From Attention to Intention

Newsletter sent 27.1.2026 by oler

In this issue: An imaginary city of AI agents that never sleeps. Why the brutal economics of liquid content should keep you up at night. Harvard’s Shuwei Fang on the demand-side shock we’re not prepared for. Plus: Claude Cowork puts agentic AI in reach for the rest of us.

What we’re talking about: Someone built an imaginary industrial city of AI agents. Dozens of programs that loop back and forth, checking and documenting each other as they produce code. The project is weird, unhinged, maybe even brilliant.

It’s called Gas Town, and the person building it, Steve Yegge, is a known blogger and developer. For this, he didn’t touch or even look at code. It’s entirely vibecoded. Before you dismiss the whole thing (the badly generated AI images sure don’t help), stay with me.

Gas Town is a self-sustaining machine in perpetual motion, nibbling away at tasks, burning tokens and money along the way. At first, I didn’t really get it.

But then I read Maggie Appleton‘s comprehensive interpretation: it’s really a glimpse into the future of coding, an experiment in design fiction. Some will hate it, the sloppiness, the inefficiency. Others will marvel at the abstraction layer and never look at code again.

What else I’ve been reading:

AI & Journalism Links

How to use AI without getting dumb: Strategies for critical prompt design to keep AI from becoming a cheap shortcut or decision-maker. (Paul Bradshaw, Online Journalism Blog)

A giant isometric pixel-art map of New York City, vibecoded by a software developer, shows how AI can help scale up the repetitive tasks that make ambitious projects impossible for solo creators. (Andy Coenen)

Google says no: “We really don’t want you to think you need to be doing that or produce two versions of your content, one for the LLM and one for the net.” (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land)

People who use chatbots for news consider them unbiased and “good enough,” new study finds. (Andrew Deck, NiemanLab)

And now: When she presented her economic outlook on journalism’s future at the Reuters Institute’s gathering in Oxford, she brought an extra slide for the assembled editors-in-chief and media managers: “Be suspicious of the solutions that require the least amount of change.”

Her essay “Beyond the Artifact: The Brutal Economics of Liquid Content” is on top of my essential AI reading list for 2026. I’m more than happy that she took the time to be this issue’s guest: Harvard fellow Shuwei Fang.

Three Questions with Shuwei Fang

-> More Interviews

Model of the moment: If you aren’t using Qwen3-Max-Thinking already, you’re … just like me. As much as I try to stay current, I also have to get real work done. So for me it’s Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro, for both writing and coding. I bounce between the two: most days I start with Opus, and when I hit rate limits on my plan, I switch to Gemini.

Juggling chat windows is still weirdly clumsy. The next step up is letting a chatbot drive your browser. Claude has a Chrome extension, OpenAI and Perplexity have their own browsers.

Next up: give the chatbot access to your local files. There are command-line clients like Claude Code or Gemini CLI. You can tell them to search through your stuff, patch a codebase, or spin up something new. You say what you want; it figures out the steps (sometimes) on its own. This is what we call agentic AI.

For the rest of us, Anthropic has launched Claude Cowork. It runs in the Claude desktop app and feels like a more user-friendly interface for the same concepts as Claude Code: you make a request, Claude makes a plan, then executes it—breaking the work into smaller tasks, testing, and iterating along the way.

I gave it access to a copy of my website’s innards, WordPress theme files, 460 files across a bunch of folders, and asked how to make a small design tweak. It told me exactly which file and which line to change.

Not the sophisticated agent orchestration with pre-defined rules quite yet. But it is a start.

One more thing: Florent Daudens has written an introduction to Claude Code for journalists, as has Casey Newton in his newsletter Platformer.

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The previous issue is Eventually, This Will All Work, the next issue is Hack Your CMS, Skip the IT Queue.