It feels good to get back to some of the fun stuff.
The comments here can double as a place for GPT-5.4 reactions, in addition to my Twitter thread. I hope to get that review out soon.
Almost all of this will be a summary of agentic coding developments, after a note.
Table of Contents
The Virtue of Silence (Unrelated Update)
After Undersecretary of War Emil Michael went on the All-In Podcast and did an extensive interview with Pirate Wires, I found many enlightening quotes, many of which demanded a response, and went about assembling an extensive list of analysis of the statements of Emil Michael during the ongoing recent events with Anthropic.
As part of that, I ended up in a remarkably polite and productive Twitter exchange with him. We reached several points of agreement. The Department of War has no intention of doing what in law is called ‘mass domestic surveillance’ but those words are terms of art in NatSec law, and mean a much narrower set of things than one would think.
There are many things that I or Anthropic or most of you would look at as mass domestic surveillance, that are legal, and it is DoW’s position that it’s their job and duty to do everything legal to protect our country, including those things. The law has not caught up with reality and Congress needs to fix that. And this is the best country in the world, with the best system of government, because private citizens can voice their disagreement with such actions, including by refusal to participate.
Thus, in the spirit of de-escalation, although there are many interpretations of events shared by Michael with which I strongly disagree, I am going to indefinitely shelve the piece, so long as events do not escalate further. As long as things stay quiet there is no need to religitate or unravel the past on this. The Department of War can focus on its active operations, things can work their way through the courts as our founders intended, and once we see how we work together in an ultimate real world test hopefully that will rebuild trust that we are all on the same side, or at least to agree to part in peace once OpenAI is ready. Ideally the DoW will have multiple suppliers, exactly so that they are not dependent on any one supplier, the same way we do it with aircraft.
I hope to not have another post on the Anthropic and DoW situation, at least until the one celebrating that we have found a resolution.
... continue reading