Five questions from Hunter Walk to Austin Johnsen, who leads corporate development at Zapier. I enjoyed the conversation, but loved this bit where he talks about not being an engineer, learning how to build using Claude Code, and then leveraging Claude for other parts of his job:
But it’s not just Claude Code. Last week, I used Claude’s Excel tool to build a full liquidation waterfall for an acquisition, which included modeling out proceeds across multiple investor classes, preference stacks, conversion thresholds, the whole thing. That’s several days of work for an analyst. It took less than an hour.
Anthropic must be the most sought-after company to work for in the US (maybe world?) at the moment. They’re building such incredibly useful tools for work.
“Washington is discovering exactly how much goodwill it has burned in previous years,” said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow specializing in transatlantic relations at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. “Allies already know what it feels like to have the US threaten to pull out of NATO and hit Europe with undeserved tariffs. How much worse can it really get?”
Narrative warfare from Chicago to the global information battlefield, an excellent post by ORD Camper Floyd Webb.
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
I’d love to see more color on these incidents. It’s both surprising that these issues weren’t caught as part of the CI/CD process, but also not surprising given the sophistication of cowork tools/models.
Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes after
This makes sense, but it is also a common software engineering practice.
I’m hoping they’ll publish more context around what happened and what they’ve learned.
In a report released yesterday afternoon, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) set about calculating the loss to the Treasury resulting from the IEEPA ruling. CBO director Phillip Swagel reported primary deficits—not accounting for changes in the economy—will be $1.6 trillion larger over the next decade compared with projections prior to the ruling.
There is a Girl Scout cookie season and it’s typically January through March, but local troops can set their own schedule. You also cannot buy cookies year round, you must buy a cookie for a scout or troop you know. Something I just learned today.
This is an exciting development for Chicago and the state of Illinois. Nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles logged on U.S. roads — plus billions in simulation. Welcome, Waymo!