Le Chonk, Training Without Backprop, and AI-Designed Chips with Avi Flombaum

Get the free daily newsletter: chaosagents.ai What if everything developers know about building software is about to change? This week on Chaos Agents, Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy welcome Avi Flombaum, entrepreneur, investor, and longtime builder, to question some of software engineering's most deeply held assumptions. Should developers still care about reading every line of code? Is rewriting an application now more practical than refactoring it? And what happens when AI makes creating custom hardware as accessible as writing software? Plus, we dig into Mistral's massive new open-weight model and its controversial approach to safety, Q Labs' attempt to train AI without backpropagation, an ancient Egyptian sentence no AI can decipher, and AI agents designing their own chips. Along the way, Avi shares what he's learned from the other side of the venture capital table, why he's embracing voice-driven development, and why the future of engineering might require letting go of everything we thought we knew. Chaos Agents is an AI news podcast curated by an agent named Eddie, then questioned, debated, and occasionally yelled at by human hosts Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy. Links: today's newsletter, http://avi.nyc, https://rethink.avi.nyc