AI Builders
Digest

Box CEO Aaron Levie emphasizes that software jobs aren’t going away. Agents represent the single biggest form of leverage for anyone technical in history, making it probably the best time ever to be technical—whether working solo, in a team, or at a company level. He argues that most of the world’s software has already been built and agents will reduce work on the existing pie, but we’re about to experience 100X more software than before. Examples include improving apps people use daily, replatforming legacy on-prem systems to the cloud, automating workflows for SMBs that couldn’t hire developers, patching security issues, bringing automation to IT, and connecting vast amounts of organizational data.

Levie adds that agentic coding is a huge boon for developers wanting to get far more done, IT building custom systems, domain experts automating workflows, and curious learners starting to code. However, it’s less great for casually building complex software you must maintain long-term, as upgrades, security patches, and ongoing maintenance are taxes most knowledge workers aren’t prepared for. Net net: vastly more software and more software developers ahead, but not everyone rolling their own.

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch announced that the company is growing the Vercel Labs team. Their mission is to build the devtools of the AI era. They used to build tools for humans; now they’re building them for agents. @ctatedev and team have shipped tools that agents love: agent-browser, portless, skills, chat, just-bash, json-render… with 22.8M+ downloads to date. Rauch called it a dream job and said DMs are open.

Claude launched new connectors to the tools creative professionals already use. The Autodesk Fusion connector lets designers and engineers create and modify 3D models through conversation. The Blender connector allows debugging a scene, building new tools, or batch-applying changes across every object directly from Claude. Additional connectors include Adobe Creative Cloud, Ableton, Splice, Canva Affinity, SketchUp, and Resolume. Claude also joined the Blender Development Fund as a patron to support open-source development.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad expressed being thrilled to support the education GOAT as he reinvents education again. He also commented that it’s impressive GitHub kept the service up given the growth, predicting years ago that free services would become untenable with human-level bots. He suggested exploring micro-payments: even cents per git push might reduce spam and make it sustainable, perhaps powered by Bitcoin to keep it open and accessible without KYC.

Peter Yang, Product at Roblox, expressed a lot of respect for solo AI builders, saying the world is their playground now. He proposed measuring how good AI models are by what era of games they can one-shot a single level for (or build in 30 min of work): from Atari and NES to PS5, Xbox Series X/S. He thinks we’re still in the NES era. Peter Yang also called an idea from @Shpigford actually brilliant and said he’s stealing it for his OpenClaw.

Peter Steinberger (Polyagentmorous ClawFather at OpenClaw + OpenAI) shared that they now spin up a codex instance on every commit landing on main to look for booboos like regressions or security issues. It was live for 10 minutes and already found one of his. He also described advanced loops: if an issue is found, codex spins up a PR; a review agent checks, and if issues remain, another agent fixes (up to 5 loops).

Thariq from Anthropic's Claude Code mentioned hunting annoying bugs, including a white whale where CC sometimes appears to hang during big file writes. They’re working on making the no flicker renderer excellent for default use and invited users to share more pain points.

Every CEO Dan Shipper suggested we might need new terms like “Codex-native,” “Cowork-native,” “Cursor-native” for apps designed to be used inside the in-app browser of your agent of choice. The agent and user can both use it, full context is shared, and both can see what the other is doing—huge opportunity to build software here.

He shared that using Posthog inside codex is so much better: codex can write queries and see results, making collaboration seamless. Codex can also kick off agents that write PRs or run production DB requests to back up insights. A browser inside your desktop coding orchestration tool beats an agent in your browser.

Builder Zara Zhang advised: Don’t get AI to generate images; get them to generate SVGs! Vector illustrations that seamlessly blend into the design style are the perfect complement to HTML Slides (using the QuiverAI API inside AnyGenIO’s Frontend Slides feature).

She expressed interest in building web apps by just sharing GitHub repos with code so people can customize the UI however they like—kind of like Karpathy’s “idea file”: just write down the idea, and people’s agents can build it customized.

Y Combinator President & CEO Garry Tan said if you’re sick of hearing about agents, 2026 is going to be the eternal September for you. He also found some demos hilarious and marked 10 years since AlphaGo, calling it incredible.

Sam Altman posted that @ajambrosino is mogmogging and to enjoy the next few updates. He also shared several content links.

Linear Head of Product Nan Yu shared about the luxury of having excess compute.

FPV Ventures partner Nikunj Kothari shared a funny anecdote about a founder talking to Tier 1 VCs being called “neolab index funds” and had too much fun building a button. Aditya Agarwal called something awesome. Peter Steinberger also mentioned smelling a leak.