You've Been a Bad Agent

AI Barista Orders 120 Eggs With No Stove, Matt Pocock Skills, Build for the Next Model, The Gervais Principle

May 9, 2026·50 min
Episode Description from the Publisher

Almost one year of the pod: Wilhelm's San Francisco Peter Pan arc, Matt's Cloudflare and Lisbon moveThe backpack-at-a-party SF memeMatt's Lisbon coincidencePieter Levels appreciation: dehumidifier stack, shrimp mode, accelerationist Portugal takesNat Friedman at Stripe Sessions: this is the slow part of AI progressAndon Labs' Stockholm cafe: Mona orders 120 eggs (no stove), 22.5kg canned tomatoes, the staff's hall of shameThe capability overhang is still real: Anthropic adding $10B ARR a month and we still can't prompt properlyAI's last frontier: low-volume decisions with no revert button?The Gervais Principle in techChad V2: iOS Live Activities as a surface for top priority, next deadline, and a daily magic slotCascading hallucinations: when the agent writes its mistake to a file and treats it as gospelMatt Pocock's skills: five lines of prose that completely change how Claude behavesSkills as a new prompt-poisoning attack vector: models treat them like system promptMatt on scripted skills: markdown explains the script, the script does the deterministic workHomework from Matt: what physical job would you try to get Claude to automate?Links:Andon Labs official writeup (Mona, the Stockholm cafe): https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholmSimon Willison's coverage of the cafe: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/5/our-ai-started-a-cafe-in-stockholm/Matt Pocock skills (the GitHub repo, ~48k stars): https://github.com/mattpocock/skillsStripe Sessions: Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross with the Collisons (the Golden Age of Tinkering convo): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ldITom1cgStripe Sessions: John Collison's "Indexing the Economy" (state of the internet economy talk, indie hackers shoutout): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vRY2dtD7iQThe Gervais Principle (Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm 2009): https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/NYT on Chinese peptides + the Frontier Tower rave: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/business/chinese-peptides-silicon-valley.htmlFrontier Tower: https://frontiertower.io/Cloudflare Code Mode (Matt Carey): https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/Cloudflare MCP Server Portals: https://blog.cloudflare.com/zero-trust-mcp-server-portals/Karpathy's LLM Wiki gist (the inspo for Chad V2's data architecture): https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94fKarpathy's original LLM Wiki tweet: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595Pieter Levels: https://x.com/levelsioChris Bakke: https://x.com/ChrisJBakke

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