Shawn Scully

I have an agent who’s single purpose is to wake me up with something fun every morning today it sent me this A+

I just packed my whole 3D workflow into one Claude skill. i gave opus 5.5 one reference picture and said: build me a full teardown of this, every part in code. the build: > the picture set the look, every shell, gear and hose is three.js code > opus matched its render to the picture side by side for 3 rounds before any video > 260 tiny pistons, hoses, screws and wires sit under the big gears > my first version just hovered, so now something comes apart every 2-3 seconds > pull a leg and its servo bar flips to DETACHED i built 7 of these in 2 days. the sims are live on my playground. the skill, the playground and all 9 prompts 👇

Atoms are the new bits. 25% of YC startups now build hardware, so we're setting up a YC Hardware Lab in Dogpatch. We're hiring the person to run it. If you've built hardware and know your way around a shop, apply or send us someone great: ycombinator.com/careers?job_…

Volonaut’s Star Wars-inspired Airbike completed test flights in California in 2026. The single-person, jet-powered aircraft is preparing for production, priced at $880,000. Its official specs list a top speed of 102 km/h and 10 minutes of flight time.

At Aviern, we are making unmanned cargo airplanes for autonomous airports. The US has 5,000 public-use airports, and we will fly freight autonomously to every single one of them.

Our prototype just hit 40 knot airspeed and is over halfway to completing transition

Ekin Dogus Cubuk of @periodiclabs on why AI has to learn from the physical world, and building their own lab to close that loop: "One of the more fundamental ways of making things around us is powder synthesis... You can actually, using that method, discover new superconductors, magnets, all kinds of materials that are very important for technologies around us." "But at the core of it is just quantum mechanics. And we feel like teaching these LLMs quantum mechanics will be the next frontier for LLMs." "Science is by its nature iterative, right? Like even the smartest humans tried many times before they discovered the things they discovered. LLMs can be very smart, but if they're not iterating on science, they won't discover science." "The important thing to teach these LLMs is the method of scientific inquiry. So you do simulations, you do theoretical calculations, you do experiments, you get results, and the results are probably incorrect or not what you wanted at first, but you iterate on it." "You have to do it with the real physics, not just the simulation." @ekindogus @AnjneyMidha a16z's Christian Keil makes the case for why building, testing, and iterating in the physical world is the bottleneck for AI in hardware: a16z.news/p/superhuman-hardw…

"It took me three months to design it, but it's nine months until I can actually start to use it." Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on the manufacturing bottleneck between designing hardware with AI and actually getting it built: "Let's say we're off to do a great new chip together, the one that's gonna leap ahead because we have understanding of the AI workloads... And let's say we turn our AI tools loose. Within three months we have an awesome design." "[But] we still have like a couple of really major bottlenecks today. One is we still have nine months of silicon processing time... So I can design the thing in three months, but I can't actually get it into real silicon at scale for nine months." "We have to really see that bottleneck improve if we're gonna have this innovation." "If it takes me a year and a half until I actually get scale and software on it, my understanding of the AI workloads is no longer applicable to the chip that I designed." "All of those aspects somewhat obviate the fact that AI has made the design piece easy. All of those manufacturing scale issues to me become a huge bottleneck." @PGelsinger @appenz @RaghuRaghuram a16z's Christian Keil makes the case for why manufacturing, testing and iteration are the next frontier for AI in hardware: a16z.news/p/superhuman-hardw…

University of Cincinnati researchers, working with NASA, have developed a system that uses audio recordings to identify mechanical faults in drones before flight. By recording the sounds drones make with chipped or cracked propellers, damaged motors, and seized bearings, the team converted the audio into data that ground station computers can use to flag a drone as unairworthy before it takes off. The system is designed to integrate with existing NASA preflight checks and could eventually be embedded in autonomous drone-in-a-box systems, where drones launch, land, and recharge without an onsite operator. Future versions could allow drones to monitor their own sounds mid-flight and return to base before a catastrophic failure occurs.

Introducing Real World Engineering Bench (RWE-Bench). AI isn’t great at designing rockets, engines, or chips yet. With better evals and RL environments, it will be. Software was just the beginning. The physical world is next.

can’t believe we got touchscreen MacBooks just in time for AI agents to make touching our computers obsolete

my AI agents after I give them full access and tell them to be careful

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says if frontier models stopped advancing, it wouldn't matter for most orgs because enterprise AI is bottlenecked on context, not intelligence: "There's no agentic work that's automated the whole enterprise. That has just not happened. Why is that? The real reason is the models are smart enough, but they just don't have the context that exists inside of any organization." "They have not been in every meeting. They don't know what's in everybody's heads. They don't know all the processes. There's always a couple of employees who know everything in every organization. You go tap on their shoulder, and everybody's like, 'Oh my God, what would happen if he or she quits?'" "If you just fused that and gave that context into the AI models, just the frontier today, I think there's so much productivity gains you could get for any organization on the planet." "For that, we actually don't need smarter models... If the frontier doesn't advance, it doesn't actually matter for the vast majority of organizations on the planet. They're just so far behind in the adoption curve of actually automating things and getting value out of this stuff." @alighodsi Read the latest Profiles of the Future by @bhorowitz and @mikemcg0 on Databricks & the Future of the Firm: a16z.news/p/databricks-and-t…

Okay, maybe I underestimated Dot a bit. I emailed someone to say I was unavailable on the specified date this week and had to cancel the meeting. OpenAI Dot then proactively messaged me, informing me that I had apparently mixed up the dates because the person had wanted to meet me the week after next. Two things are remarkable: Dot independently monitored my email, detected the error, understood the context, and alerted me. This actually saved me from a lot of misunderstanding. A little "aha" moment. I'm currently in the US, which is why I have access to Dot. Of course, I won't have access once I'm back in Germany (and not using a VPN). But it's a really good use case!

unpopular opinion: ai generated designs are not slop. or even remotely close to slop. ai raises the design floor so dramatically now that dismissing it as such is really no diff than when mathematicians got irked when ai solved decades old math problems. if you’ve studied interaction design to any extent you obviously know that so so much of it is patterns, conventions, & adapting to established behaviors. geee, imagine what new technology is amazing at this? you should maximize its utilization.

big labs "selling ai to enterprise" need 100 million more FDEs to own the market i've talked to 40+ huge public company ceos/execs, still zero examples of labs showing a single example of how they can use ai a companies founders led sales will solve this, then labs will copy

OpenAI's James Sun and Ari Weinstein on the AI adoption gap between San Francisco and the average American business, and why agentic computer use is the way to bridge it: "Living in San Francisco, we see a lot of thinking, 'Wow, the labs can do everything,' and, 'Why doesn't everybody just install Codex and just have it do stuff?'" "But for the average American and the average small to medium business owner or the average enterprise, even understanding what the tools are capable is [hurdle] one, connecting tools in a way that makes sense is two, deploying it is three, servicing is four." "The really cool thing about computer use as a technology is the universality of it. It works with every application. It's unlike any other thing that we've built where the developer has to do some work to adopt it, someone has to build a connector or MCP server." "If there are complex workflows that require a lot of disparate software, computer use is a great way to join them, complete the entire end-to-end workflow, and then building it in a format and UI that feels good to hold for those customers feels still like a really, really big opportunity that I think is still open." @JamesZmSun @AriX

AI robot dentists are already a reality in China. Precision dental work without a human dentist. via @ViralRushX #AIDentist RT!