The Next Token is a technical, conversational podcast from Sunil Pai, Dillon Mulroy, and Rhys Sullivan about the ideas, tools, and weird edges shaping software right now. Expect candid conversations about AI, developer experience, building on the web, open source, infrastructure, and the work behind the work: what they are trying, what is breaking, what is actually useful, and what deserves a second look. Cloudflare sponsors the show, but the conversations are host-led, curious, and independent in spirit.
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Recorded August 24, 2026. Special guest Michelle Chen answers our questions about inference. The AI industry lights money on fire. Sunil plans his LLM prepper era. Rhys takes the week off, preparing for YC Demo Day!
LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER Executor (Rhys's company) https://executor.sh Y Combinator Demo Day https://www.ycombinator.com/demoday Michelle Chen on X https://x.com/michellechen Love Island S8 villa tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2gjF5NFQng Cloudflare Workers AI https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-ai/ Cloudflare AI Gateway https://www.cloudflare.com/products/ai-gateway/ Cloudflare AI Search https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-search/ Models on Workers AI https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/models/ Cloudflare/NVIDIA GPU blog post (2021) https://blog.cloudflare.com/bringing-ai-to-the-edge/ Dane Knecht, Cloudflare CTO on X https://x.com/dok2001 Birthday week https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/birthday-week/ Unifying Workers AI and AI Gateway https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-ai-gateway-unification/ Z.ai / Zhipu (GLM) https://z.ai Hugging Face https://huggingface.co Cloudflare R2 https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ SGLang https://x.com/sgl_project vLLM https://docs.vllm.ai OpenRouter model discounts https://openrouter.ai/models?discount=true DeepSeek https://www.deepseek.com Moonshot AI (Kimi) https://www.moonshot.ai Moondream https://moondream.ai OpenAI io (Jony Ive) https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ SlopCodeBench (aka "SlopBench") https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents/blob/main/benchmarking-opus-5-on-slop-code-bench.md The Next Token Ep 03 (AI psychosis) https://youtu.be/2bE93tynluk Ox Alpha/GLM-5.3 Flash https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2092616204787626030 The subreddit for Sunil https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ Solarpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk AMD Instinct https://www.amd.com/en/products/accelerators/instinct.html Jensen Huang was once a Denny's waiter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-billionaire-ceo-went-denny-145530671.html CUDA https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit Wafer (GPUSteve's company) https://www.wafer.ai/ NVIDIA Blackwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_(microarchitecture) NVIDIA Hopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_(microarchitecture) Black Forest Labs Flux.1-dev https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev NVIDIA Vera Rubin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_(microarchitecture) ZIRP era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy Q-commerce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-commerce Cloudflare Durable Objects https://developers.cloudflare.com/durable-objects/ Kenton Varda continues to be right 6 months ago https://x.com/kentonvarda Sparkles emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkles_emoji Community, the Greendale flag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEjIzKZ4wOA Sunil's new role https://x.com/threepointone/status/2088272607804039274 Sunil's builder-in-residence role https://sunilpai.dev/posts/the-task-isnt-the-job/ Sunil on software factories https://x.com/threepointone/status/2091167009669075314 Max Kreminski https://mkremins.github.io/
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Empirical evidence of Large Language Model's influence on human spoken communication https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754
Bill Oliver's likely-LLM-generated speech https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/bill-oliver-ai-legislature-reaction-9.7296118
BURNOUT
Dillon tweet about joy & burnout https://x.com/dillon_mulroy/status/2073886986117447715
Scott Tolinski mental health survey tweet https://x.com/stolinski/status/2083217955849195640
Direct link to Scott's survey https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdij87S57ibtMm2yPotcL0Ipd-c4ybQ45FgPqNTvVVW4pGU5w/viewform
Definition of burnout from W.H.O. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases
Marcy Sutton Todd on BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:tzdj4b4znqjiuau7plthr6f7
"I've Never Seen a Model Say 'This File Is Getting Too Big'" - Ep 02
Episode 3
Thursday, July 23, 2026 • Duration 01:12:28
Recorded July 17, 2026. We settle the model-access bet. We talk about how the labs talk to us, plus extend an open invite for OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Thinking Machines to come on the show and be specific about their best-case scenarios about how AI makes the world better. Thinking Machines ships an American open-weight model. And then Dillon fires the slop cannon, walking us through his agentic workflow, while a package he technically did not order shows up.
"The Future Worth Building Is Human" (Thinking Machines manifesto)
"I Want Your Product to Enable My Agent" - Ep 01
Friday, July 3, 2026 • Duration 01:13:27
Recorded June 30, 2026, 2pm Pacific. Live from AI Engineer World's Fair! Fable is still banned (as of recording time, ahem). Advice: Build for agents. We're still talking about loops, but which loops? And more receipts are demanded.
Recorded June 15, 2026. Dillon, Rhys, and Sunil discuss the Fable/Mythos situation and require receipts for bold claims about how AI is changing everything.
Can you trust a tool that quietly degrades itself?
Why more code hasn't meant better software.
Open weights, sovereign models, and where access to intelligence is heading.
Receipts Required
Revisiting bold predictions (accurate and otherwise).
In the News
Claude Fable 5 & Claude Mythos 5. Anthropic's launch announcement (June 9, 2026): anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5. Priced at $10 per million input tokens / $50 per million output tokens. Safeguards fall back to Claude Opus 4.8 on: cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and distillation.
Access suspended by the US government. Anthropic's statement (June 12, 2026): .
Receipts Required Tweets & Code Referenced Books Referenced In Person Credits
Dillon's reply to Ankur https://x.com/dillon_mulroy/status/2071330371283915027
"The Primitive is the Product" - Lenny Pruss, Amplify Partners https://www.amplifypartners.com/blog-posts/the-primitive-is-the-product
"I am a golden god" - "Almost Famous" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCfFCFkVSss
Rita Kozlov - "Welcome to Agents Week" (the math on scaling agents to the masses) https://blog.cloudflare.com/welcome-to-agents-week/#the-math-on-scaling-agents-to-the-masses
TOPIC - LOOPS & SOFTWARE FACTORIES (ROUND 2)
"The Coming Loop" - Armin Ronacher https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/6/23/the-coming-loop/
"People should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists. … It might be ten years." (Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence, 2016)
Dario Amodei (Anthropic):
"I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code." (Council on Foreign Relations, March 10, 2025)
Sundar Pichai (Google):
"Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster." (Q3 2024 earnings call, October 2024)
"We've been using AI to generate code internally at Google for a while. Today, 75% of all new code at Google is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, up from 50% last fall." (Google Cloud blog post, April 2026)
Boris Cherny (Claude Code, Anthropic):
"I don't prompt Claude anymore. I have loops that are running. They're the ones that are prompting Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops." (Source, June 2026)
Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw, OpenAI):
"Here's your monthly reminder that you shouldn't be prompting coding agents anymore. You should be designing loops that prompt your agents." (X, June 7, 2026.)
Dillon's Fable tweet
"imagine if they banned all models and we all went back to writing code by hand and the last 6 months were just a fever dream…imagine" (X, June 12, 2026)
Greg Brockman's tweet about the old days
"how did we ever write all that code by hand" (X, February 13, 2026)
Sunil's "$250 run" tweet
"spent all day on fable for a giant PR. ~10kloc, lots of testing and intervention. 250$. I... don't think it's worth it? happy with 4.8/5.5, and the quality of work is better when it's smaler steps. Still rocking @cursor_ai, that's software that I still love using on the daily." (X, June 11, 2026)
Mitchell Hashimoto's perf improvements tweet
"I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem. …" (X, May 28, 2026)
"Survey any codebase as a senior advisor and produce prioritized, self-contained implementation plans for OTHER models/agents to execute. Strictly read-only on source code — never implements, fixes, or refactors anything itself. Use when asked to audit a codebase, find improvement opportunities (bugs, security, performance, test coverage, tech debt, migrations, DX), suggest features or where to take the project next (roadmap, product direction), or generate handoff plans for another agent to implement."
Coffeeflare. Free coffee meetup with the team during the Fair (no badge needed) - Tuesday, June 30, 2026, 7am-10am, Sightglass Coffee, San Francisco.
The Next Token is sponsored by Cloudflare. Subscribe on YouTube: @NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts.
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