Daily Edition · Page 6

THE DAILY INDEX

Technology, AI, software, security, crypto and business

GENERAL

TLDR Founders

AI ACCENTURE, NOT ACCENTURE FOR AI

There are three real flavors of AI services right now, and the bet to take isn't a body shop of elite generalists or the labs' own consulting arms whose engineers quietly work for their sponsor's lock-in. It's the inverted shape, a product company that delivers a service, where you build an internal agent and context layer and use it to serve one narrow customer cheaper and faster than anyone else can. The tell is whether they'll do anything for anyone, or whether they have religious beliefs about what they won't touch. The next Accenture isn't Accenture with AI on the front of the brochure, it's a company that rebuilt how services get delivered from the ground up.

SOME THINGS I'VE LEARNED RUNNING CODING AGENTS ON LARGE-SCALE PROJECTS

Simon Last at Notion runs coding agents on a single session for days, sometimes weeks, and they remember the patterns they learned on day one. The biggest mistake teams still make is scoping tasks for an afternoon when the right size is work that would take a strong engineer multiple weeks. Your job is to write plan docs faster than the agent burns through them, and to have a second read-only agent review every diff before anything ships.

FEDWIRE FOR FINTECHS – OPPORTUNITIES

The day after the President signed the executive order on financial technology, the Federal Research Board released a formal proposal to establish a special-purpose 'Payment Account', a streamlined, payments-only account category designed to bypass the traditional Master Account bottleneck. This framework promises a 90-day review timeline for Tier 2 and Tier 3 non-bank applications. While this sounds like a massive win, the operational reality is a lot more complicated. This article looks at the core opportunities, constraints, and economic hurdles to consider.

OPENAI IS BRINGING CHATGPT DIRECTLY INTO MICROSOFT POWERPOINT

OpenAI's new ChatGPT feature, available inside Microsoft PowerPoint, allows users to build and edit presentations using the AI chatbot. The feature allows users to describe what they want, and the assistant generates an initial structure from that input. The tool can modify or insert slides and also apply reasoning to a finished deck to surface weak points in the narrative or predict objections that audiences may bring up. The feature is available to users on all subscription levels. It can be added either through the Microsoft marketplace or through PowerPoint's own interface.

FORWARD-DEPLOYED ENGINEERING HEATS UP AGAIN

Google is doubling down on hiring forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) and making the interview process much simpler. Its hiring process has been shortened from four to six interviews over the course of weeks to as few as two interviews in just two days. OpenAI has outsourced its FDE hiring spree, and Anthropic plans to use outsourced FDE recruitment. The new FDE roles could be a great opportunity for early-career software engineers entering the industry.

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