Human-AI Interaction
How people interact with AI systems, including interface design, trust, collaboration, delegation, personalization, and cognitive workflows.
AI Coding Agents Can Build Dashboards, but Analysts Must Define the Questions
Alejandro AO argues that AI coding agents can build a working business dashboard quickly, but that speed does not replace the analyst’s judgment. In a bank marketing example, he starts by defining what campaign managers need to learn, checks what the dataset can support, and specifies KPIs before asking an agent to build the interface. He then reviews and revises the charts, while cautioning that observed patterns do not establish what caused them—or what will improve the next campaign.
Crypto Faces an AI Security Risk Without a Known Attack
AI-driven advances in mathematics could threaten the cryptography that protects crypto wallets, but the risk is harder to define than the quantum threat the industry has spent years preparing for. On Diet TBPN, host John Coogan relayed warnings from Vitalik Buterin and cryptographer Matthew Green, while arguing that crypto has time to strengthen its defenses rather than rush funds into new wallets. Coogan and co-host Jordi Hays also questioned whether the open-source tools that could expose vulnerabilities should be restricted.
Apple’s Stores Build Customer Relationships That Online Shopping Cannot Replace
Ron Johnson argues that retail can adapt to online shopping and AI without losing the customer relationships that physical stores help build and sustain. He sees AI improving shopping across channels, but says human service still matters in stores; his failed effort to change J.C. Penney’s offer shows the risk of moving faster than customers’ values allow.
Reachy Mini Turns Expressive Movement Into Its Desktop-Robot Pitch
Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face introduce Reachy Mini, an open-source desktop robot, through a music video built around the machine’s own recorded movements. The video’s case for the small robot rests on its expressive head and antenna motions, visible construction and simple prompt-and-response interaction; it also extends the open-source invitation to the film itself, which viewers can scrub through and fork.
ChatGPT Extensions Keep Product Interfaces and Context Beside the Conversation
Corey Ching argues that ChatGPT plugin extensions can keep a product’s interface and selected context beside a conversation, so users can ask for help without losing sight of what they are working on. The Figma and Meetings demonstrations show how selected designs or meeting notes can inform a request while remaining available for review. Ching recommends starting with a user task, then building and refining an extension around it.
Persistent Agents Turn AI Work Into Shared Team Investigations
At OpenAI DevDay 2026, Jason Liu argues that the next step for workplace agents is not simply helping one person do more, but letting teams contribute to work that continues across conversations, meetings and devices. He says persistent agents, shared workspaces and reusable tools can keep an investigation moving without requiring one person to gather every clue, relay updates and carry the task to completion.
AI Makes Game Mashups Easier; Finishing Them Remains the Hard Part
On Diet TBPN, hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays argue that a striking AI game mod is a proof of concept, not evidence of a finished game: making a mashup reliable and enjoyable takes far more work than getting it to run. Their discussion extends that distinction to AI products, where useful capabilities can remain hard to discover, and to agents, whose expanded access can make them more useful while increasing security and privacy risks.
Anthropic’s $518 Billion Compute Commitments Face Uncertain Customer Demand
Anthropic’s leaked financial figures show revenue rising from $400 million in 2024 to $4.6 billion in 2025, alongside a decade-long commitment to $518 billion in computing and infrastructure spending. On Big Technology Podcast, Alex Kantrowitz argues that those obligations could amplify the effects of slower growth, both for Anthropic’s suppliers and for a stock market increasingly reliant on AI-related companies. Ranjan Roy sees customer concentration and losses as more immediate risks, and expects Anthropic’s counterparties to have reasons to negotiate if the company falters.
Coding Agents Need Testable Definitions of Done
Nick Nisi and Zack Proser of WorkOS argue that engineers can delegate more work to coding agents only when they define completion in terms the agents must verify. Their workshop turns a failed test loop—an agent touched a file meant to prove tests had run, without running them—into a broader operating rule: use measurable goals, automated checks and human review to keep parallel and recurring work in bounds.
Enterprises Are Building AI Strategies Around Model Independence
OpenRouter’s Alex Atallah and Replit CEO Amjad Masad argue that enterprise AI is likely to depend less on one all-purpose model and more on a mix of specialized systems that companies can choose, combine and control. Atallah makes the case for keeping model options open; Masad says businesses also need independence from model, cloud and data providers. Both see narrower models as potentially cheaper and easier to govern, though the speakers leave unresolved how agents should coordinate safely and when specialization beats a general model.
Meta’s Muse Shows How Connectors Can Make AI Agents Useful
Meta’s Muse is being used to argue that consumer AI may depend less on the most powerful model than on software that connects to services and takes tedious tasks off users’ hands. On Big Technology, Alex Kantrowitz says Muse’s early use points to a product opportunity for Meta—and a challenge to intermediaries such as travel-booking sites—while Ranjan Roy cautions that adoption will hinge on trust and whether cheaper, non-frontier models can do enough. Neither sees Muse as proof that frontier AI has lost its value.
The Best Agent Workflows Start With Context, Guardrails, and Human Judgment
Charlie Holtz, co-founder and CEO of Conductor, argues that teams using coding agents should build around human judgment rather than treat software development as a factory line. His principles include staying close to new tools without chasing workflows that will soon become standard, protecting code and agent instructions with strict review, and giving agents access to organizational knowledge and persistent workspaces. The aim, he says, is for people to conduct teams of colleagues and agents, not simply manage automated production.
Managing Coding Agents at Scale Requires Better Visibility, Autonomy, and Review
Ido Salomon, creator of AgentCraft, argues that the obstacle to using coding agents at scale is the human effort required to steer, direct and review them. His strategy-game-style orchestrator represents agents as units on a map, with the file system as terrain, and combines visibility tools with autonomous workflows and shared workspaces. Salomon says the detailed interface may suit power users, but not everyone; an early, simpler mode is intended to make agent tools easier to approach.
A Breakout Hit Can Turn an Artist Into a Business Manager
Country singer and songwriter Dylan Gossett argues that artists risk losing the conditions that make their work distinctive when they let a breakout dictate what comes next. In an interview with Chris Williamson, he describes how “Coal” reached a large audience without a planned campaign, then considers the pressures to repeat a hit, follow audience feedback and outsource creative work to AI. Gossett’s point is not to reject promotion or new tools, but to protect the time, experience and freedom that allow him to write songs on his own terms.
Microsoft’s Autopilot Bet Puts Consumer Distribution at the Center of AI Agents
Microsoft is recasting Copilot as Autopilot, a consumer agent designed to work across a user’s services and personal life. On TBPN, John Coogan and Jordi Hays argue that Microsoft’s reach among ordinary consumers could matter as much as the agent’s capabilities: people may encounter it through tools they already use, even if AI enthusiasts are not drawn to a Microsoft-branded product. But acting across services asks users to trust an agent in a more active role.
Make Attention Capture Harder and Connection Easier
Author Catherine Price and horticulturist Rebecca McMackin argue that the obsession with productivity reflects a culture that makes attention capture and measurable output the default while treating play, friendship and contact with nature as indulgences. Price recommends changing those defaults by adding friction to compulsive phone use and protecting activities that need not produce anything, while McMackin makes the case for gardens and less-managed lawns as ways to relinquish control and make room for other life.
AI Makes Coding a Core Skill Beyond Engineering
Andrew Ng, the Stanford adjunct professor and founder of DeepLearning.AI, argues that generative AI makes coding more worth learning, not less. He says professionals who can specify what they want a computer to do—and use AI to turn that instruction into custom software—are already gaining a productivity advantage across functions such as marketing and recruiting. In Ng’s view, the scarce skill is not writing code by hand but defining the task, outcome and criteria precisely enough for a computer to execute.
Perceived Allegiance Shapes Reactions to Female Sexuality
William Costello argues that the different reactions to Sydney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter are not chiefly about how sexualized their images are, but whom those images are understood to serve. In his account, Carpenter signals allegiance to women and frames sexuality as female-facing, while Sweeney is treated as appealing directly to male desire without the same political or social reassurance. Costello says the resulting backlash functions as coalition enforcement, reflecting a broader asymmetry in how male and female desire are morally interpreted.
Studio 4.0 Keeps AI-Generated Video Editable on the Timeline
ElevenLabs presents Studio 4.0 as an agentic video editor built around an editable project timeline rather than one-off media prompts. The company says users can generate video, images, voiceovers, music and sound effects within the same workspace, then revise shots, captions and audio alongside the rest of the edit. Its Studio Agent can assemble a first draft or handle tasks such as captioning, while leaving editors able to alter the work and hand it back to the agent.
Public Health Must Treat Misinformation as an Outbreak
Epidemiologist and science communicator Jessica Malaty Rivera argues that public-health emergencies involve two outbreaks: the pathogen itself and the information surrounding it. In conversation with TED’s Whitney Pennington Rodgers, she says trust cannot be assumed or commanded through expertise; it must be earned through listening, transparent explanation of evidence and uncertainty, and messages that account for people’s histories and fears. Rivera’s case is that communication is not an add-on to prevention but part of the intervention.
The Retreat From Reading Weakens the Public Culture of Argument
Journalist James Marriott argues that the decline of long-form reading threatens more than books’ place in daily life: it weakens the habits of sustained argument, critical scrutiny and complex thought that literacy helped establish in public culture. Speaking with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts, Marriott contends that writing makes ideas more stable and contestable than performance-driven media, while Roberts questions whether books alone can provide depth or improve political judgment. Marriott’s narrower conclusion is that reading may persist not as a mass habit but as a deliberate discipline.
Erdős–Szekeres Proves the 2025 IMO Tiling Minimum
Grant Sanderson uses the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad’s hardest problem—a 2025-by-2025 tiling puzzle—to argue that the crucial mathematical work is often finding the viewpoint that makes a proof possible, not merely verifying its final steps. He shows how an optimal 2,112-rectangle construction and its lower bound emerge by turning gaps in the tiling into paths through a permutation, then contends that AI’s difficulty with the problem reflected a lack of the visual intuition and patience needed to discover that route.
Progress Depends on Respecting the Sequence of Change
Andrew Huberman argues that self-improvement becomes more useful when people identify the function of a practice and follow the sequence required, rather than accumulating techniques or reaching for quick solutions. Drawing on a four-part framework from Jungian analyst James Hollis, he makes the case for gratitude, preparation, responsibility and daily reflection, while arguing that trauma recovery, learning and physical training likewise require stages that cannot be skipped.
Shared Dashboards Can Adapt to Each Stakeholder’s Decision Context
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work demo argues that a shared dashboard need not force every stakeholder into the same presentation of the business. Using synthetic adoption, performance and capacity data, it shows users renaming labels, changing chart types and narrowing metrics to a region or cluster while retaining the underlying measures and a common view.