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The PC era began with a black screen & a blinking cursor. This stark prompt was the only gateway, beckoning a user to test the computer’s power.

Today, the interface to AI looks identical : an empty text box & a blinking cursor.

1980s Command Line	2020s AI Interface
Image credit: Newton Freehostia

We’ve spent decades moving away from the command line, first to Windows & then to websites. Now we’re arriving right back where we started, albeit with a much smarter partner behind the box.

For decades, the to-do list has been a catalog of debt, a deceptively thin list of items to do, with icebergs of work hidden beneath the surface.

AI transforms tasks to work that has already been done.

Vibe Kanban, Gastown, & Conductor are the first instantiations of this for software developers. They have jargon-laden descriptions like “multi-agent orchestrator” or “visualizer,” but they are, at heart, simple & beautiful Kanban boards of done & dusted work.

Meta is acquiring Manus for $2.5 billion.¹² Alongside the announcement, Manus disclosed $100 million in ARR achieved in eight months, 147 trillion tokens processed since launch.³

Can we use those figures to explain the acquisition price?

Publicly traded software companies have gross margins of 71-72%. AI companies run lower. Gross profit per token may be a better indicator of earnings potential. Some AI companies already use gross profit as a quota metric rather than revenue.

This year I traveled through systems, human & machine, from the mathematics of complexity to industrial espionage.

1. The Complex World: An Introduction to the Foundations of Complexity Science: Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems introduced me to feedback loops a decade ago. This book goes deeper, surveying where complexity science stands today.
2. Math Without Numbers by Milo Beckman: A vivid & accessible tour of abstract mathematics. Beckman covers topology, infinities larger than infinity, & other mind-bending concepts, all without a single digit & with proofs to explain it all.
3. On Democracy by E. B. White: White, New Yorker editor, Charlotte’s Web author, Elements of Style co-creator, is among my favorite writers. These essays provide a time capsule to help us understand where we are today. Written as fascism spread across Europe & America debated isolationism, White’s defense of America provided a window into another era of rapid political change.
4. Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang: Wang argues that the US & China each have a dominant form of government problem-solving : through laws in the US, or through engineering in China.
5. God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright: Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of the Lone Star State. Both California & Texas value independence & innovation. As a Californian, it was fascinating to see Texas through Wright’s eyes.
6. The NVIDIA Way: Jensen Huang believes Nvidia’s worst enemy isn’t competition but complacency. Kim’s portrait reveals a CEO who spends late nights alongside his team, torturing them into greatness.
7. The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies: Davies argues that modern organizations function like runaway AIs, making decisions no human intends. A hotel executive cuts staff to improve the balance sheet. Later, you can’t check into your room & the clerk can only offer a voucher. There’s no one to call, no way to communicate back. That’s an unaccountability machine.
8. Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway: I’ve read every le Carré. His son Harkaway picks up where his father left off, adding a bracing entry to the canon.
9. Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway: Before spy novels, Harkaway spent fifteen years writing science fiction. Curious about his earlier work, I was not disappointed. Titanium Noir explores a world in which the wealthy have access to drugs that double their lifespan & double their size. The novel examines what happens when health becomes a function of wealth.
10. Boom: Bubbles & the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart & Tobias Huber: Why does transformative progress require financial bubbles? This builds on Carlota Perez’s work on technology innovation cycles. Hobart & Huber argue that bubbles’ poor accountability shelters the world’s most important breakthroughs.

What should I read in 2026?

Motive, the AI-powered fleet management company formerly known as KeepTruckin, filed their S-1.

Founded in 2013 by Shoaib Makani, Ryan Johns, & Obaid Khan, the company has grown from an electronic logging device (ELD)¹ compliance tool into a comprehensive physical operations platform serving nearly 100,000 customers across trucking, construction, oil & gas, & manufacturing.

Motive’s platform has since expanded beyond compliance to combine AI-powered dashcams for driver safety, GPS tracking for real-time visibility, & spend management cards to control costs. This suite acts as a central operating system for physical economy businesses, unifying data from vehicles, drivers, & equipment into a single interface.

Every year I make a list of predictions & score the previous year’s. You can find my 10 Predictions for 2026 here. 2025 was a good year : I scored 7.85 out of 10.

1. The IPO market rips.

Score : 0.6.

Every year I make a list of predictions & score the previous year’s. You can find my 10 Predictions for 2026 here. 2025 was a good year : I scored 7.85 out of 10.

1. The IPO market rips.

Score : 0.6.

Every year I make a list of predictions & score last year’s predictions. 2025 was a good year : I scored 7.85 out of 10. I will release the scoring tomorrow. For today, here are my predictions for 2026 :

1. Businesses pay more for AI agents than people for the first time.

This has already happened with consumers. Waymo rides cost 31% more than Uber on average, yet demand keeps growing. ¹ Riders prefer the safety & reliability of autonomous vehicles. For rote business tasks, agents will command a similar premium as companies factor in onboarding, recruiting, training, & management costs.

Thursday is the new Monday for podcast producers. Analyzing hundreds of tech & VC podcasts over six weeks this fall through MotherDuck’s MCP server, I found 42% of episodes drop mid-week, between Thursday & Friday. Sunday? A publishing desert at just 3%.

Here’s what else the data reveals.

When Episodes Drop

Prompt: Count the number of podcasts published on each day of the week with %

The pattern makes sense : listeners consume podcasts during commutes & workouts early in the week, so publishing mid-week ensures fresh content when people are ready to listen.

Gemini 3 Flash represents a step function increase in model deflation : a gauntlet thrown.

Google’s latest model underprices the state of the art by 70% to 79%, with very similar levels of performance. At $0.50 per million input tokens & $3.00 per million output tokens, Gemini 3 Flash hovers within 9% of the best scores across 20 benchmarks.¹

How much better is the price-performance? How much cheaper can teams run inference?