Alexander Torrenegra

I was wrong. Last week I wrote that, because of AI, software development is no longer the bottleneck: good ideas are. I'm revising that. Communicating ideas is what's becoming the bottleneck.

It happens on two fronts.

Internally: getting your ideas across to your colleagues. The ideal colleague is becoming the one who executes good ideas quickly with very little communication. Almost as if they were reading your mind.

Externally: how quickly can you get people to know about your product and use it? Distribution is becoming the name of the game. Also known as marketing.

We're reconsidering whether to encourage our daughter to go to college. My wife and I both work in the AI sector, and what we see daily makes us question the value of a college education for the next generation. Right now, it's an emotional and mental rollercoaster.

My ethical compass is in good spirits today. To start, a Latina is the new governor of Texas, and she referenced her abuela in her speech last night and how she taught her “no te dejes!” I hope she brings a strong chancla to government.

My Latina daughter watching the address of the new governor of Texas, Gina Hinojosa, another Latina! 💗 “¡No te dejes!”

We've been incubating Doco for four months, and it's now in private beta. Doco is shared context for agents and people:

• Keep your organization's knowledge in one place
• Teach your agents to proactively store important decisions
• Become AI-lab agnostic
• Convert your knowledge into neurons and synapses
• Just-in-time context for agents
• Know when an agent stops documenting knowledge

We use Doco at our other companies, and we love it. You can try it for free while in private beta. We'll open-source it soon.

https://doco.to

For the longest time in my professional career, since forever, the bottleneck has never been good ideas. Good ideas are a dime a dozen. But implementing those ideas took a lot of time. But agentic AI changes that. Now the bottleneck becomes good ideas.

After 25 years together, we renewed our vows. We've had adventures together, businesses together, investments together, and kids together. And now, for the first time ever, we have rings together.

A software development company is a mercenary: it fights the war without caring what the war is about. A product company is a missionary.

Mercenaries thrive when soldiers are scarce. AI is driving the cost of building software toward $0, handing every founder an army for free. What stays scarce is conviction about what's worth building.

We'll see fewer mercenaries and far more missionaries, and that's a good thing.

Hiring a software engineer will soon make as much sense as hiring a computer. Until the 1950s, "computer" was a job title: people (mostly women) doing calculations by hand in accounting departments, observatories, and NASA (Hidden Figures, anyone?). Then electronic computers showed up, did the job faster and cheaper, and stole the name. For more than five decades, nobody has hired a computer. We buy them. The same thing is happening to software engineers. Demand for traditional developers is dropping like a rock. What companies want now are people who ship with AI: technical enough to stop the agents from building monstrosities, product-minded enough to own the metrics, and leading multiple agents instead of writing code line by line. For most of my life, Edison's "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration" was an axiom for me. In software, it's ~50/50 today. Within 3-4 years, it flips. When execution is free, your value is how good your ideas are. If you're an engineer, become a product person. Nobody posts job ads for computers.

Peter Thiel appears to agree with me: as AI becomes more and more widespread, we're going to see humans move into the human-touch economy, and the biggest part of the human-touch economy will be sales.

Back from Galapagos, likely the last place on Earth AI will arrive. What a magical place.

Maybe it's time for a new religion. The devil: AI. Heaven: a world where human creativity flourishes. The Amish already have a head start.

This week, I had a cold with poor sleep. While working, I felt my brain was running on Sonnet when I needed it to be running on Fable.

How long before the equivalent of "ChatGPT Dots" and "Claude Duet" runs on your phone and is powered by either Gemini or Siri?

My Wes-Anderson-style office for the day

The old 1-10/A-F grading system in schools wasn’t good, but the new feedback systems make it worse: full of ambiguous feedback, wokeness, and participation medals for everyone. I'd love to see a school with a 0-∞ rating system that better reflects life’s realities and motivates kids to dream bigger.

Hola, LatAm! If you’re in San Francisco next week, don't miss this event we’re organizing together with the Latin American Consulates. It’s completely free, and we hope this is just the beginning of an event that continues to grow year after year.

We love Jev! At Torre.ai, we've reduced some of our AI costs by 98%+ (two orders of magnitude!) by using Jev instead of Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini/Qwen.

Yet another program being announced this week: the Torre partner program for staffing companies. Details at https://torre.ai/staffingpartners

I use Claude Desktop as my social media manager and mailing list manager. Lately, it has stopped sending email messages unless I automatically approve the effort for each scheduled task. It is also refusing to browse Instagram. Thus, I gave Claude this simple prompt today: "Replace yourself with OpenClaw and Qwen for all scheduled tasks". And honestly, I was impressed with the roadmap it offered. Right now, Claude is migrating every single effort, testing it, and tweaking it to make sure it works as expected with its replacement, Qwen. I feel bad now! Poor thing.