “smart”; it’s about the probability of *looking* right. We’ve built systems where the weights (wᵢ) are optimized for plausibility, not veracity.
This creates a “convincing mirror” that confidently serves dangerous advice in medicine or finance. The gap between “convincing” and “correct” is the most critical variable we need to solve for.
Aneesh Karve retweeted
1/ Deep learning is going to have a scientific theory. We can see the pieces starting to come together, and it's looking a lot like physics!
We're releasing a paper pulling together these emerging threads and giving them a name: learning mechanics.
🔨 arxiv.org/pdf/2604.21691 🔧
Aneesh Karve retweeted
my entire career strategy hangs on a strong belief that we are not going to see fully automated software generation in my lifetime.
but we are going to see an end to the ralph-loop, spec-driven-one-shot-dream, and the "end of white collar work" hype.
we're already seeing some high profile players in software development start to set their coarse along the same path i've been following these past few years. it starts with "wow" then "i can use my skills to fully automate this" and then it proceeds to "fast but no cognitive ownership" then disappointment, confusion, frustration, and ends with "hey, this isn't going to work guys, we need to be more disciplined and look at the code, keep our cognitive ownership, and just use the tools to improve our outcomes. these are not our replacement, these are our accelerators. it's the same story, different tooling".
i'm already there. if a company were to come to me today and say "we tried all the trendy stuff but it just made everything worse, we're losing control of our code base, we need to either ditch these things or make them a power-up" then i am ready for that.
if i am wrong, then so be it. my career is over anyway because i have zero interest in giving up cognitive ownership and responsibility (the ability to respond), while remaining accountable.
i'd rather wash dishes or stack shelves than submit myself to the horrors of remaining accountable without cognitive ownership, agency, and responsibility.
“Spend time on AI” is wrongheaded advice. The value is in knowing how to think so that you can catch and improve sloppy AI reasoning.
Focus on your differentiator, not on the commodity.
Aneesh Karve retweeted
The people I want to hear from right now are the security teams at large companies who have to try and keep systems secure when dozens of teams of engineers of varying levels of experience are constantly shipping new features
this is the Final Boss of Agentic Engineering:
killing the Code Review
at this point multiple people are already weighing how to remove the human code review bottleneck from agents becoming fully productive. @ankitxg was brave enough to map out how he sees SDLC being turned on its head.
i'm not personally there yet, but I tend to be 3-6 months behind these people and yeah its definitely coming.
"The Butlerian Jihad, also known as the Great Revolt as well as commonly shortened to the Jihad, was the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots that began in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G."
Aneesh Karve retweeted
New post: "The Mythical Agent-Month"
With coding agents, we are writing code faster than ever. But hands on keyboards was never the bottleneck, a lesson from Fred Brooks's 1975 classic that we keep painfully relearning. Will it be different now, or will we run into the same "brownfield barriers" as new agent-native software projects scale up?
wesmckinney.com/blog/mythica…
You can understand Hayek’s Fatal Conceit with this sentence:
Traditions are experiments that worked.
Except they weren’t experiments in the rationally planned sense, more like adventures or accidents that proved useful.
Aneesh Karve retweeted
Mises gave us the recipe for civilization:
1. Civilization requires economic calculation
2. Calculation requires prices
3. Prices require markets
4. Markets require exchange
5. Exchange requires private property
Therefore:
No private property → no prices → no calculation → no coordination → no civilization.
And, the extent to which private property is violated (aka taxed) is the extent to which civilization is eroded.
#Bitcoin is the strongest form of private property in the history of the human race.
