The /drill-me Affair, Stateless MCP Rekindles Simon & Theo's $50k July

The /drill-me Affair

The timeline's comedy event of the week: the CEO of Microsoft posted a detailed writeup of a "ROIC Intelligence App" he built and mentioned on the earnings call — took a Morgan Stanley hyperscaler-ROIC PDF, used Copilot code "with a single prompt + skill (/drill-me) to create the plan," autopilot to build the app, and /rubber-duck to test. Matt Pocock's reaction (1.9k likes, 312k views): "What seems more likely: 1. The CEO of Microsoft is using my skill and got the name wrong 2. The CEO of Microsoft is using a skill which a redditor posted on r/ClaudeCode, receiving 2 upvotes. Crazy world we live in."

The thread is a gift. swyx: "drill me daddy" (102 likes). Matt, to the suggestion that Microsoft engineers built it internally: "Sure, because a Microsoft team designed a product called /drill-me". Someone proposes /wayxplorer as the next knockoff; Matt counters "waygrindr". A more sobering reply predicts /drill-me simply ships as a built-in in the new Copilot superapp — which, name aside, is the actual story here: skills born in one ecosystem are getting laundered into enterprise products with zero attribution, and there's no mechanism for anyone to even notice, let alone credit.

Matt's week otherwise: a podcast appearance on Unhandled Exception covering the skills repo (nearly 200k stars now), /grill-me, /wayfinder, "the death of tactical programming," and whether sprints still make sense — his pitch: a good first-principles intro to getting started with his skills.

Simon's Double Ship: Stateless MCP & smevals

Two substantial releases from Simon Willison in one evening.

Stateless MCP. The new stateless MCP specification has rekindled his interest in the protocol (481 likes) and produced two new projects — mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp — written up on his blog. The reply section is a rare case of near-consensus on why this matters: statelessness is a deployment story. Session affinity was what stopped an MCP server being trivially deployable — dropping it "turns an MCP server into an ordinary HTTP endpoint you can put on Workers or Lambda and forget about." Workers can restart or move without dragging sessions; "connection state was the quiet thing keeping this stuff in demos". The counterweights worth reading: auth context now has to ride in every request instead of the connection, and the URL becomes the whole integration — "the first MCP 2.0 migration horror story will be a temporary hostname living in ten thousand agent configs."

smevals. Built with Prime Radiant: a tool for running small eval suites against models, harnesses, and prompts — try it with uvx smevals docs, writeups on the Prime Radiant blog and Simon's own. He says the hardest part was the vocabulary, and here's an example of the static report it produces after running and grading a suite across models. The design point repliers picked up on: separating the runner from the grader means you can swap agent backends without touching grading logic. This is the personal-benchmark thesis leerob was pushing a month ago, now with tooling — small regression suites you actually use catch the "version didn't change but the vibes did" drift that public leaderboards can't.

Also from Simon: DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 delivers a disappointing pelican at default reasoning but a much better one on high, and his notes call the model "VERY good for its price" per the Artificial Analysis pareto line — the price-war week ends with DeepSeek shooting back. Plus he's on Oxide and Friends covering accidental cyberattacks, Kimi K3, Golden Gate Claude, and "other worthy digressions."

Theo's $50k July

Theo closed the month just short of $50k in token spend, displayed on an e-ink dashboard on his desk (half the replies just want to know what the frame is). The disclaimers thread is the useful part: he didn't pay that — it's retail value of tokens consumed on three $200 Claude subs plus one $200 Codex sub ($800/month, so ~60x leverage); the big mid-month spike was a long /goal experiment before Codex resets expired; "the work that mattered" was about $20k of the spend; and he mostly ran Fable and gpt-5.6-sol. The replies split between the mortgage-payment observation ("$1.6k a day"), "Rookie numbers. I did $80k on Codex alone", and the one genuinely pointed critique: "Imagine a home builder bragging about the amount of lumber he had to use."

The same evening produced the counterpoint to all that leverage: Opus 5 burned through his 5-hour Claude limit in about 10 minutes "because it decided to spawn a checker every 2 seconds" (and yes, it was Opus 5). Also shipped: npx t3 pair --tailscale — pairing link + QR code to make remote T3 Code setup "10x easier" for Tailscale users, nine days after mobile launch — plus ongoing T3 Code performance work, a $100k lifetime creator-revenue milestone, and a heartfelt SwiftUI review: "absolute garbage... Lists are so fkn bad" — even minimal ones drop to 60fps past 100 items on an iPhone 17 Pro.

OpenAI Patches Git Itself

Via Theo (1.6k likes): OpenAI works in a single giant monorepo on GitHub, is hitting git performance limits at their size and velocity, and is now upstreaming performance, correctness, and testing fixes from openai/git to git itself — with the Codex app also picking up more efficient git usage in new builds. The replies fill in the history: Microsoft has been here for years (Scalar, VFS for Git — Theo: "git lfs was lifechanging"), Google solved it by walking away from git entirely (Piper). The two sharp observations: most orgs at this scale fork and patch privately, so upstreaming is genuinely unusual, and patching git core instead of moving to a Piper-style system "kinda tells you everything about their infra conservatism". Worth watching for anyone whose agents hammer git status in a loop — which is everyone.

In Defense of /loop and /goal

Direct rebuttal to this week's loop-engineering dinner (where most founders admitted they weren't using /loop): swyx says he's apparently the minority AI leader STILL actively using /loop and /goal — "i think all of u guys who stopped using it are wrong - not wrong forever, just giving up on it too early in the g5.6/c5 era." His two use cases: when you want the right mix of steerability and autonomy, and when you want an open-ended "loop that generates loops" end state without deeply specifying the path. His example: a saved /goal rescued a very long action-reasoning turn that would otherwise have died.

The replies are a nice catalogue of practitioner patterns: /goal as drift prevention on long turns ("without it the agent tends to drift or restart reasoning from scratch"), /goal as intent-carrier when running 3–4 sessions at once, the saved goal as the killer feature ("a long turn dying used to mean rereading the transcript like an archaeologist"), and the most elaborate: one orchestrating chat that writes /goals for new chats and monitors them via heartbeats — "It is a lot better at writing a goal than I am, I just have to communicate intent." Together with Dex Horthy's forward-pressure/backpressure split from Wednesday, the loops debate now has both a vocabulary and a counterargument.

Other Notes

Quiet this window: @karpathy, @leerob, and @bcherny had nothing new; @potetotes' RSS feed returned 0 items (known issue). Thread reply pages fetched via nitter.net worked this run.