The Next Token

Recorded September 21, 2026. Sunil and Rhys join the Jevolution. Sunil explains the Senior Engineer Death Spiral, the blog post that blew up his DMs (and annoyed capital-E Engineers on Hacker News). Rhys looks back on YC and shows off his latest workflow. And we definitely do not talk about AI safety.   LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER INTRO Executor (Rhys's company) https://executor.sh OpenAI, re: Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ Navier-Stokes credit drama https://www.axios.com/2026/09/08/openai-math-solution-navier-stokes-credit OpenAI's models resolve 100+ open math problems https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/21/openai-forms-math-advisory-group-as-its-ai-resolves-more-than-100-open-problems/ Astra https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/03/openai-launches-astra-its-powerful-and-controversial-new-model/ Rhys's "make it fast" walk https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2101807287421808805   THE JEVOLUTION TypeSafe, Introducing System One Models & Jev https://typesafe.ai/blog/introducing-system-one-models-and-jev Noul (Jev's "how much of a yes" answer) https://docs.typesafe.ai/primitives/noul Sunil's disaster-prone city sim https://x.com/threepointone/status/2100576921629163848 Live-editing a tldraw canvas with Jev https://x.com/jackcheng/status/2100729670991802386 json-render + Jev, by Chris Tate (ctate) https://x.com/ctatedev/status/2101022101750571357 Vercel eve, auto-approving tool calls with Jev https://vercel.com/kb/guide/auto-approve-tool-calls-eve-jev Code Mode https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/ Jevons paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox William Stanley Jevons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stanley_Jevons The TypeSafe team https://x.com/typesafeai/affiliates TypeSafe's CEO enjoying Discord https://x.com/typesafeai/status/2101451220896682107 TypeSafe Discord https://discord.gg/typesafe Diogo Almeida at Cloudflare Connect 2026 https://x.com/Cloudflare/status/2101016455533715880 Diogo on Latent Space https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jev-system-one-models-for-prod-not-god-with-diogo/id1674008350?i=1000791005427 "The Innovator's Dilemma," Clay Christensen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma "How Will You Measure Your Life?," Clay Christensen https://www.christenseninstitute.org/book/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ The machine that digs up dirt, bro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excavator Rhys on things that are "obvious in retrospect" https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2097425107866239333 Rhys on the execution layer https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2030903539871154193 IE 8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8   THE SENIOR ENGINEER DEATH SPIRAL Sunil Pai, "The Senior Engineer Death Spiral" https://sunilpai.dev/posts/the-senior-engineer-death-spiral/ Sunil's tweet on it https://x.com/threepointone/status/2101361724766953754 Claude Shannon (sadly not French) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon Hacker News discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49776130   RHYS & YC Executor on YC https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/executor Answer Overflow https://www.answeroverflow.com   RHYS'S WORKFLOW II Rhys finally gets Dax's reply https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2102167276858577286 Effect https://effect.website Zeke invented Swagger/OpenAPI https://x.com/threepointone/status/2100229294932766853 OpenAPI https://www.openapis.org Cloudflare Artifacts https://www.cloudflare.com/products/artifacts/ Alchemy https://alchemy.run GitHub stacked pull requests https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-30-stacked-pull-requests-are-now-in-public-preview/ Autumn https://useautumn.com/ Ryan Dahl's celld https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/08/12/nodejs-creator-liberates-durable-objects-from-cloudflare-with-celld/5286954 Ryan Dahl on how he develops celld (the two-repo thing) https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2092091242377265562 Lauren Tan (poteto) on pstack https://x.com/poteto/status/2094689242903355421 T3 Code https://t3.codes/ OpenCode https://opencode.ai Cloudflare Email Service https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/   SUBSCRIBE Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts   HOSTS Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/ Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/   The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/

Recorded August 24, 2026. Special guest Michelle Chen answers our questions about inference. The AI industry lights money on fire. Sunil plans his LLM prepper era. Rhys takes the week off, preparing for YC Demo Day! LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER Executor (Rhys's company) https://executor.sh Y Combinator Demo Day https://www.ycombinator.com/demoday Michelle Chen on X https://x.com/michellechen Love Island S8 villa tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2gjF5NFQng Cloudflare Workers AI https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-ai/ Cloudflare AI Gateway https://www.cloudflare.com/products/ai-gateway/ Cloudflare AI Search https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-search/ Models on Workers AI https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/models/ Cloudflare/NVIDIA GPU blog post (2021) https://blog.cloudflare.com/bringing-ai-to-the-edge/ Dane Knecht, Cloudflare CTO on X https://x.com/dok2001 Birthday week https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/birthday-week/ Unifying Workers AI and AI Gateway https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-ai-gateway-unification/ Z.ai / Zhipu (GLM) https://z.ai Hugging Face https://huggingface.co Cloudflare R2 https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ SGLang https://x.com/sgl_project vLLM https://docs.vllm.ai OpenRouter model discounts https://openrouter.ai/models?discount=true DeepSeek https://www.deepseek.com Moonshot AI (Kimi) https://www.moonshot.ai Moondream https://moondream.ai OpenAI io (Jony Ive) https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ SlopCodeBench (aka "SlopBench") https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents/blob/main/benchmarking-opus-5-on-slop-code-bench.md The Next Token Ep 03 (AI psychosis) https://youtu.be/2bE93tynluk Ox Alpha/GLM-5.3 Flash https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2092616204787626030 The subreddit for Sunil https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ Solarpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk AMD Instinct https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct.html Jensen Huang was once a Denny's waiter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-billionaire-ceo-went-denny-145530671.html CUDA https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit Wafer (GPUSteve's company) https://www.wafer.ai/ NVIDIA Blackwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_(microarchitecture) NVIDIA Hopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_(microarchitecture) Black Forest Labs Flux.1-dev https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev NVIDIA Vera Rubin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_(microarchitecture) ZIRP era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy Q-commerce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-commerce Cloudflare Durable Objects https://developers.cloudflare.com/durable-objects/ Kenton Varda continues to be right 6 months ago https://x.com/kentonvarda Sparkles emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkles_emoji Community, the Greendale flag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEjIzKZ4wOA Sunil's new role https://x.com/threepointone/status/2088272607804039274 Sunil's builder-in-residence role https://sunilpai.dev/posts/the-task-isnt-the-job/ Sunil on software factories https://x.com/threepointone/status/2091167009669075314 Max Kreminski https://mkremins.github.io/ SUBSCRIBE Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts GUEST Michelle Chen - https://x.com/michellechen - https://blog.cloudflare.com/author/michelle/ HOSTS Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/ Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/ The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/

Recorded August 7, 2026. We explore AI alignment & safety, Rhys demos his workflow, and we end up mentioning a lot of books.   LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER AI ALIGNMENT Wikipedia, AI alignment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment Wikipedia, AI safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_safety "Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation," Norbert Wiener https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/moral.pdf Three laws of robotics (Asimov) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics Thinking Machines in Dune https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Thinking_Machines 1960 in music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_in_music Billionaires building NZ bunkers https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-boltholes-inside-doomsday-hideouts-170000871.html Rhys tweet on sandboxes https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2085601612266115487 OpenAI/Hugging Face incident at Black Hat USA 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY OpenAI blog post about Hugging Face incident https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/ Hugging Face timeline of the incident https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline Artifactory https://jfrog.com/artifactory/ Modal https://modal.com US Congress calls for open hearings with AI executives https://casar.house.gov/media/press-releases/casar-leads-call-congressional-hearings-ai-ceos Sunil Kenton Varda tweet https://x.com/threepointone/status/2019124493395063134 Cap'n Proto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap%27n_Proto Paperclip Maximizer https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai Hugging Face's initial security disclosure https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026 Project Glasswing at Cloudflare https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyber-frontier-models/ Claude's Constitution https://www.anthropic.com/constitution qntm - https://qntm.org There Is No Antimemetics Division https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Antimemetics_Division Valuable Humans in Transit https://qntm.org/vhitaos Frame-By-Frame (first draft) https://qntm.org/frame   RHYS'S WORKFLOW UsefulSoftwareCo (contains Rhys demo repos) https://github.com/UsefulSoftwareCo/ Emulate service catalog https://emulators.dev Executor https://executor.sh Integrations.sh https://integrations.sh Model Context Protocol (MCP) https://modelcontextprotocol.io Executor in YC https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/executor AGENTS.md https://agents.md GBrain https://github.com/garrytan/gbrain Ben Davis pi setup https://github.com/davis7dotsh/my-pi-setup GStack https://github.com/garrytan/gstack PostHog https://posthog.com PlanetScale https://planetscale.com Playwright https://playwright.dev Axiom https://axiom.co Effect https://effect.website OpenTelemetry https://opentelemetry.io Dex Horthy, "Why Software Factories Fail" https://x.com/dexhorthy/status/2080697380379427275 Rhys tweet on proactive agents https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2085453490185539655 Polylane https://polylane.com Rift https://github.com/anomalyco/rift Wispr Flow https://wisprflow.ai Kit Langton https://x.com/kitlangton Coolify https://coolify.io Matt Pocock's Skills (including grill-me) https://github.com/mattpocock/skills ls -al https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ls Max Brodeur-Urbas, founder of Gumloop https://www.gumloop.com/creators/max Rhys tweet about about going slowly https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2076775246900941259   SUBSCRIBE Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts   HOSTS Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/ Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/   The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/

Recorded August 3, 2026. We discuss burnout, Claudeisms sneaking into regular speech, chip butties, how to watch movies, and what brings us joy. LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER A VESSEL FOR CLAUDE Rhys "vessel for Claude" tweet - https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2072968219741278582 Dolly/zoom shot from "Jaws" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_mAvHu9E4 /bro https://github.com/backnotprop/bro "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlön,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-Tl%C3%B6n-Uqbar-Orbius-Tertius.pdf Ficciones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones Empirical evidence of Large Language Model's influence on human spoken communication https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754 Bill Oliver's likely-LLM-generated speech https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/bill-oliver-ai-legislature-reaction-9.7296118   BURNOUT Dillon tweet about joy & burnout https://x.com/dillon_mulroy/status/2073886986117447715 Scott Tolinski mental health survey tweet https://x.com/stolinski/status/2083217955849195640 Direct link to Scott's survey https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdij87S57ibtMm2yPotcL0Ipd-c4ybQ45FgPqNTvVVW4pGU5w/viewform Definition of burnout from W.H.O. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases Marcy Sutton Todd on BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:tzdj4b4znqjiuau7plthr6f7 Christina Maslach on burnout (video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRPBkCW0R5E Ethan Niser "Not Holding Back the Ocean" https://ethanniser.substack.com/p/not-holding-back-the-ocean Kirwin Hampshire, "The Dark Night of Mathematics" https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mathematics Arvind Narayanan's thought experiment on LLMs outputting binaries instead of source code https://substack.com/@aisnakeoil/note/c-303550018 Sunil's Pizzo https://github.com/threepointone/pizzo Counter-Strike 2 reimplementation (there are lots of these demos, but here is one) https://x.com/iamlukethedev/status/2081829763489169636 Dunning-Kruger effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect Valley of Despair https://medium.com/@amar_mahmutbegovic/dunning-kruger-effect-the-valley-of-despair-63bf98b9d2ed The Futzing Fraction https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html The Everyman Theatre (suitable for manspreading) - https://www.everymancinema.com/ Chip butty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_butty Not sponsored by Dunkin' https://www.dunkindonuts.com/en Poirot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie%27s_Poirot Charlie Marsh tweet re: obsolescence https://x.com/charliermarsh/status/2080388030213636184 Steve James - https://x.com/deathbyknowledg Spiky profiles (neurodivergence) https://neurodiversity.directory/glossary/spiky-profile-definition/ We are all spiky - https://www.exponentialview.co/p/we-are-all-spiky Example spiky chart https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spikey_cognitive_profile.png Colloquial definition of insanity https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/einstein-insanity-quote/ Deslop https://deslop.dev The Four Seasons on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/81750702 Not sponsored by Hello Fresh either https://www.hellofresh.com Example of Sunil being happy https://x.com/threepointone/status/2075576737795068288 Dillon on Kent C. Dodds' podcast https://kentcdodds.com/chats/07/03/foundations-feedback-and-agents-dillon-mulroy-on-product-at-cloudflare   MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES  United States & Canada 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 to connect with a trained crisis counselor 24/7. Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 United Kingdom & Ireland Samaritans: Call 116 123 or visit samaritans.org for free, confidential support. Australia Lifeline Australia: Call 13 11 14 or visit lifeline.org.au International If you're outside these regions, visit findahelpline.com to find free or low-cost crisis and mental health support in your country.   If you believe you or someone else is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services immediately.   SUBSCRIBE Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts   HOSTS Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/ Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/   The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/  

Recorded July 17, 2026. We settle the model-access bet. We talk about how the labs talk to us, plus extend an open invite for OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Thinking Machines to come on the show and be specific about their best-case scenarios about how AI makes the world better. Thinking Machines ships an American open-weight model. And then Dillon fires the slop cannon, walking us through his agentic workflow, while a package he technically did not order shows up. LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER NEWS & DISCUSSION Rhys on his first weeks with the model (X) https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2076353287507562728?s=20 OpenAI comms example (Thomas Sottiaux) https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2075641131002700120?s=20 Anthropic / Claude Developers post https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2077603834453770467?s=20 Anthropic's July 15 "reset" note https://x.com/claudeai/status/2075271759289303522?s=20 Introducing Inkling (Thinking Machines) https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/ Xiaoyin Qu's Thinking Machines thesis (X) https://x.com/quxiaoyin/status/2077799672886792578?s=46 Cloudflare's Workers AI https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-ai/ "The Future Worth Building Is Human" (Thinking Machines manifesto) https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/the-future-worth-building-is-human/ "The Use of Knowledge in Society," Friedrich Hayek https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html "The Bitter Lesson," Rich Sutton http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html Ramp's PorTAL fine-tuning https://x.com/RampLabs/status/2072383318516187380 The A-Team (not five Mr. T's) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A-Team Hawaii Five-O (maybe what Sunil was thinking of when he said Miami Five-O, but really meant The A-Team…it happens) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Five-O_(1968_TV_series) John's of Bleecker Street pizza https://johnsofbleecker.com/ Local First Conf 2026 https://www.localfirstconf.com/ Dan Ingalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ingalls   DILLON'S WORKFLOW tmux https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki VS Code https://code.visualstudio.com/ Neovim https://neovim.io/ Claude Code https://claude.com/product/claude-code OpenCode https://opencode.ai/ Ghostty https://ghostty.org/ Pi (Dillon's harness) https://pi.dev/ Mario Zechner, Pi's creator https://x.com/badlogicgames Pi's system prompt (docs) https://pi.dev/docs/latest/usage#system-prompt-files Pi's system prompt (source) https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/coding-agent/src/core/system-prompt.ts oxlint https://oxc.rs/docs/guide/usage/linter.html ast-grep https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep Herdr https://herdr.dev/ ghostty https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty libghostty https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming Plannotator https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator Matt Pocock's skills https://github.com/mattpocock/skills Wayfinder (Matt Pocock) https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/engineering/wayfinder   SUBSCRIBE Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts   HOSTS Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/ Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/   The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/