The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Coates: Companies trying to serve both SMB and enterprise usually fail
“The world is littered with the corpses of, you know, the companies that tried to serve SMB and enterprise at the same time.”
Coates: AI agents reach 75% in 10 minutes, but 95% is brutal
“Well, look, I mean, I think the exciting and frustrating thing about LLMs right now is that you can get an LLM like agent thing, like a sidekick-esque thing. You can get it to like 75% in like 10 minutes. And then it's like this brutal hill climb to get it to,…”
Coates: Factual LLM outputs are merely the hallucinations that users prefer
“Yeah, you know, that's its job, right? You know that every time it emits a token, it's hallucinating, right? It's just that you like some of the hallucinations more than the others, right?”
Coates: GUI AI agents instantly turn the open web into an app store
“If it actually works, the strategic brilliance of that is they instantly have the world's largest app store because the world's largest app store is just the web, right?”
Coates: Redundant systems at the same stack layer cause compounding upstream delays
“The real answer to how do you solve this problem is one is developing extremely good intuitions for when you are accidentally creating duplicates at the same layer of the stack. So you just never get into the problem in the first place. And then the second par…”
Coates: AI copilots remove UI complexity barriers for entrepreneurs
“AI brings us into the world of like, okay, well, what if we can give you the driver in the car who knows how all these switches work and can help you along without having to learn all the switches? It's probably one of the most powerful opportunities for more …”
Coates: Perplexity sits exactly between ChatGPT's interface and Google's search
“The sort of the triangle of like perplexity, Google, ChatGPT of like, it's basically like LLM native search and like ChatGPT really good at the LLM interface thing, not amazing at search yet. Google amazing at search, not really figured out the LLM thing yet. …”
Coates: Shopify's 2020 checkout 'code red' took 200-300 people for a year
“At least in my case, checkout code red in 2020 was, hey, the checkout is failing in, I don't know, three, four, five different ways. And the checkout is a pretty important part of Shopify, obviously. So let's go fix that. So we, me and, you know, somewhere bet…”
Coates: Shopify consolidated from 12-15 business units down to 3-4
“There used to be 12 to 15 of these kind of fairly small fractured business units, and now there is actually only like three or four, which is actually truer to what the product is, but of course, each of those units is bigger than the ones that were before, so…”
Coates: High percentage of Shopify R&D leaders are former founders
“When I look at like my management team, the people who report to me, who each of these sort of nine or 10 people run R and D orgs that are like a couple hundred people each and almost like a very high percentage of those people are also founders, right?”
Coates: Shopify's AI rule is models can propose but never commit
“One of the principles that we have for all of the Shopify magic features today is that they're allowed to propose changes, but not commit changes, right? So they can like generate text, but they're not going to save it without you actually reading it and savin…”
Coates: Human-in-the-loop AI generates a three-part feedback loop for models
“You actually get a three part signal. You get which suggestions are accepted clean, which suggestions were accepted, but then with minor edits and then which suggestions were outright rejected. And that's An amazing loop to be able to improve things through.”