Morgan

Hi I'm Morgan, and since I have a lot of new followers, I thought I'd take a moment to introduce myself 👋 First, please don't mistake me for an expert, because I am far from one. I am, however, someone that gets excited about a lot of things, and I'm endlessly curious. I was born and raised in Berkeley, CA, went to college and studied Engineering in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon, and after school went to work for a tiny startup called Sonos. When I joined Sonos, they were pretty much running out of money, I was actually told I might not have a job for long. But I loved the idea, really liked the founders, and took the plunge. Luckily, Sonos did not run out of money, and I was there from ~35 people to ~1,000 people. I was at Sonos for nine years, but knew working for a company, esp. one that was now 1,000 people, wasn't my path, I really wanted to start and run my own business. After that, I started Bold Metrics which I run today as the Cofounder/CTO. I have an amazing team that I am incredible proud of. They are all 10x smarter than I will ever be. Through this journey I realized that my passion in life is coming up with ideas, building the narrative around those ideas and how they fit into a future that I can see in my mind, and pitching those ideas to investors. From there, I can do what I love the most, building teams. I really enjoy the process of finding great people and building a culture where they can truly thrive. At Bold Metrics, I pushed us to adopt agentic coding workflows in early 2025. Through this experience I started benchmarking our own stack, actual PRs from our repos, and helped my team understand what models and effort levels they really needed for regular daily work. What I learned is that benchmarking models across effort levels led to fascinating results. As I shared this with a few friends in SF, they all said I should open source my benchmarking tool and share the results. So I did, and I called it VulcanBench. Today VulcanBench is the biggest money-losing thing I've ever done, and I love it. I get to wake up every morning and see new insights about models that I try to turn into real signal that other engineering teams can use. I live in Lake Tahoe, it's my favorite place on earth. I'm not a big foodie or restaurant guy, and I don't drink, so the whole "dinner and drinks" thing isn't really my jam. I would much rather chat while riding a ski lift then in a noisy crowded restaurant. And I love cooking so would always rather cook at home. For decades now I've been traveling Internationally. I got the travel bug launching Sonos in Asia, Australia, Latin America, and Canada. I usually visit 4-5 countries a year. It's hard for me not to get antsy being in the US for more than a few months, the world is my home. I married my best friend, the love of my life, we've been together for over 20 years now. To me, the meaning of life is love. I live my life by one simple rule - spend as much time as possible with the people I love. You will never find me missing dinners to sit in an office grinding away while eating DoorDash. Time is too precious for that. I am dedicated to changing the world, that is my life mission, and I have known it for a long time. Throughout my life I've had many friends say I'm crazy for saying that. That's okay, we need more crazy people in this world with big dreams and a high tolerance for risk. If you are following me, and actually like and comment as yourself, thank you. It has been a truly humbling experience to see my account on X grow as I just write what's in my head on here. I do not write sponsored posts or do any kind of sponsored stuff at this time so please don't pitch stuff to me, you'll always get a no. I want to keep this account focused on me just writing whatever I want, whenever I want. Okay, this turned out longer than I expected, so I'll leave it here. And holy moly, if you read all of this, you might just be as crazy as me 🤪

TIL, you can make your Dot your start screen. So now my dock is complete 🧘‍♂️

Very excited to buy with Bot 🦾 🛍️

So amazing to see this! 🦀 🤌

This sounds like a very good combo 🤝

Very excited to try Claude Duet, just got access today. Thanks to Opus 5.5, and some of the changes over the last couple of months w/Claude Code, I am finding myself using Claude Code more than ever before. So safe to say, I'm really ready to jam w/Duet 🕺

This is your reminder to play more games, starting tomorrow.

Muse is making some pretty smooth moves in the agentic commerce space imo. And let’s be honest, nobody on X has a better sense of humor than @alexandr_wang so double win.

Always make time for saunas.

I gotta be honest, Google could use some help on comms/marketing. As an engineer, that’s genuinely interested in understanding how Antigravity is progressing, this just isn’t ideal 🫠 And note, not calling out Rody or trying to be negative. As you all know, I’m a super positive guy, actually think Antigravity is likely getting some legs…but this is confusing.

Vote!

A bit delayed on the next issue of my model routing Substack, but for good reason...I'm waiting for Grok 4.8 I think Grok 4.8 is going to be a tipping point for SpaceXAI, and I thought it was going to come out last week, now it might be this week, and I'm okay with it being delayed. Once the model comes out, I'll benchmark it with VulcanBench and then share the results with my paying subscribers first. If you had no idea I had a Substack, that's fair, I don't talk about it much. Easy URL to remember though: modelrouting.substack.com Now, let's get Grok 4.8 out, I'm soooo ready for it!

Few people realize this, but agents rarely use MCPs.

Wow, Shopify paid $99M for Shop.com 🤯 Safe to say anyone that said domain names weren't going up in value over time, can now eat their words.

Okay, so I have decided not to benchmark Kimi K3.1 Pro with @VulcanBench after running some initial tests. This is one of the interesting and complex things about running these benchmarks. At the end of the day, as a CTO, I care about models that me and my team would use for daily coding tasks. And this means models need to have a good balance of accuracy and cost efficiency. I started testing Kimi K3.1 Pro on low effort, with four tasks, and it solved none of them, took 26 minutes per task, and cost $2.05. For comparison, GPT-6.1 Sol low, on the same four tasks solved three out of four, took 4.5 minutes per task, and cost $0.21. This is also a really good example of why you can't just look at input/output token cost to judge the cost of a model. Kimi K3.1Pro and GPT-6.1 Sol both cost $2/M input tokens and $10/M output tokens. What input/output cost doesn't take into account is how many tokens a model uses per task, and in this case, Kimi K3.1 Pro uses ~10x the tokens, so it's actually ~10x more expensive than GPT-6.1 Sol. So I'm going to pass on benchmarking this model, it would cost me between $200 - $300 to do it, and I already know this isn't a model I'd use with my team. Live long and benchmark, thoughtfully 🖖

The word of the week is: WebMCP And for good reason. I think it is the future of how events will navigate the web. It also means, the web, domain names, yeah, they aren’t going anywhere. But there will be a way to make it much easier to build them for agents. And yes, agents will use the web wayyyy more than us humans ever did. I think Shopify writes great docs, so if you want to learn more, read this: shopify.dev/docs/api/web-mcp

Look at the next tweet you’re about to write. Is it bringing more positivity to the world or more negativity? I can tell you this, you will never regret helping to spread positivity. Life is short, if you’re spending your time complaining or making other people feel bad, stop wasting your precious time. Here’s to all the amazing and wonderful things we have to be grateful for. To those accounts out there spreading negativity, it’s never too late to change. I love you all ❤️

Not sure ppl realize what a big deal this is.

I keep hearing more good things about Antigravity. To be honest, I had totally counted it out. Now, Google seems to be making major steps forward with their models, and now their harness. Only way to know, for me, is to benchmark with @VulcanBench and compare 🖖 I know Google is making some changes/updates to Antigravity this week, so I'll wait for those to hit, and then start comparing harnesses. My plan to start is to compare Pi and Antigravity. Pi is such a solid harness, I feel like it's the best reference. Now to just figure out how to get access to Google's models without going broke 😅 But before I do anything, curious if ppl agree that Pi is a good reference harness if I wanted to compare Antigravity to one harness?