Seattle News
First off — SEAHAWKS!!!! Man, what a season. And while the Super Bowl lacked excitement in some people’s eyes, I love a great defense and a great kicking game. This sack was wonderful – over and through a lineman:
AI and Microsoft
I dropped my Microsoft Copilot subscription this week. I never got any value from it; I kept expecting Microsoft to really make Copilot hum in productivity scenarios. And was constantly disappointed. While I was at it, I downgraded my GitHub plan to GitHub Pro, dropping Copilot. And then, for good measure, I dropped my Microsoft 365 subscription.
Some of you are probably thinking, “What took you so long?” And you would probably be right. I had some legacy loyalty for the Microsoft brand; I had some great years of my career there with great people, but that was ages ago. And while Microsoft had some early AI traction, they have squandered it.
So it was an easy decision to drop Copilot and move to GitHub Pro (and I will probably move to GitHub Free). Microsoft is an afterthought in AI right now. Dropping Microsoft 365 took a few more seconds of thought. I hadn’t opened PowerPoint or Word in years, except by mistake or when someone sent me a file, and I can generally open those files in other viewer apps. Excel is more of a loss.
But then I realized I really don’t ever want to open Excel again. I just want to tell Claude or whatever to do some analysis and create a table or results for me. And then iterate in English with Claude. I’ll never have to manually create a spreadsheet again; that is what AI is for. I don’t need to remember pivot tables and conditional formatting and VLOOKUP and how to import pdf data and all that spreadsheet goo. It is wonderfully freeing!
And now that I’ve settled on English as my spreadsheet construction language, I really don’t care if Claude emits Excel spreadsheets, Google Sheets, Numbers, custom JS/HTML, Python, Webasm, or whatever.
SemiAnalysis this week said that Claude is an inflection point:
Coding is now a beachhead in terms of the disruption that agentic information processing has, and the larger 15 trillion-dollar information work economy is now at risk.
Every single workflow in the information work category is often similar and shares a workflow that Claude Code proves works for software.
Dead on. And I like what Karpathy said this week:
Stop writing implementation steps (linear). Start writing success criteria (looping).
This is how I view doing analysis of a topic now – stop laying out spreadsheets, start writing clearly what results you want, and let the AI figure it out.
Going even further, humans won’t write or read code directly anymore — How StrongDM’s AI team builds serious software without even looking at the code. We don’t write or read ASM anymore — why should high-level code be any different? And if we don't need to write high-level code, we certainly don't need to write spreadsheets.
Every single task we do on computers will be transformed. We are going to stop implementing detailed spreadsheets and slide decks; instead, we will tell the agent layer what the results should look like and nudge it towards success.
Maybe this will all be great for Microsoft, but I'd say they are missing the opportunity so far.
Anthropic appears to be at that magic point for a mission-driven organization when work is purposeful, fun, exhilarating, and everyone at the company is committed to the mission. A great time to be at any company. I was lucky to be at Microsoft when it still had some of that magic, but those days are past.
Shorts
Charles Fitzgerald with an excellent column today — A warning to Seattle: Don’t become the next Cleveland. Seattle has been fortunate to be the birthplace of several amazing industries, but that won’t continue without intentional, thoughtful policy.
Washington is not the only state confused about its economy. Florida passed an E-Verify law. Job growth quickly declined. We need more honesty about the scale of guest workers and immigrants our economy needs, and we need to implement immigration policies that support it.
The Car Industry Is Racing to Replace Chinese Code — this sounds like a goat rodeo. Apologies to the goats of the world.
Here is my stupid 10-minute app of the week. Starting last week, I’ve decided to build an app to go along with every post. Most of them will be stupid. But it is a great way to learn the modern AI stack.