personal principles for the new world
how i'll win on the march to AGI
I’m writing this because it feels like we’ve entered a new world, and I want to take advantage of the opportunity.
Five months ago, AI code writing was a fantastic lever. It helped our team go faster, write boilerplate code, debug, and even complete small features on its own. Today its no longer just a lever, now it is the paradigm itself. Most of 2025, we called this way of building “vibecoding.” Now it’s just the way we write software.
As someone who builds and sells software for a living, that’s a striking development. It makes me want to do a pulse-check: am I building my business the right way? Am I focusing on the right things? Should I be thinking about my life differently?
The future is daunting, exciting, and very uncertain. I want to make the most of it. So I’m writing a few principles to guide me through the next era. I believe that if I follow them, work doggedly, stay curious, and do the right thing, I can win.
What does winning mean to me?
On a macro scale, it means making a positive contribution to humanity. I believe in the Jobsian view that we should leave a dent in the universe. Tens of billions of people who came before me toiled, experimented, and died to make my life amazing. I owe the current generation, and the billions who come after me, the same effort. Winning also means being happy and healthy, and one day being financially stable enough to support my family. On a micro scale, it means building a successful company.
belief
I haven’t felt this viscerally since the first time I played with ChatGPT in my dorm room, November of 2022. My first few prompts to Chat were for writing poems and jokes. I was amazed to see the coherence and dynamism of the responses. I quickly asked it about its own sentience, and it gave graceful answers. I was enamored.
I didn’t study for a single one of my finals that semester. I knew there would be a few weeks of arbitrage where professors didn’t know what this new technology could do. I felt gleeful about the “secret” that I had unlocked, amazed that the students around me were still dutifully studying, unaware that the world had changed.
Watching AI write code makes me feel the same way now. Outside a narrow subset of companies, the rest of the world has spent the past few months operating as usual, unaware that the world has completely changed. Opus 4.5 ushered in that new world.
I knew AGI would come someday. I live in SF, read all the essays, listen to the podcasts, keep the pulse with musings on X. I’ve debated the predictions, both aggressive and doomer, and heard postulations from researchers, VCs, founders, and everyone in between.
But until you see it for yourself, watch it automate large swathes of your work, until you feel its magic applied to something real; you don’t really “feel the AGI”, do you?
More broadly, watching it eat software has made me a believer. I understand why AI hasn’t cracked every domain of knowledge work yet; there are practical problems with evals and diffusion. But I believe those are tractable problems. I can look at the trajectory from here and imagine what an Opus 7 will be capable of. I believe AI will upend how we do knowledge work, and as a knowledge worker, I want to be ready to take advantage of the opportunities it creates.
my vantage
To be clear, this is not a breathless discussion. I do not feel doom. I feel a lot of uncertainty, which can sometimes shade into fear, but I am largely optimistic. I think AI will do wonders for the world and improve the quality of life for everyone.
I don’t claim to know the timelines for this change, and I don’t think they matter much for what I’m doing. Whether it takes five years or fifty, my principles remain the same.
I’m a proximate consumer of AI. I live in SF. I did YC. My friends and I are all deeply involved with startups and the cutting edge. I’m tapped into the online knowledge ecosystem of where the industry is going. But I’m still a consumer of AI, not a creator. I don’t work at a lab, chip company, or physical infrastructure company. That is, of course, optional. I could pivot to one of those, but I’m not inclined to. I love my customers. They have so many problems to solve to reach their full potential, and they need my help to solve them. As long as that’s true, I’ll keep building.
What follows are my personal principles for winning on the march toward AGI. Many of these principles overlap with what we’ll do with our business, but those belong in a separate document that we won’t share publicly.
be close enough to grab the falling apple
In an interview with the Acquired Podcast, Jensen gave an analogy about how he’s guided NVIDIA through many eras of technology: gaming, crypto, scientific computing, and now AI.
You want to position yourself near opportunities. You don’t have to be that perfect. You want to position yourself near the tree. Even if you don’t catch the apple before it hits the ground, so long as you’re the first one to pick it up. You want to position yourself close to the opportunities.
That’s kind of a lot of my work, is positioning the company near opportunities, and the company having the skills to monetize each one of the steps along the way so that we can be sustainable.
— Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA (on the Acquired Podcast)
Given the rapid pace of change, the best thing I can do is stay close to the tree and grab the apples as they fall. I don’t know exactly how the landscape will change, but I’m certain it will.
Here’s why I believe I’m well-positioned:
My industry (Physical AI) is on the frontier of what’s possible. There are many unsolved problems and, better yet, unknown unknowns. The apples are plentiful and falling fast
I live in SF, and I’m in communities where this technology is the norm. I get information earlier than most of the world. I think anyone could do this if they followed the right people and conversations online, but proximity still helps
I am agile. I am a broke 20-something-year-old. I don’t have an inflated lifestyle or a dearth of material possessions. I am lucky to have no dependents. I live minimally. I avoid people, places, and institutions so bureaucratic that they stifle my ability to change direction quickly
I am willing to make a diving catch. I’m bold enough to take big bets. I’m comfortable with risk, and I have good intuition for taking calculated ones
I am scrappy
don’t be dogmatic about my role
In the era of manual knowledge work, everyone had a box they played nicely in. You were an engineer, an accountant, a teacher, etc. You completed the tasks someone in your box would handle. You used the tools that someone in your box would use.
AI has blurred the lines between these boxes. A single person can use tools and abstract their impact over multiple roles.
The only description I should have of myself is “I help X people do Y things.” The how — with what tools, in what fashion — will change dramatically, and the rate of change will accelerate.
If I’m dogmatic about what I am, the world will leave me behind. “Computer” was once a job title for humans. Now I’m typing on a machine that automated them.
The boundaries that society, my education, or my job placed on me are artificial. All that matters is how I can best provide value for the people I care about.
focus on the things that won’t change
Right now, everyone is asking what will change. When Bezos was building Amazon, he asked the opposite question, allowing him to focus on compounding over the long term.
“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one.
I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ...
In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
— Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon
Change is the constant right now, and, given the magnitude of it, it’s hard to predict every little thing that will be different. A better use of my energy is to focus on what won’t change: my personal values and the needs of my customers/loved ones, and then to orient myself in that direction for the long term.
Even though the platforms, tools, and personas will change, those underlying truths will not. If I focus on what won’t change, I’ll do alright.
do things i love, things i might even do for free
This was always a prerequisite for doing great work, but now it might matter even more. Only the most knowledgeable, most obsessed people will remain valuable. I’m reminded that Magnus Carlsen once entered a chess trivia competition and won.
For much of knowledge work, the human contribution will matter less and less at the margins. This will filter out many people; most will be okay with producing a “good-enough” level of work product. There will be only a few crazies who are willing to work excruciatingly hard to squeeze out the last few percentage points of excellence. The Current Thing is to call this extra effort “taste”, but also see “quality” and “craftsmanship” for attempts to define the same.
The marginal value of human work, in both knowledge and physical domains, will approach zero. I want to be one of the people who continues pushing right to the end, until I am quite sure there is nothing I as a human can do to make humanity better off.
Even still, I might work for free, because I think it’s fun. People used to hunt to eat. Now they hunt for sport. Right now, we work to earn our keep. Is it far-fetched to think that one day we’d work for sport?
internalize that the models will only get better
In the summer of 2024, Sam Altman gave our batch a talk. One thing he said that stuck with me: “This is the worst GPT will ever be. The models will only get much, much better.” It’s easy to nod and smile. Duh, of course they’ll get better! It’s much harder to actually internalize.
The models are only getting better. What does that mean for how I approach my work? How much better will they get? At each point along the curve, what can I accomplish that I couldn’t before?
I will only work with people who are optimistic about the future and excited to harness these capabilities. I will only work on companies that benefit from this improvement. I will only work in industries that get bigger and more valuable as a result.
I won’t surround myself with people who stagnate, or worse, try to stand in the way of progress. I don’t think indefinite AI progress is a foregone conclusion: there will be boom-and-bust cycles, physical constraints, and regulatory hurdles. But the long arc of technology has made one thing clear: you either jump on the train or eventually get run over. I’m damn sure not going to be roadkill.
don’t panic
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain
— Frank Herbert, Litany Against Fear, Dune
Fear is only useful to me for about two seconds, when the jolt of fight or flight spurs me into action. After that, it’s strictly detrimental. It just provides dread that makes me unhappy or paralyzes me from taking action.
I’m not a fearful person. I know that change is requisite for improvement. I welcome it, and I’m excited about the opportunities ahead. I just really, really care about winning, and the thought of losing is, to put it mildly, upsetting.
With all my decision-making, I must remove fear from the equation. I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.
simple ideas
The kicker is that none of these principles are new or unique to the march to AGI. These are the same things that always mattered. Just swap “models getting better” for “technology getting better,” and you could hand these principles to someone in any era of the modern world.
Charlie Munger said it best: take a simple idea and take it seriously. If he were still with us, he’d probably tell me, “Don’t midwit yourself into losing.”
Vedant - follow these principles. Work hard. Stay curious. Just keep compounding. Don’t die. You will win.