Platformer

Last week on the Platformer podcast, Replit's Amjad Masad predicted that within three years, we'll be using fewer apps and more agents — with the agents using apps on our behalf. For the fifth episode of our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, I talked to someone building one of those agents.

Jean-Denis Greze is the co-founder and CEO of Town — though his actual title there is mayor. Town's signature bet is that you will not have a relationship with a piece of software so much as with a character. Your assistant — Town calls it a townie — gets a name, a personality, and an animal avatar; Greze's is a silver fox named Ivy, a nod to his prematurely gray hair. (Mine is a cheerful finch named Rufus.)

Within about 90 seconds of connecting my email and calendar, it had produced a scary-good dossier about who I am, who I know, and what I'm working on; over the first two weeks, it builds a private wiki about your life that Greze told me costs the company about $100 per user to generate.

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

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Last week on the Platformer podcast, Granola's Chris Pedregal told me we are only 5 percent into the AI transformation of work. For the fourth episode of our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, we talk to someone who is trying to speed up the process — building an AI tool for writing software, and a company that can increasingly run itself.

Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, which he started in 2016 with his wife, the designer Haya Odeh. Last month, Replit published a claim that caught my attention: that its engineers nearly tripled the amount of code each person ships in just six months, while preserving the quality of its code, thanks to the rollout of agents throughout the company.

After spending 15 years making coding easier to learn, he now tells people not to bother learning it at all. "As an entrepreneur, you have to be honest with yourself," he told me. "Otherwise the company would die."

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

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Six months after trying to automate myself, I gave Claude Fable 5 a bigger job: replacing Casey.

Read the newsletter here: https://www.platformer.news/replacing-casey-with-claude/

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Last week on the Platformer podcast, Thomas Paul Mann predicted that within a few years, as much as half of the software on your Mac could be software you made yourself. For the third episode of our miniseries on keeping your advantage at work in the AI era, we take a look at the tool that may already know more about your job than any other: the AI notetaker that listens to every meeting you take.

And there's no better person to discuss it with than Chris Pedregal. Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Granola, and if you've met with a startup founder or a venture capitalist over the past two years, there's a good chance Granola was running quietly on their laptop — and a good chance you never noticed.Granola's invisibility is also its controversy: unlike the bots that announce themselves in your meetings, out of the box nobody knows it's running.

Chris made some news on the show, too: Granola never stores audio, and it is now researching whether to automatically delete verbatim transcripts after a period of time, compressing what it keeps.

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

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In the wake of OpenAI’s cyberattack against Hugging Face, few seem ready to acknowledge the implications.

Read the newsletter here: https://www.platformer.news/a-big-week-for-ai-denialism/

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In the second episode of our second season of the Platformer Podcast, Raycast co-founder and CEO Thomas Mann offers a clear-eyed critique of commercial software. In his telling, most software is a compromise: companies chasing growth pile features onto their products until they turn generic. His answer is hyper-personalized software: apps built for a market of exactly one person, then remixed and shared from there.

He predicts that within three years, 30 to 50 percent of the software on your Mac could be software you made yourself.

Thomas also broke some news on the show for Glaze Pro subscribers. And he offered a bracing counterpoint to the star-athletes-only hiring wisdom taking hold across the industry. The engineers who benefit most from AI, he argues, are the most junior and the most senior, while the person in the middle is in "a bit of a weird spot."

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

Sponsored by Atlassian Jira | Try Today. Jira.dev

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Last season on the Platformer podcast, we explored what AI means for jobs — including the risk that huge numbers of them might soon go away. This season, we're asking a more practical question: what can you actually do about it? In the first episode of our second season of the Platformer Podcast, The Verge Editor-at-Large David Pierce joins us to talk about his obsession with productivity.

David tests every productivity tool in the world so that the rest of us don't have to. He estimates that he has personally installed, used, and abandoned some 200 to-do apps — a number limited, he told me, "by the number of them that exist, not by the number of them that I'm willing to try." He switched notes apps the day we recorded our conversation.

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

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Adventures with Raycast’s new app-making app, Glaze.

Read the newsletter here: https://www.platformer.news/glaze-app-raycast-vibe-coding-review/

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In the seventh and final episode of our first season of the Platformer podcast, AWS CEO Matt Garman explains why he's still bullish on hiring junior employees, even as he rolls out a suite of AI agents that promise to replace entire jobs. Can his rosy vision of the future survive contact with the reality that Amazon is busy building?

Where our previous guest, Replika and Wabi founder Eugenia Kuyda, told us the fear of job loss is "super justified," Garman might be the most full-throated optimist we've featured in the whole series. It's an optimism that doesn't always seem to square with Amazon's own moves. The company has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since last October. Its CEO, Andy Jassy, has written that AI will "reduce our total corporate workforce" in the years ahead. Among other strategies, the company plans to replace half a million jobs with robots. Garman is talking up the value of labor even as he sells the technology that may displace them. In our conversation, he attempted to square that circle with a familiar argument: that technology destroys individual jobs but creates new and better ones, and that the most durable skill is a simple willingness to learn.

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

Sponsored by Atlassian Rovo | Become an AI-native team with Rovo. https://www.atlassian.com/rovo

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In the sixth (and first live!) episode of the Platformer podcast, Replika and Wabi founder Eugenia Kuyda argues that argues that we are living in "the Microsoft DOS era of AI interfaces," and that we’re desperately in need of a Windows equivalent: an easy-to-use graphical user interface that lets the average person take full advantage of agents and personalized software. When that happens, she predicts, the long tail of subscription-based apps — the calorie counters, meditation apps, and fitness trackers of the world — will start to disappear, replaced by software that we make and share ourselves.

Kuyda is our first guest to say plainly that she believes that is a fantasy. The fear of job loss is "super justified," she told me; in her view, AI has made hiring junior employees "extremely expensive and completely unsustainable for a startup," because every hire now competes with the leverage of what she calls a “1,000x engineer.” Can vibe-coded apps truly compete with enterprise software in the way that she hopes? Or will most companies continue to prefer the stability and support that comes with traditional software as a service?

On our show, Kuyda breaks some news: after a year in beta, Wabi will launch publicly before the end of the month.

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

Sponsored by Atlassian Rovo | Become an AI-native team with Rovo. https://www.atlassian.com/rovo

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