Sunil Pai and Rhys Sullivan host this episode of The Next Token. Dillon Mulroy is away. Recorded September 21, 2026. They discuss fast classifiers, a stalled-engineer pattern, YC, and Rhys’s revised Executor workflow. Cloudflare sponsors the show; Sunil works there.

Cheap classification changes what builders try

  • 03:53: Jev, from TypeSafe, returns constrained decisions rather than conversational text: booleans, choices, or a graded answer called a noul.
  • Sunil describes short-context classification for risky email, tool selection, interactive canvases, and simulated citizens. His city demo gives residents different reactions to proposed laws.
  • Rhys sees potential in searching a catalog of roughly 10,000 tools and classifying messages inside code-driven workflows. His early evaluation was delegated to another model, not a published benchmark.
  • 08:26: The name invokes Jevons paradox: making a resource more efficient can increase its use. The hosts’ road analogy expands three jammed lanes into six jammed lanes.
  • 12:35: Sunil uses disruption theory to explain the appeal. A cheap, limited product can open uses that expensive general-purpose systems discourage. Local privacy remains a separate concern for Rhys’s desktop users.

“Obvious in retrospect” still requires someone to build it

18:32: Rhys asks why familiar ideas took so long to appear in agent software.

  • Code mode lets an agent search for tools, call them in code, chain operations, and filter results.
  • A shell is one visible tool with many programs behind it. Giving an agent Bash changes how it reaches tools; it does not make the available action space small.
  • Sunil compares React running on older browsers. The ingredients existed earlier, but someone still had to assemble and demonstrate the useful abstraction.

The senior engineer death spiral

22:31: Sunil describes the pattern behind his essay.

  1. A new role or promotion creates pressure to prove seniority.
  2. The engineer chooses a grand refactor and works in isolation.
  3. Positive status updates replace something colleagues can inspect.
  4. Delay creates a plan to compensate with heroic hours.
  5. Sleep, relationships, and judgment deteriorate while the project remains stuck.

Sunil gives his own unfinished work on Suspense-related images as an example. He also describes readers privately recognizing the pattern. These are personal accounts, not a measured estimate of how often it occurs.

Drop a level to rebuild momentum

  • 27:17: “Drop a level” means temporarily shrinking the work, not accepting a formal demotion. Fix bugs, help teammates, and complete annoying tasks.
  • Small visible contributions can repair confidence and working relationships. Return to the larger project through a small pull request or a demo that can exist today.
  • 35:57: Managers should name the problem directly and help reduce scope. Quietly adding bug work can let the original fiction continue while doubling the workload.
  • Sunil says his management experience is limited. The prescription is his recovery pattern, not a substitute for assessing an individual’s workload or health.

YC teaches outcomes as well as activity

37:55: Rhys values YC’s peers, focused advice, founder dinners, and introductions. Partners supply guidance; they do not build the company for him.

  • He regrets not spending more time near the shared workspace. Events gave him energy that solo work did not always sustain.
  • 45:26: Group office hours feel like reinforcement learning for founders. Set a goal, try something, observe the result, and adjust.
  • A user or revenue outcome differs from “ship 50 PRs.” Activity is easier to produce than evidence that the product matters.
  • He liked the program while remaining dissatisfied with his product progress. The architectural breakthrough came after the batch ended.

Better primitives made the agent workflow work

48:59: Rhys says the major change was his understanding of Executor, not a new collection of tools.

  • Separate contracts, which define API shapes and schemas, from implementation. Effect helps him keep those boundaries visible.
  • Make every integration a custom tool defined in code. MCP and OpenAPI imports can scaffold that code rather than require parallel product paths.
  • Keep accounts separate from integrations so an app can combine services and support multiple accounts.
  • Use consistent routing files and infrastructure as code. Alchemy lets an agent deploy and tear down its own test environment.
  • Keep the end-to-end verification loop from the earlier workflow. Knowing the architecture still matters even when the agent writes much of the implementation.

Review the agent’s optimization choices

1:01:06: Rhys sent an agent to investigate slowness and went for a walk. He reports a reduction from roughly one second to 200 milliseconds, then reviews the proposed changes separately.

  • Reusing a router and isolating a large compilation module made sense to him.
  • Lazy-loading the Autumn SDK missed a simpler option: implement the two API calls he needed.
  • A smaller import optimization could wait until the application shipped.

1:08:12: A private development repository holds plans and rough working material, while a clean mirror serves the public project. Rhys credits Ryan Dahl’s example. T3 Code now brings his preferred native coding harnesses into one interface.

The final purchasing shift follows the same logic. Rhys cares more about extensibility, security, and reliability when agents can build convenience features. Easier implementation raises the value of choosing the right underlying service.