“11 AI agents” is meaningless as a phrase. If I said “I have 11 spreadsheets” or “I have 11 browser tabs” to do my work, it means about the same thing.
Bragging about how much software you’re shipping with AI is like holding down the shutter button and bragging about how many photos you took.
overheard
Overheard : Defining a Culture
Ben Horowitz shared his ideas on defining a culture In a conversation with Patrick O’Schaugnessy
Let me give you a small but probably the most important insight, which is from Bushido, the Way of the Warrior from the Samurai. A culture is not a set of ideas. It’s a set of actions. If you define your culture as a kind of set of ideas – integrity, do the right thing, we have each other’s backs, or any corporate values – it’s actually just a bunch of fucking platitudes. It doesn’t mean anything. The culture has to be defined in terms of the exact behavior that you want that support that idea. What do you have to do to actually be that thing that you want it to be? It’s the little things. How responsive are you to your colleagues? What’s the SLA on returning a Slack message or an email? Do you show up to meetings on time? Not everybody has those ideas, but if you want that idea, you’ve got to manifest it through something else.
Overheard : Embedded Intelligence
The hype may be about the frontier models. The disruption really is in the workflow.
Read this in Om Malik’s post (https://om.co/2026/02/06/how-ai-goes-to-work/), and it’s one of the most grounded take on AI I’ve seen lately. We spend so much energy debating which LLM is ‘smarter’ by a fraction of a percentage, but that’s just benchmarking engines. The real shift happens when the engine is already under the hood of the car you’re driving.
Om calls it “embedded intelligence.” It’s when you’re in Excel or Photoshop and the AI isn’t a destination you visit (the prompt box), but a hover-state that helps you work.
The goal isn’t to ‘use AI.’ The goal is to do what you used to do, but better, faster, and with more room for the creative decisions that actually matter.
Overhead : Agentic Engineering
Andrej Karpathy’s nomenclature for the state of tech in AI has become the unofficial industry clock. Watching the terminology evolve over the last few years feels like watching innovation move from a crawl to a sprint:
Jan 2023: “English is the hottest new programming language.” The shift from syntax to semantics. We realized that the bottleneck wasn’t knowing where the semicolon goes, but being able to describe the logic clearly. Coding became a translation layer.
Feb 2025: “Vibe Coding.” The abstraction deepened. We stopped looking at the code entirely and started managing the ‘vibe’ of the output. It was the era of radical abstraction—prompting, iterating, and giving in to the exponential speed of LLMs.
Feb 2026: “Agentic Engineering.” The current frontier. We’ve moved from writing prompts to managing workers (agents). It’s no longer about a single interaction; it’s about architecting systems of agents that can self-correct, plan, and execute.
The timeline is compressing. AI isn’t just a pastime anymore; it’s the factory floor. We’ve gone from being writers to editors to architects in less than a thousand days!
We live in amazing times :-).
Google Gemini’s interpretation of the blog post in an infographic.
Overhear : Securing AI Agents
A good framework on how to think about security when deploying AI agents.
Treat AI agents as insider threats
David Cox mentioned this during a recent conversation with Grant Harvey and Corey Noles on the Neuron podcast. Very simple, but very elegant. Once you frame agents this way, familiar tools – least privilege, role-based access, audit logs – suddenly apply cleanly. The attack surface shrinks not because agents are safer, but because their blast radius is smaller.
Overheard : Prosperity & Open Source
Loved this quote by Matt Ridley on how open sourcing and sharing ideas leads to improved prosperity. Positive sum instead of zero sum games. The free exchange, combination, and mating of different ideas (like trade and specialization) drive human progress and wealth far more effectively than when ideas are not not shared and guarded.
Prosperity happens when ideas have sex
Overheard : Kindness
Warren Buffett in his farewell letter on kindness
Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts
of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you
help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to
beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.
I wish he sticks around a long time even though he is giving up his oversight role at Berkshire and continues to share his wisdom.
His letter is also a masterclass in great writing. Each paragraph is less than 5 sentences, and each page has less than 10 paragraphs. All written in simple to understand language.
Overheard : SEO is dead
A great graph on all the times SEO was pronounced dead, yet the market value of the SEO industry keeps growing. Graph by Chris Lourenco on linkedin.
Overheard : Attention span
Some interesting metrics on the attention span of consumers before they make a decision to spend more time on the content or not.
Shared by Lulu Cheng in a conversation with Shane Parrish
And then in terms of text, because one of the ways that people get to know you is through your writing, I don’t know about seconds, but it’s like the first paragraph. For an email, it’s the subject line. For a tweet, it’s the first line, first sentence, the hook. So the opportunity, the surface area of the opportunity we have to latch on, is getting more and more fine, which means that the hook that we need to use has to get more and more sharp.
- Writing : First Paragraph
- Email: Subject Line
- Tweet : First Line
- Video : First 30 seconds
Overheard : mental model and curiosity
Mark Bertolini in a chat with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on “Invest Like the Best” podcast, speaking about the need to update your mental model about the world constantly. And the two things that differentiate good leaders from the rest.
I always say to people, the mental model that exists inside your head about how the world works is the most critical tool you have. And if you don’t constantly add new information to it and are not a continual learner, you can’t possibly know what you need to know to make good decisions.
And so I look for two things in executives, curiosity and courage. The curiosity to continue to ask questions and learn more every day, and the courage to act on it when you have a hypothesis that might be powerful.