Robert Schwentker

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@schwentker

San Francisco Bay Area CA sandboxlabs.ai Joined April 2009

3.8K Following 3.9K Followers 8.1K Posts

Latest posts 5

Robert Schwentker @schwentker 5h

1/5
Last Thursday @GergelyOrosz interviewed @CompleteSkeptic @typesafeai ex-OpenAI RLHF at @Pragmatic_Eng Unplugged, @SFJAZZ hosted w/ @WorkOS

Best part was hanging in the lobby after, w/ his Uber waiting. My two cents:

linkedin.com/pulse/do-weird…

www.linkedin.com Do the Weird Stuff: Diogo Almeida on New Realms of Software How great the Pragmatic Engineer Unplugged last Thursday. Totally unexpected the lobby afterward was even better.

Robert Schwentker @schwentker 5h

Continuing experiments w/ @typesafeai Jev.

Imagine software that can tell another piece of software "don't buy this" & attach a confidence score.

A store's catalog API talked a shopping agent out of a $149 sale: return risk 2/2, 100% confident.

No human in the loop.

Robert Schwentker @schwentker 22h

1/3
At DotDev 2026, @tobi described three shifts happening simultaneously:

“Everything that was previously impossible is now just simply hard.

A lot of what used to be very, very hard is now actually easy.

A lot of what was expensive is now quite cheap.”

Together, they create “the most rich environment for innovation that is possibly imaginable.”

Shopify Developers Verified account @ShopifyDevs Jul 30

Two days. 2,000 partners.

Missed DotDev 2026? Catch the replays

Fireside chat with @tobi and @harleyf

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Robert Schwentker @schwentker 2d

1/7
Field notes from @thelinqapp's Hello, World! at the @exploratorium: checkout is moving into conversation. @stripe @DoorDash @itsdazzleai @getlindy & @browserbase on tokens, trust & context.

🐚 Quotes below.

linkedin.com/pulse/checkout…

www.linkedin.com Checkout Moves Into the Convo Field notes from Linq's Hello, World! at the Exploratorium, San Francisco The fog had mostly lifted above the SF Bay Monday as Linq gathered builders at the Exploratorium to talk about agentic...

Robert Schwentker @schwentker Nov 1

Wow. Personal scale, self-modifying apps: that’s a thing now. Production scale is an open question.

@deepgramscott of @DeepgramAI raised the question at Deepgram Speaks, calling it “complaint-driven development” ⭐, a north star. If a fix ships in seconds, the review has to happen in seconds too, no?

Field notes: linkedin.com/pulse/context-…

www.linkedin.com Context Becoming Runtime Field notes from Deepgram Speaks 2026 on voice, moving context & software that changes while interaction is still unfolding "You should be able to complain at any moment and the product should get...

Patrick Collison Verified account @patrickc Oct 31

I'm now building an "improvements" feature into all of my personal vibecoded applications: a freeform text input that's hooked up to an agent that yolo implements whatever is submitted.

It's an interesting experience -- the activation energy barrier to sanding any rough edge or implementing any new feature becomes extremely low. Someone else who uses one of the applications I created has already implemented 150 improvements over the course of a few days. This pattern feels like a new kind of tool -- liquid software? -- and every application that doesn't have this feature now has a slightly rigid and anachronistic flavor. Why can't I just tell it how I want it to be different?

Now, it's not obvious to me how this pattern can or should scale. Does it become unmaintainable after a while? (Maybe model intelligence improvement outstrips my feature appetite such that it's fine?) How does collaborative software work in this model? Can software designed this way be secure and reliable?

Whatever the larger questions about broader deployment, it definitely works great in a personal context. It reminds me a little of the visions of Lisp/Lisp machines, Smalltalk, and HyperCard -- systems that the user can take control of and modify. Those visions never quite worked, though: the vast majority of software today is not end-user modifiable in any useful way. So, while this "liquid" affordance is a very small touch, the way it changes one's relation to the software feels a bit transgressive and empowering in a Lickliderian and Engelbartian way.

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