
CEO, Late Stage Capital, Chair @ Blushift, @SecundoAI, Inspiring leaders to build culture driving creativity, growth + innovation. Author @SmallBetterBook
Boston, MA
Joined April 2007
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Brady Brim-DeForest retweeted
My thoughts on the current state of AI driven software development, why I'm no longer concerned about a runaway intelligence explosion, and what I think is a far worse outcome we could be walking into...
maevyn.codes/decoherence
Brady Brim-DeForest retweeted
I wanted to share a peek into how I'm building darting.dev/ inside of darting.dev/
This.
I stole this idea and now use it with every single employee.
It’s the best illustration I’ve seen of teaching someone to be high agency.
It says there are 5 levels of work:
Level 1: “There is a problem.”
Level 2: “There is a problem, and I’ve found some causes.”
Level 3: “Here’s the problem, here are some possible causes, and here are some possible solutions.”
Level 4: “Here’s the problem, here’s what I think caused it, here are some possible solutions, and here’s the one I think we should pick.”
Level 5: “I identified a problem, figured out what caused it, researched how to fix it, and I fixed it. Just wanted to keep you in the loop.”
Using this framework, here’s what I say to every new employee…
You will live at Level 4 from Day 1 and as we build trust you will rise to Level 5.
Being high agency doesn’t just mean tackling problems in this way. It means your entire way of working should be oriented to being a Level 4+ employee.
Plz feel free to steal it as well.
And ty @stephsmithio for the framework!
Brady Brim-DeForest retweeted
As an AI Engineer. Please learn
>Harness engineering, not just prompt engineering
>Context engineering, not just long prompts
>Prompt caching vs. semantic caching tradeoffs
>KV cache management, eviction, reuse, and memory pressure at scale
>Prefill vs. decode latency and why they optimize differently
>Continuous batching, paged attention, and throughput optimization
>Speculative decoding vs. quantization vs. distillation tradeoffs
>INT8, INT4, FP8, AWQ, GPTQ, and when quantization hurts quality
>Structured output failures, schema validation, repair loops, and fallback chains
>Function calling reliability, tool contracts, argument validation, and idempotency
>Agent guardrails, loop budgets, tool budgets, and termination conditions
>Model routing, graceful fallback logic, and degraded-mode UX
>RAG architecture: chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, and freshness
>Retrieval evals: recall, precision, grounding, attribution, and citation quality
>Evals: golden sets, regression tests, adversarial tests, LLM-as-judge, and human evals
>LLM observability as a first-class discipline: traces, spans, tokens, latency, errors, and drift
>Cost attribution per feature, workflow, tenant, and user journey not just per model
>Safety engineering: prompt injection defense, data leakage prevention, and permission boundaries
>Multi-tenant isolation, cache safety, and cross-user context contamination prevention
>Fine-tuning vs. in-context learning vs. RAG vs. distillation and when each is the wrong tool
>Latency, quality, cost, and reliability tradeoffs across the full inference stack
>Production failure modes: hallucinated tool calls, malformed JSON, stale retrieval, runaway agents, and silent eval regressions
Brady Brim-DeForest retweeted
Well, I guess the idea that humans will have nothing valuable left to do in the age of AI is going around again, so it is a good time to repost this article
Solid guidance from Leo:
ncronline.org/vatican/pope-l…
This was such an important resource to me as a child.
The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!
This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5…



















