You can ask my girlfriend, my best friends, or my family. I think that the next five years will have untold and unprecedented consequences for us as a society. I get the geopolitcal ai cold war from Anthropic + OpenAI and other leading foundational labs. There is no stopping. Pandora’s box is open.

Anthropic dropped their recursive self improvement article yesterday. Sakuna was not far behind. I do not believe we are on an S curve - I do believe we’re on the exponential. Although, I disagree with Dario that we’re “nearing the end of the exponential” (although i do love borderline any Dwarkesh podcast).

Closed loop software engineering is very much coming (i’ll caveat this saying, i do not believe it can attack all fields). You can see it with Jarred Sumner and Boris with Bun. Everyone (in the ai community) championed the 11-day 750k line rewrite of Bun from Zig → Rust. While Bun is in a unique spot where systematic and formal verification is very much present within the tooling and repo, there is no detracting from such an announcement. This is a wildly impressive engineering feat.

In my very core, every single day, I feel and think about Ai. Every. Single. Fucking. Day. It is endlessly exciting, extremely terrifying, and also for sure tiring. I believe that almost every single person is in this boat. There are dramatic societal and cultural ramifications that are ripping by each and every day. I firmly believe in Ai could lead extreme class divide and the permanent underclass. Reminiscent of several themes in The AI Doc, I recently became an uncle to my nephew. The technological shifts and pace of the industry have made me severely question core fundamental hopes - largely, related to children - that I would have been adamant on when I graduated college. Day over day, it feels like I see startups that spin up ideas once satirically critiqued in David Egger’s The Every. Almost every engineer I know in my circle has lost countless hours of sleep to this Ai Era that we’re living in - partially due to the intoxicating nature of building new systems and services that were out of reach for time, and partially due to the severe daily anxiety that comes with some of the underlying questions.

One of the tragedies is some of this anxiety has fueled behavior that has almost certainly made me a worse partner. I am lucky to have a loving and very understanding partner but these underlying currents have rippled into my relationships.

And yet…. And yeeetttttttttttttt…..

Yet the one thing I cannot fucking get over - is where is the Excalidraw table feature?

It’s partially a clickbaity title - and I’m guessing that the four readers this substack normally gets (parents + sis + partner) - won’t even get it. But for those that do - it is a bit odd right?

Here’s more context. Excalidraw is a free, open-source, collaborative whiteboarding session. It’s fantastic, used heavily in the SWE industry, and generally well liked.

A fucking YEAR ago, Cat Wu stood on the stage at Code with Claude and showed Claude Code planning the new table format, ripping it, and opening up a PR. Yes, it was under the anthropic-experimental/Excalidraw-CWC-Demo private repo. They demo it and it works seemingly well (although I would guess that a PM might not like the immediate keyboard switch from having erase be 0 to now E that Claude let rip, but hey it’s a product decision and it’s a year ago).

The PR that I found is here from Cat opened up almost exactly a year ago (June 7th, 2025 - today is June 6th, 2026).

In Anthropics defense, perhaps there’s more logistics and politcs here? Open source has been getting killed, perhaps it’s hesitancy to not having ai created PRs merged in? I haven’t done enough homework to now besides opening up Excalidraw and still not seeing it. The PR on a precursory passover… seems sufficient? There were some comments that were never addressed so those are perhaps blockers.

Perhaps Anthropic just didn’t want to deal and just forked it internally? I have done the same thing with steiepete’s CodexBar vs mine. I just want a targeted change - easier to fork and let it rip and then merge upstream when the time comes. I doubt they even care that much and it’s truly just for a demo.

But what I cannot get over is this fucking thread.

What’s my takeaway? Hm perhaps venting. Hopefully at least a somewhat amused smirk on >= 1 engineers face. Perhaps calling into question some of the ai hype train (you should follow James Hawkins for more of that content).

My actual takeaway might be the opinion that I believe the permeation of advanced Ai systems throughout society are still going to take longer than people realize…

btw, had a workflow (or ultracode?) session let it rip on a PR. almost certainly has some sprinkles (or full chips) of slop throughout. part of it was like a 1 year delta to see how far progress has come. turns out, still a very bad v1! Lots of bugs. Text initially didn’t even render on loss of focus for an individual cell element. That would be a crit at my company. But yeah, who knows maybe if I (and Claude) spin the cycles, and that PR gets merged in, perhaps I’ll take down this post. It at least has better functionality than the other PR… see below.

edit (2026-06-06):

ohhhh i get it. they haven’t merged the PR in because…. it’s bad! these are off Cat’s PR’s branch.

other nits:

• clicking on the column lines or the rows don’t do anything

• right clicking? nada relevant table options in the context menu

• you wanna add a new column or row? sucks, rebuild it

Yeah ok so now I’m actually angrier than before. Why open this PR!!! Just for the marketing clout? My lord, no fucking wonder why open source is dying it’s because of low brow, zero care-of-craft shit like this. I get it that Cat has bigger fish to fry - as do her engineers - and dealing with the future state of software engineering and a thick S1 and IPOs and geopolitical tensions takes priority, but my lord do NOT open this up PR. If an Anthropic engineer (or Cat) actually pulled this down, ran yarn start, and tested this locally in their browser, said “lgtm” then holy freaking shit did I lose a load of respect today. God dang, should I rename the article as “does anyone give a f*ck anymore?”