Things Shawn Wang Has Said on Podcasts

“You name 100 blessed organizations that are priority. They have access to a cyber model. You've just created 100 attack vectors for me to go compromise. And by the way, they're pretty easy to compromise.” — Shawn Wang, Latent Space

The conversation turned to labs giving a short list of vetted organizations early access to cyber-capable models so they can patch before wider release. The host pushes back, arguing that a named list of privileged organizations becomes a target in itself.

Latent Space · 2026-11-08 Permalink → Listen →

Latent Space Around 1:14:21 into the episode

Alessio Fanelli

…and do it after. Or is there a problem of, oh no, it'll be much better at finding vulnerabilities. You can full cent test it for longer, even if you've patched, or like, how long, right? You can give it for three months, someone can try to exploit it for six months. The problem's not solved, right?

Mihail Eric

Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1

My whole problem with, and again, like, this is a whole rant that we don't need to go into, but like, it's like, you know, you name 100 bless organizations that, like, okay, these are like priority. They have access to a cyber model that you've just created 100 attack vectors for me to go compromise. And like, by the way, they're pretty easy to compromise. Yeah. So I don't know. Anyway, above all pay grade.

Alessio Fanelli

It's always fun to get juicy in security.

Speaker 1

I mean, security is right now very juicy, right? And I think actually the security folks love it because they usually don't get that much attention and now they have a ton of attention. Is that true?

Mihail Eric

I mean, that they don't get attention. I find that, at least from a VC perspective, you'd love, VCs love investing in security companies. And pretty good, like a Wiz or something. It's done very, very well.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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“I do not want to hire anyone who hasn't been through psychosis and come out the other end. Because I am currently paying for somebody to go through psychosis. And that's very expensive from his salary, very expensive from tokens, and I'm getting nothing out of it. And he doesn't get it. My feedback doesn't get through.” — Shawn Wang, Latent Space

The hosts and guest were discussing the stages of adopting AI coding tools, including a stage of over-engineering agent setups that gets called "psychosis". The host argues engineers should go through that phase and come out of it, because he is currently paying an employee who is stuck in it.

Latent Space · 2026-11-08 Permalink → Listen →

Latent Space Around 1:48:38 into the episode

Speaker 1

someone else's team.

Alessio Fanelli

…were like, there was the whole Open Claw, there was something else, and there was Gastown, and the whole manifesto also really helped spur it into the conceptual. The people that would never use Gastown, but learned about Gastown because you can read the manifesto. There's a marketing angle to it.

Speaker 1

…trying to move to multi-agent and blah, blah, blah. And you probably should try to build your own orchestrator, right? And that's all that. Arguably, this is kind of out of date now. There is more to the software factory beyond this. But this article predates the software factory. I do think one of those things where I'm open to, as an employer, I have this problem in my company today, which is I do not want to hire anyone who hasn't been through psychosis and come out the other end. Because I am currently paying for somebody to go through psychosis. And that's very expensive from his salary, very expensive from tokens, and I'm getting nothing out of it. And he doesn't get it. My feedback doesn't get through. And so it's almost like I would encourage your students to have psychosis and then come out and go, okay, what was wrong with me? Because that's what Steve just went through. Like a very public two-year journey of this. Yeah,

Mihail Eric

it's

Alessio Fanelli

weird on the student side. There's like a lot of industry you think you're being productive, you're not. It's probably the student version, right? You're notion charting and making all these optimizations, personal S, and it's like, dang, I went through the psychosis, but nothing has changed…

Mihail Eric

Yeah. I haven't seen this. I've seen a version of this from Boris, actually. Obviously, more geared toward cloud use cases, but I remember he made like a cloud artifact which showed, I think, more at the team level, but I think he had four stages, not eight stages. But it kind of roughly followed…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

“I'm on record as like a 95% doomer, where I'm like, the default path we should assume is that this all goes wrong…” — Shawn Wang, Software Unscripted

Wang and his host had been arguing about whether AI eliminates jobs the way automation was supposed to eliminate radiologists, and had just agreed that radiology did not die. Wang's framing here is asymmetric risk rather than prediction: he says being wrong and unprepared is negative infinity on the risk-reward matrix. It comes from someone who works on AI developer tooling for a living.

Software Unscripted · 2026-05-09 Permalink → Listen →

Software Unscripted Around 1:00:04 into the episode

Shawn Wang

…And, like, isn't that nice? Like, like, uh, you know, the ultimate reality of abundance is that everyone just has a basic living wage, uh, universal basic income, and they can live their lives, have fun with their kids, touch grass, while the robots work for you. Why are you so scared of this?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean, that is certainly one way it could play out. And then there's also, you know, the Skynet kills everybody, you know, and we're all paperclips. I do, yeah.

Shawn Wang

I also, I am also, I'm on record as like a 95% doomer, where I'm like, the default path we should assume is that this all goes wrong because, you know, the risk reward is that we should assume it goes wrong because the other, like, the situation where it is that we're wrong and it does go wrong and we were not prepared for it is a fatality, right? Like, it's, it's like in negative infinity in terms of our risk reward matrix.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I have an unusual take on that, maybe, which is not something I've heard other people say, which is that it seems to me that the history of human disasters is that the way that we prevent mega disasters is that we have a smaller disaster that's still really bad. Yes.

Shawn Wang

But

Speaker 3

not a complete Armageddon. Where does

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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