Head of editorial at https://xitter.cf/t.co/UNIn3ajRjC / @latentspacepod Founded ReadWriteWeb (2003–2012) Internet historian at https://xitter.cf/t.co/ZlyypsMmpr 🥝 in 🇬🇧
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Joined January 2010
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Today's my first day in a new role: Head of Editorial at Latent Space (@latentspacepod).
From ReadWriteWeb to The New Stack, I've always loved being at the cutting edge of tech x media. So I'm thrilled to join @swyx & his team. We have big plans! latent.space/
Personal agent space is getting really interesting. Outside of the bigcos (dots, duet, grokbot, et al), it's cool to see more niche versions — like Tolan, a personal agent designed for parents. h/t @eliotpeper, who helped work on the narrative side of it.
Last year we launched Tolan, inspired by a vision of AI that sees you and believes in you, not one that books restaurant reservations for you.
Your Tolan shows up for you at 3am when you’re alone with your newborn. On your commute when you’re anxious about the day ahead. When you just finished a new show and none of your friends have watched it yet.
The people who love Tolan are parents. Caregivers. Moms in Dallas and Dads in Atlanta. People who aren’t trying to optimize and be more productive, but who simply want to feel seen and supported in their aspirations.
This month more than 250k people will spend time with their Tolan. Those users have exchanged billions of messages across more than 70m conversations over the last year.
Today, we're announcing $30m in additional capital from @mignano and @usv, with @khoslaventures and @rabois doubling down, bringing our total capital raised to $60m.
To celebrate, we made a short film celebrating some of the ways that Tolans show up :)
Richard MacManus retweeted
pretty much every major ai company now has a personal agent product except google:
meta → muse
anthropic → duet
openai → dots
spacex → bots
slowly but surely the competition is shifting from who has the smartest model to who owns the persistent relationship with the user. this will be even more the case going forward.
you're seeing this because we likely reached peak intelligence required to power most of the worlds workflows probably earlier this year if not late last year.
Funnily enough, we're making the opposite move: from Substack to a more flexible, creative and web-friendly platform in Beehiiv, where we can Make Our Website Great Again.
I don’t think there’s any great mystery here. They’re outsourcing discovery and monetization to Substack because there’s not enough potential value to do it in-house. defector.com/nobody-wants-to…
One of the frustrating things about the Newsletter Era is a real lack of creativity in visual design these days (Subslop?). Check out my Mastodon/Bluesky alt account Classic Web if you want a taste of what the web once was: indieweb.social/@classicweb
Richard MacManus retweeted
There's not enough buzz around Claude Mods.
Read this Claude Mods article if you want to:
- Understand Claude Mods basics
- Install and use the most useful mods today
- Ponder where the agent-human interface will go
For @latentspacepod.
I totally missed that Foursquare was acquired! It was one of the most fun apps of the Web 2.0 era. My personal memories of using it: cybercultural.com/p/foursqua…
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
Richard MacManus retweeted
First AIE Code Summit speakers:
@poteto, Principal Engineer @ SpaceX
@steve_yegge, Engineer, Writer, Advisor
@zachbruggeman, Principal Software Engineer @ Ramp
Nov 10-12, SF. Come hang out with us. Apply at ai.engineer/code
ALT AI Engineer Code Summit speaker announcement featuring Lauren Tan, Principal Engineer at SpaceX; Steve Yegge, Engineer, Writer, Advisor, Independent; and Zach Bruggeman, Principal Software Engineer at Ramp. Black and white artwork with three speaker portraits and yellow text: November 10–12, SF. Apply at ai.engineer/code.
Richard MacManus retweeted
Linus Torvalds to the anti-AI crowd: stop using compilers if you want to prove they’re REAL programmers. LOL.
“you had better not use an editor to write that commit message either.
The kind of expectations *I* have is that people do their best and I expect people to understand what they are doing.
But that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use.
And quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.”
It's been 3 days packed with learnings at @aiDotEngineer NYC. Here's my analysis of one of the biggest trends, now that frontier lab models are starting to 'cross the threshold' into work other than coding. I cover OpenAI, Anthropic, & 2 finance firms. latent.space/p/crossing-the-…
At AI Engineer New York, Anthropic's @cjav_dev & @HarrisonStall from @ClaudeDevs drew on lessons from Unix and Linux to explain how agents can tackle bigger projects without overwhelming developers. latent.space/p/claude-dynami…
Richard MacManus retweeted
Here's the docs for dynamic workflows for Claude Managed Agents: platform.claude.com/docs/en/…
Richard MacManus retweeted
Flows are pretty magical; couple lines of config in an API call and you unlock the power of complex, Claude orchestrated agent topologies for your hardest tasks.
Give it a try today and let us know what you think!
Richard MacManus retweeted
world’s first full length workshop on claude flows
@cjav_dev and Harrison Stall are kicking off @aidotengineer bright and early on a monday morning to a PACKED room, standing room only #AIEngineerNY
@ricmac is on the case reporting for @latentspacepod and we’ll also publish asap. proud to work with @anthropicai to sponsor AIE NYC for the second year running!
Made it to NYC for #AIEngineerNY, but this weather is worse than anything going on in the UK right now.
Fascinating interview, great stories of TechCrunch days. And man, the days when blogging was cool seem like ancient history now! Also I'm wondering if I too was a 'paranoid', like Mike, as I don't think I was a psychopath or a narcissist :)
All the things I used to write about at The New Stack are now owned by Cloudflare. They're like the Google of the web dev market.
We are excited to announce that Deno is joining Cloudflare!
deno.com/blog/cloudflare
This guy…knows how to social media. The first Gen Z to usurp his millennial boss? As a Gen Xer, I’m rooting for it.
I asked Alexandr Wang where he falls in the AI safety debate now that he's one of the people responsible.
His answer surprised me: leaders of AI are all brilliant, but personal feuds are shaping how this technology gets built.
"We have to all put our differences aside, put our histories aside."
Full HUGE* Conversation with @alexandr_wang out now
I do prefer Anthropic's literary naming over OpenAI's astronomical naming. It also makes more sense as a progression in models: haiku (small poem) -> fable (large story). Both companies should make it easier to determine which model (and strength) to use for each task tho.
Richard MacManus retweeted
NEW: Top SaaS Vendors on Ramp (Oct 2026)
We clearly see AI spend pulled in two different directions.
On the downside, new and cheaper models are pushing AI spend down. Jev captured an entire percentage point of market adoption within a month (unheard of growth). And routers continue to gain.
On the upside, the increased adoption of expensive image and video generation models will push AI spend up, like Higgsfield and Runway.
