Create your own AI fusion model Hi friend!There's no shortage of new model releases these days. And all of the top AI models have different capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. They come at different speeds and different price points. Which one you should use depends not only on the task at hand, but also on the specific phase of the task.Writing a good plan requires a different skill set than wiring up a service to an API. Gathering and synthesizing research is different from designing a...
17 days ago • 2 min read
What Happens When a Model Disappears? Hi friend, The big story of the past few days was obviously Fable 5. I tested it and found it genuinely extraordinary, but my conclusion was still that it is definitely not the new default model most users should switch to. What happened next has already been covered thoroughly. The US administration, citing national security concerns, barred Anthropic from offering access to the model to non-US citizens. Anthropic responded by pulling access more...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
How to update your language to get better results from AI Hi friend!Both of these statements are true: AI tools democratize professional work.But seniority still matters. A beginner can now create things that looked impossible a few years ago. They can design an interface, generate a professional slide deck, write functional code, or edit a video. Give the same tools to a senior engineer, designer, analyst, or strategist, and the output will still be much better. Not because they can click...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
What running slow taught me about agentic engineering Hi friend!AI tools can tempt you to work at 100x speed.And honestly, I’ve been there.Spinning up ten agents in parallel. Jumping from tab to Codex to terminal to Cursor like a madman. Moving fast. Getting a lot done. Seemingly.Then reality kicks in.Your mind can only go so fast.And if your goal is not just to generate output, but to actually ship something good, you cannot simply hit send on everything the AI gives you. You have to review...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Composer 2.5 makes waves Hi friend!Google's big developer conference I/O happened last week and it was, as expected, a bit of an AI fever dream. There's been a ton of commentary on it already, so I'll spare you the details, let me just say - it feels like they have little focus right now and all of their releases are significantly behind the rest of the industry - see i.e. how Antigravity stacks up against Cursor or Codex. But then again - it's just Google being Google - as per Ben Thompson...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Self-Driving Codebases Hi friend! Today I'm sharing a few notes on my experiments around self-driving codebases, a phrase often used by the Cursor team. If you find this interesting, share it with a friend or colleague!Thanks for reading, Robert Notes: Self-Driving Codebases The idea of a self-driving codebase might sound abstract. But with recent releases from Cursor, Claude Code, and similar tools, it is becoming more concrete. Across the major coding harnesses, the same shift is happening:...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Edition One Hi friend! Welcome to the first edition of The Hybrid Engineer. This newsletter is about what it looks like to work, build, and think with AI. I’ll cover the tools, workflows, experiments, and lessons I come across while using AI to write code, automate work, build products, and explore where software development and knowledge work are starting to merge. The “hybrid” part has two meanings: people are crossing old boundaries between technical and non-technical work, and all of us...
3 months ago • 3 min read