Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!
Today my guest is Steve Newman — the veteran software engineer who created Writely, the startup acquired by Google that ultimately became Google Docs, and who is now the founder of the Golden Gate Institute for AI, the nonprofit behind the Curve conference, and author of the Second Thoughts Substack, which is increasingly popular among the AI obsessive set for its grounded, well-balanced, anti-sensationalist, and at times openly-confused analysis.
We do eventually get Steve’s takes on some of the biggest open questions in AI - including how near or far we may be from a reclusive self-improvement driven intelligence explosion, how far behind digital AIs robotics will lag, and whether or not AI will have a major impact on climate change - but the main focus of today’s conversation is a show and tell of Steve’s personal AI toolkit and vibe-coding practices.
I wanted to have this conversation, because having spent the last few months building up my own Claude Code powered personal productivity stack and now autonomous assistant too, I feel that though I am getting outstanding value from what I’ve built, I still stand to learn and gain a lot from seeing how someone like Steve, who’s been programming professionally since 1985, is using the latest tools.
As you’ll hear, it unfolded exactly as I’d hoped.
We walked through the dozen or so bespoke applications that have fundamentally re-wired how Steve interacts with the digital world, and which for me produced a number of light bulb moments when I realized how much value I’ve still been leaving on the table.
These include, among others:
- an attention firewall that alerts him about urgent messages without requiring him to constantly check email and messaging apps;
- a personal reading app that attempts to flag meaningful new ideas in the otherwise overwhelming number of newsletters he’s subscribed to;
- a dashboard that allows him to see the status of his various coding agents at a glance;
- a Chrome extension that automates common workflows;
- and a universal logging solution that allows Claude to debug and fix the errors that inevitably pop up.
Along the way, he also describes his strategies for information security and integrity, how he uses mobile and voice, and – my favorite: his anti-tokenmaxxing philosophy, which he sums up as “the agent’s not important; I’m important!”
Because there is quite a bit of screen sharing, this episode is probably best consumed in video form on YouTube, but I think we do a good enough job narrating that it should also work well in audio form. And in any case, even if you don’t listen at all, I encourage you to do what I did immediately after recording. Copy the transcript, give it to your Claude Code or OpenClaw, and ask it to identify the ideas we discuss that would most meaningfully enhance your personal setup.
I’ve already created a new UI to help me produce the podcast more efficiently, and I’m working on a number of hooks, and a personal chrome extension, and I’ll be very interested to hear what your coding agents create for you based on this conversation.
With that, I encourage you all to subscribe to Second Thoughts on Substack, and I hope you enjoy this behind the scenes look at what one extremely accomplished builder is building now, with Steve Newman of the Golden Gate Institute for AI.
Watch now!
Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz