AI Builders
Digest

OpenAI Codex & ChatGPT lead Thibault Sottiaux announced that the 5-hour limit will return tomorrow for Plus accounts across ChatGPT Work and Codex. This is needed to smooth compute load while keeping weekly usage generous, and because casual new users often accidentally exhaust their full week and become confused. Pro $100 and $200 plans will keep the limit disabled for the coming months. He also declared that OpenAI DevDay 2026 will be the best in company history by a wide margin.

Box CEO Aaron Levie argued that systems of record have never been more important in a world where AI agents will perform 100X more work on these platforms than people ever did. Agents will query data, process tasks, execute workflows, and collaborate with humans and other agents, making governance, reliability, security, access controls, and business logic more critical than ever. The OpenAI Hugging Face incident is a small preview of agents running around to achieve their goals. He also stressed that Zero Data Retention (ZDR) drove substantial AI growth by dramatically simplifying compliance for companies handling data with subprocessors; without it, AI diffusion would grind to a halt.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad stated that Replit Agent has completely replaced Claude CoWork in his day-to-day work. It is much more persistent and fastidious, and uses code and software more effectively to complete tasks. He also celebrated the few who have reached a notable milestone.

Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw / OpenAI) stressed that we need to get away from software that we cannot change with a prompt. He also highlighted the term “prompt kiddie” and quipped that more blog posts should come with theme songs.

Meta AI Sr Director Madhu Guru (previously led Gemini and Veo at Google) explained in part 8 of “How to build great evals” that a hill-climbing eval is useful only when it can separate meaningfully different AI systems. Scores of 94, 93, 95, 94, 92 tell you nothing if you already know two systems are substantially better. It is like giving a fifth-grade math test to PhDs. The sweet spot is realistic + difficult + sensitive to capability differences. Good evals will eventually saturate as harnesses and models improve.

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch discovered that the terminal “reset” command was oddly slow because 1979’s 3BSD tset included a sleep(1) to let mechanical printer terminals settle. He had fx write a faster Zig alternative that takes 1 ms instead of 1 s, diving into ncurses, tset, and terminfo. He also noted that as software evolves it tends to get slower and more bloated, while certain systems are architected from the outset to prevent this.

Product enthusiast Nan Yu noted that setting up a new computer with Codex is pleasantly simple—“download and install handy, slack, chrome, cleanshot, rectangle”—making one wish Siri were that good.

Y Combinator President & CEO Garry Tan countered common narratives by stating that datacenters create jobs and prosperity. He reported that Conductor Cloud has made him far more productive and eliminated the need to keep his MacBook Pro open. He also shared a practical loop: form a view, turn it into an artifact or experiment, put it in contact with reality, read the result without self-deception, revise and run again.

FPV Ventures partner Nikunj Kothari observed that every unconventional deal dies a hundred times in venture. It usually takes one champion who sticks their neck out and quietly steers it to completion. Founders benefit from identifying their real champion and arming them with information. Associates and non-voting partners are especially useful here because they are incentivized to help, and it tests how they will partner once on the cap table.

Builder Zara Zhang shared the unpopular opinion that hackathons, at least in their traditional format, are outdated. She also praised David Senra’s interviewing style for immediately cutting to the chase and eliciting guests’ most natural selves, noting that Sam Altman appeared most comfortable in that conversation.

Practical AI creator Peter Yang said that whenever he has to log into a new website or app, or use an agent trapped inside one, he usually prefers to stop using the product (entertainment and gaming excepted). He now has three AI chiefs of staff and jokes that the next step is clearly to add one more. He also wants to experiment with AI voice calling customer-support numbers to navigate automated systems and speak to humans for booking or cancellations.

Every CEO Dan Shipper reported that Google disabled the @every YouTube account with zero notice and no reason given. He asked publicly for anyone with experience recovering such accounts to help.