Dark-mode ship log from the group chat furnace

Boot sequence

The chunk opens with Anton declaring Codex fast mode dangerously addictive, Jensen immediately pricing the addiction in tokens, and YJ volunteering a test run that closed issues before the review bots had finished talking. That set the operating mode for the fortnight: everyone trying to make agents go faster, run longer, spend less, break less, and somehow still obey the part of the prompt that says "wait".

Gaurav Keerthi pulled the memory conversation back toward first principles: the Karpathy-style file wiki is a research tool, not magic RAM. Chris turned a failed search workflow into a Codex-powered plugin. Pranav wrestled with context burn. B started asking whether anyone had tried /goal inside /goal, which is exactly the kind of recursive idea this chat treats as a reasonable Tuesday.

The vibe: less "AI will replace developers", more "which profile lets the agent run all night without setting fire to the repo?"

Local LLM garage

Jensen, Ian, Ray, and Huiliang kept the local stack loud. DGX Sparks, Mac Studios, RTX boxes, vLLM, SGLang, Ollama, Qwen, Gemma, Nemotron, Kimi, vision sidecars: the lab bench was basically a small weather system. Jensen showed Qwen coder tests running locally with the SG Code Campus crew, Ian called the early Qwen output impressive, and Ray kept the SGLang containers warm with Qwen3-coder and Nemotron experiments.

Gaurav Manek dropped the stat that made the self-hosted people sit up: speculative decoding pushed a Gemma setup on an RTX 4090 from "fast" to "what just happened". Huiliang added field notes from Google Edge Gallery and later Google startup credits. Ian kept separating serving from orchestration: the model runtime is one problem, the agent loop around it is another, and pretending they are the same thing is where dashboards go to become soup.

• Jensen: DGX Spark unboxing, Qwen tests, Kimi-in-Claude experiments, and a small vision model bolted beside a larger Qwen model like a skill cartridge.
• Ian: MoE model guidance, local/hybrid architecture, and the recurring reminder that enterprise orchestration is not the same beast as personal coding-agent autonomy.
• Ray: SGLang, Nemotron, Devin-style enterprise comparisons, and the excellent "local harnesses need tinkering; enterprise systems need boring capabilities" reality check.
• Huiliang: Gemma-on-phone reports, Paperclip curiosity, Google Cloud startup pointers, and pragmatic AWS-vs-Google data-gravity notes.

Goal mode and tokenmaxxing

The group spent a heroic amount of time turning subscription limits into a systems-design problem. Chris ran a spectacular 68-agent burn-down against a weekly reset, then explained the orchestration as a pile of independent, resumable creation loops. Jensen went deep on Codex profiles, yolo settings, 5.5 low execution, and the point at which permission prompts stop being safety and start being a tripwire.

The practical pattern that emerged: plan high, execute cheaper, review adversarially, and keep a kill switch. Bennett liked xhigh planning plus cheaper implementation. Brendan described Opus as the orchestrator with Kimi workers. Gaurav Keerthi proposed plan, challenge, execute, challenge again. Ling asked the budget question everyone was already living. Anh nailed the /goal paradox: goal mode is about evaluation, but if you approve every step manually, the goal has no legs.

Harnesses, skills, OS

This was the fortnight where "agent harness" became table stakes vocabulary. Gaurav Manek gave the crisp layer split: harness equals model plus tools plus loop; agent OS equals orchestration and business function on top. Boon Kgim put Claude Code, Codex, Cowork, Claude Design, and terminal tools into the same wrapper family, then kept asking the practical question: where does the agent live when clients want to message it at 3am?

Yish91 kept dragging theory back into production reality. Large codebases have weird patterns for a reason, compliance does not accept "I get the full picture now", and giant autocomplete is not a substitute for owning the blast radius. Rhys linked the "thin harness, fat skills" argument. Mabel brought in Nanoclaw and AIE harness talks. Brendan compared GSD, Claude Code, Kimi, and opencode. Ian treated GSD and superpowers as complementary: one for spec decomposition, the other for feature-level build-test-iterate pressure.

• Gaurav Manek: harness-vs-OS taxonomy, plus the immortal warning not to expose a Claude channel over a network port.
• Boon Kgim: subagents, Telegram-to-Hermes-to-Vercel shipping loops, and client website updates without asking the client to learn vibe coding.
• yish91: grill-me workflows, context rot, codebase pattern respect, and the recurring "tokens can go brrrr in side projects, not in accountable work" correction.
• Mabel: AIE livestream pointers and the Nanoclaw side-agent path.

Builder drops

The builder feed was busy in the best possible way. Brandon shipped Window Box, a desktop companion with scenery and music. Gijs shipped Markjason diff views, opened it up, and then gave the most useful MVP sequencing note: one-shotting the core can work, but the moment live infrastructure enters the chat, guardrails matter. YJ started collecting Brandon's tiny toys for the ABC showcase and kept pointing people back to the repo.

Brendan came back from the AIE hackathon with a working build even when the portal misbehaved, then wrote up DevRel thoughts for the agent era. Daylon showed a Telegram chatbot without middleware. Ivan Ong shared an AI-built Bible platform story from a 60-year-old builder. Chris used classical Chinese book production as an eval set. Ray, Jensen, Ian, and Huiliang kept the hardware bench alive. This is how the group works when it is healthy: someone ships, someone benchmarks, someone asks if it is secure, someone makes it weirdly useful by tomorrow.

• Brandon L: Window Box, plus the continuing tiny-toy streak that makes showcase curation a real problem.
• Gijs: Markjason diffs, open source momentum, and practical notes on sequencing AI-built MVPs.
• Brendan / bguiz: AIE build notes, DevRel funnel thinking, and a magnificent map of Google's agent-product naming chaos.
• YJ Soon: repo nudges, showcase gardening, Copilot Agents Window spotting, and the public call to add profiles, projects, jobs, and articles.
• Kevin Lee: the Cognition Forward Deployed Engineer role and a very on-brand plug for the new ABC jobs page.

Enterprise agent infra

The cloud conversation got sharper on May 22. Boon wanted a coding harness with Git access, Telegram input, staging preview, and a "go live" switch. Ian drew the boundary around AWS AgentCore: great for explicit, deterministic workflow coordination; not the obvious home for fuzzy user interaction, exploratory solution search, or emergent multi-agent coordination. Bedrock Agents, Google ADK, Autogen, Kiro, VPS boxes, Mac minis, Azure, Beelinks, RAM limits, home-network failure modes: the map got usefully messy.

Kishore pushed back from the 24x7 customized performance-cost side. Randy brought governed AI infrastructure into the room. Jensen joked his house would become the deployment risk if he self-hosted too hard, then got serious: for long-running client workloads, RAM and gateways are not decoration. Gibson already had the Telegram-to-Hermes loop running. B kept the minimal answer alive: Codex on a VPS works. Lars spotted the secret job requirement: basic network engineering, but make it operational.

Emerging consensus: personal claws and enterprise workflows overlap, but they are not one product wearing two invoices.

Design and docs

The group kept poking at the design handoff problem from both ends. Ian proposed a weirdly promising pipeline: PRD or BRD in Markdown, Figma layout converted to raw HTML/CSS, then hand annotations in comments so the agent has a richer substrate than a screenshot and a prayer. Petty is already using Claude Design as a high-fidelity first cut before sending it into Claude Code. Adamzafir named the gap: letting an agent design is still a gamble, and matching screenshots can take ten rounds of prompting.

Gaurav Keerthi asked about Figma MCP. Jan tried Claude-to-Figma for diagrams and UI recreation, then flagged a Figma plugin to test next. Wan Wei asked the delightful beginner-facing question about image and text generation replacing a marketing system. Ian recommended MacDown for non-technical Markdown editing and confessed that emacs once bounced him out of freshman CS. B, naturally, suggested nano and vim anyway.

• Ian: HTML-plus-comments as an agent-readable design handoff path, and MacDown for people who should not be forced into terminal editing on day one.
• Petty: Claude Design as mock, PRD reference, and cautionary tale when the agent decides the aesthetic has wandered off.
• Gaurav Keerthi and Jan: Figma MCP, diagram trials, and the still-unsolved "design intent into code" bridge.
• Wan Wei: the exact product-manager question everyone eventually asks: which tool eats which workflow now?

Security and governance

Security kept interrupting the fun in useful ways. Gaurav Keerthi flagged a supply-chain threat and explained his current skill-handling pattern: have the agent inspect a skill and rebuild the relevant parts locally instead of blindly importing embedded content. Daryl's simple public-repo reminder landed: do not commit personal data. Rhys and Jan kept the legal-accountability layer in view while the group discussed white-collar displacement and professional responsibility.

Chris posted a draft of collective guidelines for external events, keeping the chat technical, social, and not an ad board. The group also circled around token opacity as a pricing and trust problem. Chris framed tokens like a metered currency; others compared subscriptions, API buckets, -p changes, Fire Pass, Kimi, and Claude limits. The practical result was not ideological purity. It was hedging: multiple harnesses, multiple providers, local fallbacks, and fewer assumptions that any one platform will remain generous.

Community notes

There was also a lot of welcome energy. Ian and others kept adding new builders. Kevin thanked everyone who came to or watched AIE and pointed people to Cognition's Singapore role. Brendan suggested future meetup speakers from the AIE circuit. YJ, Chris, Jensen, and Ian kept the ABC site, jobs page, repo, and contribution loops moving. This is the less glamorous maintenance layer of a community: links, guidelines, PRs, event asks, and someone saying "please put that on the showcase page" before the thing vanishes into chat sediment.

Shoutout roll

• Jensen Loke: for running hot on DGX, yolo profiles, Kimi trials, Codex release spotting, and the local-vision skill cartridge energy.
• Ian Choo: for model architecture notes, enterprise-agent boundary setting, Figma-to-HTML speculation, and many new-member handoffs.
• YJ Soon: for repo stewardship, showcase nudges, Copilot agent-window links, and trying Codex on live issues so the rest of us get the scar tissue for free.
• Chris Pecaut: for the 68-agent sprint, classical Chinese evals, token-economics provocations, collective guidelines, and turning chat fuel into recap fuel.
• Gaurav Keerthi: for research-tool clarity, plan-reflect loops, Figma MCP questions, and supply-chain caution.
• Gaurav Manek: for speculative decoding numbers, harness taxonomy, WhatsApp MCP, and the Unix socket security nudge.
• Ray A. Fan: for Qwen/Nemotron/SGLang experiments and enterprise-agent benchmarking curiosity.
• Huiliang: for Gemma, Google credits, ADK, Paperclip, and data-gravity pragmatism.
• Boon Kgim: for subagent pattern language, client-facing agent flows, and Telegram-to-Hermes shipping loops.
• Brendan / bguiz: for AIE hackathon dispatches, DevRel notes, opencode/Kimi tests, and the Google product-name stack trace.
• Wan Wei: for asking the questions that make tools legible to more people, reporting from hackathons, and carrying Logan's encouragement forward.
• Gijs: for Markjason, MVP sequencing notes, and a healthy suspicion of unguarded AI-built infrastructure.
• yish91: for context-rot warnings, production caution, and making "giant autocomplete" sound as risky as it is useful.
• Rhys, Jan, Daryl, Peijing, Mabel, Gibson, Adamzafir, Phu, Anton, Brandon, Ivan, Daylon, Kevin, Kishore, Randy, Lars, B, and many more: for links, builds, warnings, jokes, questions, and the steady conversion of noisy chat into working knowledge.