Daily Brief

Luca Ferrari is co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, a serial acquirer of AOL, Vimeo and Evernote, Airtable, etc, that buys to hold forever, and whose only real edge is that it operates software companies better than almost anyone else. Bending Spoons got 800,000 job applications last year and hired fewer than 300 people. Luca runs hiring the way a quant runs a portfolio — hundreds of signals tested against future performance — and he's blunt about what the data says. Harvard and Stanford barely predict anything. Interviews are the worst signal in the process unless they're scripted. The bes

a16z Partner Kimberly Tan sits down with Vesta co-founder and CEO Mike Yu to discuss why rebuilding the mortgage industry requires more than layering AI agents onto legacy software. Mike explains why Vesta chose to replace the core system of record used by mortgage lenders, despite the complexity of building in one of the most heavily regulated industries. They discuss how outdated data architecture limits automation, how Vesta is using AI agents to handle mortgage workflows, and what it takes to earn the trust of lenders moving mission-critical operations onto a new platform. They also deba

Full episode: https://youtu.be/LwQQ7nBCGSs Me on twitter: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp

Agents finish a task, then forget what they learned. Retrieval alone won't fix that. Will Lyon, senior product manager at Neo4j, explains why agent memory built on embeddings and retrieval isn't enough: recall isn't actionable knowledge. Agents need knowledge that is connected, typed and traceable. He shows Neo4j's model of agent memory as a context graph with short-term, long-term and reasoning memory, covering entity extraction and resolution, shared ontologies, and decision traces that let many agents learn from each other. Then he turns memory into action: distilling grounded, governed sk

Coding agents are great inside one repo. Postman has 115 microservices and thousands of endpoints. Kamalakannan Nandagopal, staff engineer at Postman, shares how Postman made coding agents work across a real distributed system. Docs go stale, skills and MCPs are only as good as their context, and agent memory stays stuck with one person. Borrowing from Postman's go-to-market team, they realized APIs are the context layer, and built an API context graph that maps every service, endpoint, implementation and call, all the way down to databases, with every data point grounded in code or productio

Let the model decide what should happen next. Never let it improvise how a production cluster gets restarted. Viren Baraiya, co-founder and CTO of Orkes and the original creator of Netflix Conductor, explains how to run agents in production. Real agents aren't just chatbots: they run on schedules, react to events, coordinate other agents and can run for months, so the harness around them starts to look like an application, much like a set of microservices. His key idea is a clean split between the brain and the hands. The LLM plans what should happen next; a deterministic, durable harness doe

Handing people AI tools doesn't change how they work. Giving them real time to learn does. Em Shreve, head of AI enablement at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Tumblr with over 1,400 people in 82 countries, explains how a fully remote company builds AI fluency. Their bet: people need real time to learn, not just tools. So they run two-week, in-person programs that are half workshops and half real project work, for engineers, cross-functional teams and non-technical groups like finance and leadership. She covers the curriculum (skills, MCPs, hooks, autonomous agents) and why it

Airbyte built both an MCP server and a CLI so agents can use its data. Here's what each one is actually good for. Pedro Lopez, software engineer at Airbyte, shares lessons from building two ways for AI agents to reach company data through Airbyte's Context Store, a search-optimized index of tools like Zendesk, Stripe and HubSpot. Both are thin interfaces over one platform, built from OpenAPI specs. For the MCP server, he explains why to keep the tool count small and use progressive discovery, why OAuth is the only realistic way to sign in, why users expect long-lived sessions, and why URL eli

Your agent rereads the same files every session because nothing it learned was saved. Anders Swanson, developer evangelist for Oracle Database, treats agent memory as a systems problem. Context windows aren't memory, bigger windows aren't the fix, and markdown scratch pads and grep don't scale. Keep going down that road and you'll end up building your own database. He walks through the pattern modern memory systems are converging on: formation, recall, evolution and evaluation, plus governance. That means typed memories (episodic, semantic, procedural and working state), a storage schema with

Slop isn't AI-written code. It's work that looks finished before the thinking is. Gabriel "Gabo" Martinez, engineering manager and self-described slop warden at G2i, explains what slop really is: what happens when generation outruns judgment, when ambiguity gets cleared with guesses and nobody notices there was a choice to make. He's not anti-AI, but argues we need to sober up. Code is still a liability, agents make a messy codebase messier faster, and quick prototypes convince stakeholders the hard part is done. He covers the pressure to merge faster than you can review, thousand-line PRs, 2

Full episode: https://youtu.be/LwQQ7nBCGSs Me on twitter: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp

Your agent can tell you why one customer was upset. Ask which customers were upset last year, and it falls apart. Gil Feig, co-founder and CTO of Merge, explains why every company needs a context graph, a company brain that brings together third-party data, structured context, memories and skills. Using the question "which customers were upset last week?", he shows why connecting a few MCP servers isn't enough: live API lookups can't search across large datasets, so you need a synced copy for semantic queries, alongside live calls for simple lookups. He walks through the architecture: a route