Evergreen status: Playing long-term games with long-term people.

I’ve been subscribed to Stratechery since May 2018. Probably my first ever paid newsletter sub. Definitely the one I read (or in recent years, listen to) most. I’m embarrassed how often I ingest Ben Thompson Thought, and immediately feel “ok, that’s my opinion now”. Perhaps Ben is also partly to blame for my getting so giddy on tech co strategy that I took my first job at Stripe: Corporate Strategy (where we all thought Ben is the 🐐). Stripe is the “platform of platforms” (2020), and Ben is the strategist’s strategist. I’m honored he has given Stripe the privilege of furthering his work. Thank you, Ben!

When you acquire a founder and let them rip, you hope they continue to "wake up like this". Obsessed!

Clever!

Grok Bot vs Muse @elonmusk on Grok @Bot: “You can simply drop a picture of your credit card into the chat”. I can confirm: I dropped a screenshot of a virtual card into Grok @Bot, and it went ahead and made the purchase! No PCI worries expressed by Grok, or harness restrictions. (It didn’t save card for future, though; that requires typing the card # manually into a form in grok bot.) @Muse is clear: do not paste raw credit card # into the chat. If you do, it’s trained to refuse to type that into the credit card field at checkout. “Typing anything into that card field is the exact action I can't do.” (Instead: link your @link account once, and Muse can buy things in future.)

What a world we now live in

Thanks Derek for the anecdote. I didn’t know Henri or Max (and others in Privy) before the acquisition, but yes - I’m inspired by their focus and grind since joining Stripe. So glad they’re here. And now Henri leading Stripe Crypto!

Token usage on subscription vs credits. Again, I'm glad subscriptions exist. Pay-as-you-go credits seems so much more expensive. Tonight: On ChatGPT $200/mo plan, doing a bit of personal coding this evening. A few threads going with Astra. nothing hectic. Glanced at my weekly limit: 0%, what? Oh wow – I'd hit my weekly limit, and it switched over to using credits: 35,000 credits in past ~day (it would cost $1,400 to buy back 35,000 credits). I hit "reset" (one of my three resets available) to reset my weekly limit, and return to using my subscription. ~3 hours later, I'm down to 59% of my weekly limit again. 🫠 So just now, I've switched all Codex threads from 6-Astra-med to 6.1-Sol-med. I have Claude supervising Codex tonight (Codex is doing the work, Opus 5.5 is adversarial and advising). I just asked Claude to keep an eye on token use (e.g., retire long threads, start afresh). Similar story last May: it took work to run down my $200 usage, so I bought $200 of credits to keep going. "Aaaaaand they're gone!" in a fraction of the time. I'm not even mad - this time when I run out of codex resets, I'll happily be upgrading to the $500 plan. Clankers are cranking out some good shit in fairness.

Bummer I won’t be in town, but RTing because others should Carpe Greg!

Pocahontas introduced me to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, when she sang, "You can't step in the same river twice; the water's always changing, always flowinggggg…" Well, you can't wake up to the same Stripe twice. The code is always changing, PRs closing… Stripe is constantly evolving. We want to have continuous deployment of our api. We want to be able to react to feedback from users multiple times per day. Obviously AI is making us even faster at shipping (new features products)… but what about reliability? "Everyone in the industry looks to Stripe as the company that sets the bar for reliability", says @bcherny (creator of Claude Code). Today, Stripe boasts 99.9995% uptime for core APIs. The good news is: it's now possible to build new observability, new harnesses, and new kinds of automated scrutiny. @PatrickC says he reckons "AI, on net, will make Stripe quite a bit more reliable." 😮 The full interview, with gems like "shower thoughts get translated to actual existence; I think the returns to being curious have gotten much higher" and predictions for when agent↔agent transactions will be the majority of online payments, is on youtube.com/watch?v=S_lzYIvt…