11: 10x Less Productive w/ Pablo

What does it mean to build something "in the spirit of Bitcoin"?

Pablo & Gigi want to encourage you to apply for SEC-05.

Books & websites mentioned:

• Stackoverflow is dead by Gergely Orosz
• Sovereign Engineering by Gigi and Pablo

In this dialogue:

• Gigi's vibeline & vibeline-ui
• Pubcastr aka castr.me
• Pablo's thread about TENEX
• Alex Gleason's MKStack
• What is the essence of nostr?
• What are nostr's values, and can LLMs extract them?
• Agents and workflows living on nostr
• Agent specialization and Roo code
• “What would Jesus do?”
• What does it mean to build something "in the spirit of Bitcoin"?
• Hierarchy of agents
• Generalists vs specialists
• Top-down constraints and bottom-up emergence
• Wise architects VS efficient diff-merging LLMs
• Where does the human fit in?
• Distributed cognition: agents and humans
• Hiring agents via nostr
• "If the human has to intervene, something is catastrophically wrong."
• Confidence levels of an agent's action
• Giving agents money using mcp-money
• Offering bounties to solve problems
• Stackoverflow is dead
• Stock photography is dead
• Real vs fake photography test
• Vibe-coding vs regular coding, and how it relates to the switch from analog to digital photography
• What is economical, and what isn't?
• Dialogue and Dia-Logos with LLMs
• Specialization in a multi-agent world
• Adding a small vibe-coding widget to every app (allowing users to customize stuff)
• Multiplicity VS canonical design
• Money is singular, language is not
• Jack's original sin: the twitter Bootstrap theme
• The "other stuff" initiative
• What's missing from TENEX? Why isn't it fully working just yet?
• Rebuilding everything every 3 weeks
• Voice vs text, sentiment analysis vs tone
• The power and informational density of silence
• In-person vs online communication
• Letting agents learn lessons
• "Where do you get your ideas from?"
• Anonymity vs pseudonyms vs government ID
• Agents need identity, money, and reputation
• "I own this dude." —Pablo
• Owning agents
• Vibe-coding lessons: don't look at the code, and in the best case don't even look at the IDE
• Human-agent communication: typing vs speaking
• Why some meetings couldn't have been an email
• Clearly defined problems vs undefined problem spaces
• Why TENEX will be in perpetual alpha
• What is Sovereign Engineering?
• Why should you sign up for it?
• How come so many awesome things came out of it? Blossom, nsite, Zapstore, etc.
• Who should come, and who shouldn't?
• How did it start?
• What's the idea?
• "Fix the money, fix the internet."
• "Ship stuff that lasts."
• Keep it pure. No monetization.
• Focus on exploration and ideation
• What's the structure?
• 6 weeks, 21 participants
• Same structure every week
• Monday Mornings: Orientation
• Tuesday Talks
• Wednesday Workshops
• Thursday: No Agenda
• Friday: Demo Day
• Weekend: Hikes
• SEC-05: YOLO Mode
• Empower users
• Optimize for self-sovereignty
• Bitcoin works
• Lightning works (Gigi's post)
• Build the future you want to see
• Madeira: you can pay in bitcoin almost everywhere
• tl;dr: Listen to every single No Solutions conversation to get an idea of what Sovereign Engineering is

Related dialogues:

• #18: Rewriting TENEX w/ Pablo
• #19: Romantically Shitting on Paywalls w/ Pablo
• #23: Shipping Violently w/ Justin Moon
• #29: State of the Mint and Mind w/ Calle
• #31: Buzz, Mosaico, and Other Stuff w/ Pablo

Recorded at 901,069.