The Next Token

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/
SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts
GUEST
Michelle Chen - https://x.com/michellechen - https://blog.cloudflare.com/author/michelle/
HOSTS
Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon
Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/
Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/
The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow
Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/

Recorded August 7, 2026. We explore AI alignment & safety, Rhys demos his workflow, and we end up mentioning a lot of books.
 
LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER
AI ALIGNMENT
Wikipedia, AI alignment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment
Wikipedia, AI safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_safety
"Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation," Norbert Wiener https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/moral.pdf
Three laws of robotics (Asimov) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
Thinking Machines in Dune https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Thinking_Machines
1960 in music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_in_music
Billionaires building NZ bunkers https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-boltholes-inside-doomsday-hideouts-170000871.html
Rhys tweet on sandboxes https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2085601612266115487
OpenAI/Hugging Face incident at Black Hat USA 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
OpenAI blog post about Hugging Face incident https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
Hugging Face timeline of the incident https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline
Artifactory https://jfrog.com/artifactory/
Modal https://modal.com
US Congress calls for open hearings with AI executives https://casar.house.gov/media/press-releases/casar-leads-call-congressional-hearings-ai-ceos
Sunil Kenton Varda tweet https://x.com/threepointone/status/2019124493395063134
Cap'n Proto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap%27n_Proto
Paperclip Maximizer https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai
Hugging Face's initial security disclosure https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
Project Glasswing at Cloudflare https://blog.cloudflare.com/cyber-frontier-models/
Claude's Constitution https://www.anthropic.com/constitution
qntm - https://qntm.org
There Is No Antimemetics Division https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Antimemetics_Division
Valuable Humans in Transit https://qntm.org/vhitaos
Frame-By-Frame (first draft) https://qntm.org/frame
 
RHYS'S WORKFLOW
UsefulSoftwareCo (contains Rhys demo repos) https://github.com/UsefulSoftwareCo/
Emulate service catalog https://emulators.dev
Executor https://executor.sh
Integrations.sh https://integrations.sh
Model Context Protocol (MCP) https://modelcontextprotocol.io
Executor in YC https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/executor
AGENTS.md https://agents.md
GBrain https://github.com/garrytan/gbrain
Ben Davis pi setup https://github.com/davis7dotsh/my-pi-setup
GStack https://github.com/garrytan/gstack
PostHog https://posthog.com
PlanetScale https://planetscale.com
Playwright https://playwright.dev
Axiom https://axiom.co
Effect https://effect.website
OpenTelemetry https://opentelemetry.io
Dex Horthy, "Why Software Factories Fail" https://x.com/dexhorthy/status/2080697380379427275
Rhys tweet on proactive agents https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2085453490185539655
Polylane https://polylane.com
Rift https://github.com/anomalyco/rift
Wispr Flow https://wisprflow.ai
Kit Langton https://x.com/kitlangton
Coolify https://coolify.io
Matt Pocock's Skills (including grill-me) https://github.com/mattpocock/skills
ls -al https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ls
Max Brodeur-Urbas, founder of Gumloop https://www.gumloop.com/creators/max
Rhys tweet about about going slowly https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2076775246900941259
 
SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts
 
HOSTS
Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon
Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/
Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/
 
The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow
Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/

Recorded August 3, 2026. We discuss burnout, Claudeisms sneaking into regular speech, chip butties, how to watch movies, and what brings us joy.
LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER
A VESSEL FOR CLAUDE
Rhys "vessel for Claude" tweet - https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2072968219741278582
Dolly/zoom shot from "Jaws" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_mAvHu9E4
/bro https://github.com/backnotprop/bro
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlön,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius
https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-Tl%C3%B6n-Uqbar-Orbius-Tertius.pdf
Ficciones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones
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
Christina Maslach on burnout (video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRPBkCW0R5E
Ethan Niser "Not Holding Back the Ocean" https://ethanniser.substack.com/p/not-holding-back-the-ocean
Kirwin Hampshire, "The Dark Night of Mathematics" https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mathematics
Arvind Narayanan's thought experiment on LLMs outputting binaries instead of source code https://substack.com/@aisnakeoil/note/c-303550018
Sunil's Pizzo https://github.com/threepointone/pizzo
Counter-Strike 2 reimplementation (there are lots of these demos, but here is one) https://x.com/iamlukethedev/status/2081829763489169636
Dunning-Kruger effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Valley of Despair https://medium.com/@amar_mahmutbegovic/dunning-kruger-effect-the-valley-of-despair-63bf98b9d2ed
The Futzing Fraction https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html
The Everyman Theatre (suitable for manspreading) - https://www.everymancinema.com/
Chip butty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_butty
Not sponsored by Dunkin' https://www.dunkindonuts.com/en
Poirot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie%27s_Poirot
Charlie Marsh tweet re: obsolescence https://x.com/charliermarsh/status/2080388030213636184
Steve James - https://x.com/deathbyknowledg
Spiky profiles (neurodivergence) https://neurodiversity.directory/glossary/spiky-profile-definition/
We are all spiky - https://www.exponentialview.co/p/we-are-all-spiky
Example spiky chart https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spikey_cognitive_profile.png
Colloquial definition of insanity https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/einstein-insanity-quote/
Deslop https://deslop.dev
The Four Seasons on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/81750702
Not sponsored by Hello Fresh either https://www.hellofresh.com
Example of Sunil being happy https://x.com/threepointone/status/2075576737795068288
Dillon on Kent C. Dodds' podcast https://kentcdodds.com/chats/07/03/foundations-feedback-and-agents-dillon-mulroy-on-product-at-cloudflare
 
MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES 
United States & Canada
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 to connect with a trained crisis counselor 24/7.
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
United Kingdom & Ireland
Samaritans: Call 116 123 or visit samaritans.org for free, confidential support.
Australia
Lifeline Australia: Call 13 11 14 or visit lifeline.org.au
International
If you're outside these regions, visit findahelpline.com to find free or low-cost crisis and mental health support in your country.
 
If you believe you or someone else is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services immediately.
 
SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts
 
HOSTS
Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon
Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/
Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/
 
The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow
Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/

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.
LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER
NEWS & DISCUSSION
Rhys on his first weeks with the model (X) https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2076353287507562728?s=20
OpenAI comms example (Thomas Sottiaux) https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2075641131002700120?s=20
Anthropic / Claude Developers post https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2077603834453770467?s=20
Anthropic's July 15 "reset" note https://x.com/claudeai/status/2075271759289303522?s=20
Introducing Inkling (Thinking Machines) https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/
Xiaoyin Qu's Thinking Machines thesis (X) https://x.com/quxiaoyin/status/2077799672886792578?s=46
Cloudflare's Workers AI https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-ai/
"The Future Worth Building Is Human" (Thinking Machines manifesto) https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/the-future-worth-building-is-human/
"The Use of Knowledge in Society," Friedrich Hayek https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html
"The Bitter Lesson," Rich Sutton http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
Ramp's PorTAL fine-tuning https://x.com/RampLabs/status/2072383318516187380
The A-Team (not five Mr. T's) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A-Team
Hawaii Five-O (maybe what Sunil was thinking of when he said Miami Five-O, but really meant The A-Team…it happens) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Five-O_(1968_TV_series)
John's of Bleecker Street pizza https://johnsofbleecker.com/
Local First Conf 2026 https://www.localfirstconf.com/
Dan Ingalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ingalls
 
DILLON'S WORKFLOW
tmux https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki
VS Code https://code.visualstudio.com/
Neovim https://neovim.io/
Claude Code https://claude.com/product/claude-code
OpenCode https://opencode.ai/
Ghostty https://ghostty.org/
Pi (Dillon's harness) https://pi.dev/
Mario Zechner, Pi's creator https://x.com/badlogicgames
Pi's system prompt (docs) https://pi.dev/docs/latest/usage#system-prompt-files
Pi's system prompt (source) https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/coding-agent/src/core/system-prompt.ts
oxlint https://oxc.rs/docs/guide/usage/linter.html
ast-grep https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep
Herdr https://herdr.dev/
ghostty https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty
libghostty https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming
Plannotator https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
Matt Pocock's skills https://github.com/mattpocock/skills
Wayfinder (Matt Pocock) https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/engineering/wayfinder
 
SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts
 
HOSTS
Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/dillon_mulroy - https://dillonis.online/ - https://twitch.tv/dillon
Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/RhysSullivan - https://rhys.dev/ - https://executor.sh/
Sunil Pai - https://x.com/threepointone - https://sunilpai.dev/
 
The Next Token - https://x.com/NextTokenShow - https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow
Sponsored by Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com/

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.
 
LINKS / ON-SCREEN REFERENCES, IN ORDER
IN THE NEWS
Model-tiers image (OpenAI forum) https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/openai1/original/4X/f/0/8/f088bfcb17e4f7a8da3d2ba48d6391fa5a9201d9.jpeg
Claude models page (four model cards) https://claude.com/platform/api
Starbucks sizes https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/409/hot
"Freedom of intelligence" tweet (Quinn Slack) https://x.com/sqs/status/2071690420548198581
Magnitude / harness-level routing https://magnitude.dev
Anthropic's "Project Deal" https://www.anthropic.com/features/project-deal
"The Dumb Zone" tweet (Matt Pocock) https://x.com/mattpocockuk/status/2071288332642812229
Regulation / CA gov tweet https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2071632971388662233
Rhys tweets to poke additional bears https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2071811069002281335
 
TOPIC - I DON'T WANT TO USE YOUR AGENT
"I don't want to use your product's agent (Dillon quote-tweet)  https://x.com/dillon_mulroy/status/2070983687785914822
Dax's original tweet https://x.com/thdxr/status/2071010042216665452
Low-level-learning PlanetScale fireside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8tRi1RYf7c
A wild PlanetScale CTO appears https://x.com/NickVanWig
SOCs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_operations_center
Ankur Goyal / Braintrust "two mega-trends" tweet https://x.com/ankrgyl/status/2071329164125147440
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/
Dillon's software-design skills repo https://github.com/dmmulroy/skills
Rhys tweets at Sam Altman re junior engineers (etc.) https://x.com/RhysSullivan/status/2053177733598077340
 
TOPIC - RECEIPTS REQUIRED
shadcn tweet ("Are you sure?") https://x.com/shadcn/status/2069054418247393389
Theo Brown tweet re moving code agents off laptops https://x.com/theo/status/2071083700385955906
Boris Cherny "five archetypes" tweet https://x.com/bcherny/status/2071379474277613732
 
FOLLOW THE HOSTS
Dillon Mulroy - https://x.com/@dillon_mulroy / https://dillonis.online / https://twitch.tv/dillon
Rhys Sullivan - https://x.com/@RhysSullivan / https://rhys.dev / https://executor.sh
Sunil Pai - https://x.com/@threepointone / https://sunilpai.dev
 
CREDITS
The Next Token is sponsored by Cloudflare https://www.cloudflare.com
Subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@NextTokenShow and wherever you get your podcasts.