Hey all,

Today's top of my mind is a bit late and I apologize about that. I was traveling yesterday and then spent the day with the fam and saw Toy Story 5.

The saving grace? You get two pictures in this Top of Mind. One of me being inasne and the other of my beautiful family. Sums up my life.

With that, let’s dive into it.

WHAT'S TOP OF MIND

1) Stay out of your own head

I won my buddy's annual golf tournament costume contest three years in a row. Took last year off. Came back this year.

And I caught myself overthinking it. What should I do? Can I top the previous years? What if it doesn't land?

While I was in my own head about what crazy outfit I should wear, I came across an interview by Taylor Swift talking about how she approaches writing her music.

She tries and treats it like the first time, every time. Taylor Swift goes back to her bedroom and writes like nobody's listening. The childlike approach isn't something you outgrow on the way to being good. It's what keeps you good.

I decided to treat it like my first year. An original idea. Not trying to outdo myself, just trying to be myself.

And, we brought the trophy back home.

Yes, I golfed all 18 holes in this thing.

2) WTF is a loop

A loop is the most underrated idea in AI right now. You give an agent a job and a finish line, and it keeps going until it crosses it. Act, check, act again. No hand-holding.

The magic is in how you define "done."

"Don't stop writing this code until it passes every test in the GitHub repo." The agent writes, runs the tests, fails, fixes, runs them again, and keeps grinding until they're green. Could be three tries. Could be thirty. It doesn't quit.

"Check back every five minutes until the export finishes, then build the dashboard." Now the loop is watching a clock and a condition at once.

"Pull last night's subscriber numbers at 6am and flag anything weird." Same loop, just triggered by the morning.

Here's where it gets stupid good. You're not running one of these. You can fire off ten at once. One's debugging code. One's watching a data pipeline. One's drafting your competitor table. You go to sleep. They don't.

But the best part is what loops do for learning.

You can point a loop at a skill and make it better on its own. Give it a task, score the output against a rubric, find where it fell short, rewrite the instructions, run it again. The agent isn't just doing the work. It's practicing. Every pass through the loop sharpens the next one.

That's how a sloppy first draft of a tool becomes a good one without you sitting there tweaking it by hand. You set the standard. The loop closes the gap.

It's the same thing great people do. Rep, feedback, adjust, rep again. We just never had a way to hand that off before.

Now we do.

3) Grateful to be a dad. And Toy Story.

That series has tracked my whole life. Andy and I are the same age. I wore a Buzz costume when I was six. I saw Toy Story 3 in college, right as Andy was leaving for school too.

Yesterday I took my kids to Toy Story 5. My daughter went as Jessie.

It's hard to put into words what that felt like. These are kids we hoped for, for a long time. Jess sacrificed more than anyone will ever know to get them here.

So yeah, the sleepless nights are real. The tantrums are real. Some days are long.

But I sat in that theater watching my daughter watch the same movies that raised me, and the whole thing collapsed into one feeling.

It goes fast. Buzz at six feels like yesterday.

I'm just grateful I get to be in it.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

What movie series would you say has "raised" you in that way?

PEOPLE

Claire will be leaving Workweek on the 23rd. Claire is hands down one of the funniest people I've ever met and we will miss all of her great memes.

Jenn's last day on the CS team will be the 25th. We're grateful for all the hard work she's put in and wish her nothing but the best!

Thanks for giving it a read. Make it a great one.

Adam