This edition of Good Tokens is best enjoyed while listening to the Phil Collins version of You Can't Hurry Love.
Shameless Self Promotion
Introducing AgentCAD: About a month ago I became obsessed with the idea of a command line tool for creating CAD drawings as a way to empower coding agents (Claude, Codex, etc) to be better at designing 3D objects. The first version of it is here and I'd be lying if I didn't say I had a delightful time building it. Try it out by firing up your favorite coding agent, grabbing the starter prompt from here, and giving it something to design for you. You and your agent can send me feedback directly from the CLI app or email me here: hello@jdilla.xyz
Dangerously Skip Permissions: In other command line news, my friend Rami, the head of Product for Stripe's new command line product Projects.dev stopped by Dangerously Skip Permissions to talk about CLI tools and what it's like to be a PM in the age of AI. If you need any more reason to check it out, Rami is one of the 5 best PMs I've witnessed up close. Full episode is here or a taster is here.
The Kranz Dictum: If this one doesn't get you going, please have someone check your pulse because you might be dead.
The Creation of Instant Coffee I always love a good "how X came to be" piece. I was surprised by how many of these chemical processes I recognized from my time at Macro Oceans.
Rented Virtue The connection between culture and value creation is underrated. So are the Quakers!
There's only one European company more valuable than Home Depot, which is itself only the number-four American retail company.
During Pangea, whole sections of the earth went without rain for thousands of years. The megamonsoon cut off the interior from atmospheric moisture for stretches of geological time.
Consumers aged 55+ now drive 45.3% of all U.S. spending (Unusual Whales).
Musings
"Such is the blindness of men, that they even glory in their blindness." — Augustine
"The life of man is like a game with dice; if you don't get the throw you want, you must show your skill in making the best of the throw you get." — Terence. Literature and History continues to delight me.
Agentalent.ai: A marketplace where companies hire verified, human-supervised AI agents. Each agent has a human handler. It's like a staffing agency for AI. The future is weird and it's already here.
ElevenLabs Secures AI Agent Insurance: First AIUC-1-backed insurance policy covering AI voice agents. They passed 5,000+ adversarial simulations to get it. This is a big deal for enterprise adoption — insuring against hallucinations and unauthorized actions is the kind of boring infrastructure that actually unlocks deployment.
Over the past several months, I've been collaborating with a friend of mine, Dr. Dua Hassan on her podcast.
One of the things that I think is underrated about being a parent is the degree to which medical stuff with your children just happens to you. Even the planned stuff — the 6 month and 1 year appointments — inevitably happens on a day when you're tired or distracted and there's less time, attention, and energy to get much beyond "What" and into "Why".
The first season is all about the first 24 hours of life and the shots, tests, and eye goop that are applied to a baby right after it's born. I've been through this three times and recognized every step — but couldn't have told you much about them until this show.
You can find it on Spotify here or on YouTube here. Send it to a parent or soon-to-be parent you love!
Craft is the Antidote to Slop — Will Manidis is in my internet top 5. I hope I'm not insulting him when I say he has great taste (link: https://minutes.substack.com/p/against-taste)
Papua New Guinea, with about 0.1 percent of the world's population, hosts more than 10 percent of the world's languages. Sweden maintains such accurate daily birth-and-death counts that it no longer needs to conduct a census. That whole piece on fake population numbers is wild.
The IKEA effect: people place disproportionately high value on things they partially created.
Tigers are orange because their prey can't distinguish between orange and green — and green pigment is hard to produce biologically. Evolution is full of these "good enough" solutions.
Alpha-Bots — Consistently one of my kids' favorite toys. Most likely to get the 3 and 5 year old playing together for 20+ minutes at a time while I'm not in the room.
No Knead Bread — My friend Chris introduced me to this No Knead Bread recipe late last year and it has quickly become a part of my family's weekly routine. Who knew fresh bread could be this easy?
The Mundanity of Excellence. Excellence is a product of different kinds of work rather than different levels of effort. Technique (how things are done), discipline (doing things correctly, consistently), and attitude (how things are approached) are the things to focus on. “What we call talent is no more than a projected reification of particular things done: hands placed correctly in the water, turns crisply executed, a head held high rather than low in the water.”
“Those of us who retain grand ambitions and high ideals are perhaps to liable to become Casaubonnish, to become like Lydgate, so preoccupied with the dreams of youth and so stung with the perpetual sense of failure as we became assimilated to our lives, that we forgot to do the good that we can do in the time we have to do it in.” — Henry Oliver on Middlemarch
Georgia is losing its southern drawl. One of my favorite things about attending the University of North Carolina was learning the subtle differences between North Carolina accents, to the point where I could place where you went to high school by how you spoke. They were beautiful and unique.
It should be easier to send gifts to a person having only their phone number.
“If you get mad you will be seen as losing almost-every argument, regardless of what the other person did that led to you getting mad, again excepting really extreme and explicit evidence.” — Uri. I should be forced to reread this once a month.
Things I learned
Just 13% of Gen Z believes that most people can be trusted — Ryan Burge. Surely at some point this has to rebound?
Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” is the best selling single of all time, which I learned at a BP gas station video ad of all places and confirmed via Wikipedia.
The second fastest growing sector in America between 2019 and 2024 was gambling — Matt Stoller
In case this is the last Good Tokens of the year, have a great holiday season and end of 2025. See you in 2026!
A message from my sponsor
Christmas is just 7 days away. If you’re here, you already know about my dear friend Uri’s hit new game Person Do Thing, but out of love for the game and it’s creator, I have to say one final time, this is a perfect stocking stuffer and a great way to spend time with your friends and family without a screen. Highly recommended!
The Lost Generation. This one is controversial because it deals with race and DEI, but if you can distance yourself from that a little bit, it’s really informative. It made me believe more in the Elite Overproduction Hypothesis.
The story of the fight over Romansch. Particularly enjoyable for me because the Engadin is among my favorite places in the world.
Things I learned
The average boomer will get paid out significantly more in medicare and social security than they paid in taxes — Russ Greene. Soon we’ll need a Boomer Corner.
The EU makes more from fines on US tech companies than it does from taxes on all EU tech companies — David Fant
Lebron James has played against 35% of players in NBA history — CBS Sports. To be fair, he has played in 28% of the league’s seasons. I think this makes him the Queen Elizabeth of athletes.
Musings
I feel like the Grinch saying this, but we’ve got to cut down on the number of special clothing days (e.g., pajama day) that are happening in schools or daycares. All it does is create stress for me as a parent and I don’t get the sense that my kids actually enjoy these. Who is this for?
LLM corner
Some shameless self promotion: The latest episode of —dangerously-skip-permissions: How Penny Schiffer works. Penny is another technical product manager turned AI software developer who I think has really mastered creating with AI.
GenAI created ads outperform human created ads by 19%… unless they are disclosed as created by AI, in which case the performance goes down by 32% — Eric Seufert
