Aug 17, 2026

Reading Group July 2026 - Loop Engineering

This session provides an in-depth exploration of Loop Engineering, a paradigm shift from manual AI prompting to designing autonomous systems that orchestrate AI agents. Speakers share practical experiences, from building production-grade platforms with automated code generation and adversarial AI reviews to experimental loop structures and foundational infrastructure layers. Key discussions address challenges like managing token costs, preventing agent chaos, and implementing robust verification mechanisms for industrializing software development.

Aug 14, 2026

Building And Structuring An AI Native Company

Tom Blomfield of Y Combinator discusses the paradigm shift towards AI-native companies, moving beyond traditional human-centric hierarchies. He introduces the concept of self-improving AI loops—where systems continuously learn and evolve without human intervention—and illustrates this with examples like YC's self-healing data agents and living user manuals. Blomfield explores the vision of 'AI employees with VMs' leading to a 'company brain,' where humans transition to the 'edge' for intuition and real-world interaction. He concludes with practical advice for founders: prioritize token burn over headcount, ensure all data is AI-legible, and leverage AI for strategic simulations like investor calls.

Aug 14, 2026

Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max: Open-Weight Model Surpasses Most American Frontier Labs (Ep. 1018)

Jon Krohn dissects Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model positioned as the largest open-weight release in history if its promised weights ship. The discussion covers its multimodal capabilities, 1M token context window, and performance competitive with Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. Key highlights include its advanced multi-day agentic capabilities and aggressively low pricing ($2 in / $6 out per million tokens), intensifying the AI price war. Krohn also provides critical insights into the safety of using Chinese models, emphasizing data handling practices and the benefits/risks across different deployment scenarios.

Aug 13, 2026

Continual Learning: How AI Agents Get Better With Every Use | Arjun Karanam, Trajectory

Arjun Karanam from Trajectory discusses the "experience gap" in AI, where models excel in intelligence but lack real-world experience, advocating for continual learning. He outlines four key areas for the agent ecosystem: robust traceability including corrective actions, evaluations drawn from production traffic, harnesses that orchestrate rather than constrain, and comfort with open-weight models. Trajectory aims to provide a platform for companies to own and continuously improve their AI intelligence.

Aug 13, 2026

AI & Data Science Periodic Tables: How They Work Together

Aaron Baughman and Martin Keen present a unified framework using "periodic tables" to integrate AI and Data Science. They illustrate how elements like pipelines, embeddings, and RAG combine to build real-world AI applications, using a detailed document Q&A system example. The discussion emphasizes the critical interdependence of data science in grounding AI models and ensuring continuous improvement through an innovative feedback loop.

Aug 12, 2026

LLM Knowledge Bases: a practical guide — Ben Holmes, Warp

Ben Holmes outlines a personal knowledge management system leveraging LLMs and automation to transform raw voice-dictated notes into an organized, browsable wiki and visual graph. The process emphasizes rapid, "sloppy" capture, followed by AI agents enriching notes with tags, web research, and backlinks, then generating structured wikis based on Karpathy's methodology, all automated via cloud sandboxes and Obsidian's headless CLI.