It's been a helluva week (or two, it’s been a bit since the last newsletter). I haven’t been sleeping well. Apologies for lack of streams and content.

I knew I was going to get my black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on Wednesday, 4/1/2026, and was excited about that, but what I wasn't prepared for was the week in Agentic AI surrounding it.

I have written about this feeling of overwhelm/overstimulated/under-rested previously, but I get the feeling that this is going to be a recurring theme. Here’s my reaction to Steve Yegge’s AI Energy Vampire article and what I've written about how we need to change our story about ourselves since.

The mini lesson up top here is that we need to take care of ourselves on a daily basis. There is life outside of this AI race that does seem to be accelerating by the day. You have to have your health in order to be in this game for the long run and to be well enough to enjoy the rewards of it.

This is very similar to not over-training in Jiu-Jitsu. Train too much with no rest, you may get injured and won't be able to train again for months. I always try to train in such a way that I can always train again tomorrow. Just chip away at the project bit by bit at a sustainable pace. Rome wasn't built in a day.

You may see people online bragging about how much they're coding or working with AI agents and how much they're getting done, but the current pace that's happening is not sustainable, at least for me, as someone who has dove headfirst into all of this. I'm going to try to carve out a more intentional sprint-rest model, with reserving most of Saturday to be completely offline and disconnected to live in the real world (as I’m finishing this Saturday morning).

It's a weird mix of fulfilling a dream I had when I started 14 years ago, a PhD, and a business license.

I got into Jiu-Jitsu because I broke my hand the second match of my senior year in high school wrestling and wanted to continue to do some form of it into adulthood. I was a fan of the UFC and bore witness to certain classic fights (Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen if you want to look it up) where the guy on bottom (who was losing) would be able to pull out a win by choking out the guy on top with just their legs (a Triangle Choke).

I thought being able to fight off your back was the coolest thing and I wanted to learn how to do it. I had a number of friends who trained and told me that it was similar to wrestling and that I'd be good at it. I thought it was too brutal in high school, but looking back at it now, I see certain aspects (conditioning) of high school wrestling being more brutal.

When I started Jiu-Jitsu, I was still interested in competing after having stopped short in high school wrestling, and to my surprise, there was a “Worlds“ (or “Mundials”) tournament that anybody could enter by belt level. There was zero barrier to entry to the highest level of competition. I was hooked.

Unlike football, baseball, soccer, or virtually any other proper sport, where you have to start in the professional pipeline as a child/teenager, you can start this (sport? hobby?) at 20 years old and train seriously, consistently enough with a full-time job, become kind of good at this thing, and compete against some of the best in the world. Ask me how I know.

Of course, the people who train more and dedicate their lives to it become better faster, but they also have no job, no health insurance, and no career options to fall back on if they fall short of being the absolute best, which is almost guaranteed.

Somehow I threaded the needle and was able to grow a real career at a real tech company while pursuing this “getting good at Jiu-Jitsu” thing. I didn't accomplish my initial goal of becoming a World Champion, but I feel like I accomplished the spirit of it by placing in the top 16 in the -99kg division (of 84 people) at the ADCC West Coast Trials in 2022. For context, the ADCC World Championship only happens every two years and is Jiu-Jitsu’s equivalent of the Olympics. Doing the math (8 trials worldwide, top 16 of each + 8 invitees to world championship = 136, plus US trials are more competitive), I was probably in the top 100 or so people in the world competing on the ADCC circuit at the time. Not the absolute best, but also not terrible either.

The goal was to know where I stood on an absolute, world-level basis, and I accomplished it. I didn't want to be merely “relatively good” at Jiu-Jitsu compared to my peers in my local gym. I wanted to know that I was competitive amongst the best in the world.

I did this all while training at the "dad class time" of 6 am for the past 8 years. I did not train with our gym’s actual professional competitors at a specific competition class. I was able to put together the right looks with a little help from my friends early in the morning.

Glad you asked. Since I've stopped competing in Jiu-Jitsu, I have now turned my competitive aspirations towards things that align with my career, namely using AI Agents as much as possible and creating content around what I learn. Barriers to entry for generating code have been obliterated by Agents. Anyone with an idea can turn it into reality. These implemented ideas then compete on a world-level stage due to the Internet. Sound familiar?

I was upset about retiring from competition in Jiu-Jitsu last year since my body has taken on too much mileage from intense training. It was a blessing in disguise. Now I'm seeing that I shifted my competitive energy at nearly the perfect time. I've been able to focus all of my discretionary effort [1] into coding with AI agents, and it's starting to pay off.

The next ADCC trials are coming up in two weeks, and I have no regrets not planning to compete in it. If I was still focused on that for the past 6-9 months instead, I would have completely missed this AI opportunity.

I've put in a lot of time, consistently, over the course of the better part of a year or so into using "vibe coding" tools and really understanding the ins and outs of them. I've been pretty light on theory and more hands-on, learn by doing. I think developing a feel for these things is the most highest-leverage thing that I can be doing with my time.

My coach jokingly said right before he gave me my black belt that, “you can become a doctor in the time that it takes to get a black belt”. Makes you really think about the opportunity cost of doing a silly sport that you love compared to a potentially more lucrative alternative. Thanks, Coach.

The black belt tracks roughly to the amount of time it takes to get a PhD (around 10 years), with certain belts representing milestones along the way. The first one I felt a real sense of accomplishment about was my Purple Belt, since I had been a Blue Belt for nearly six years.

The purple belt is much like a college bachelor's degree, and you're expected to get it sometime in the first four to six years of total training time. I was on year seven. Lots of things happened in the six years I was a blue belt, including moving from the Bay Area to Las Vegas. I was actually supposed to test for my purple belt before I moved, but I was hurt and could not risk getting more injured.

Brown Belt is very much a master's degree. It felt like my own master's degree in Computer Science from Cal Poly. You establish a personal thesis around Jiu-Jitsu, which is your “style” or “game”. You have specific well-trodden pathways that you go down and know all the ins and outs of. You spend so much more time than literally everyone else (possibly in the world) in these positions that it is very hard for others to navigate your game unscathed. You do so much “research” in a particular part of Jiu-Jitsu that you may end up advancing it in some (however small) way [2].

Black Belt I feel like is very much a PhD, where it is now my job to teach the next generation. I think I would feel this way regardless if I was a coach or not. It is my job to more deeply understand what I know to be true about Jiu-Jitsu, and pass it on. I want to crystallize and package it up in such a way that others can digest it better. I have learned so much from the upper belts who have invested in me over the years. They have poured so much into me that I feel obligated to pay it forward and pour into others.

Glad you asked. Humans like to have hierarchies and predictable, progressive paths towards accomplishing something. Corporate types post-graduation tend to fulfill this need by completing certifications and trading up job titles. The piece of paper or title is an external validation that you know something about the subject.

I feel like the future of AI agents completely democratizes the knowing and doing of things, at least with code. Why spend time completing a full course with the certification when you can ask Claude to give you the TL;DR and implement something for you in five minutes?

I'm starting to see this in my personal relationships with people who are non-technical but are starting to build things that previously required an engineer who knew what they were doing. They start to ask me something, and they realize mid-sentence that they can just ask Claude how to do something.

It's this powerful self-bootstrapping capability of Claude Code (and AI in general) that is very reminiscent of Jiu-Jitsu to me. It is my opinion that if you lock two people in a room for a year and tell them to figure out how to grapple with no prior knowledge of any grappling art, they'll learn something about Jiu-Jitsu with no external knowledge sources.

The human body has affordances for grappling. We can figure out what joints bend which ways and how the human body moves without having to rely on the "experts" who are selling instructionals. We’re allowed to figure things out for ourselves. I think we’ve lost that sense of exploration. Entire industries are built off of our fear of not being able to figure things out for ourselves, or wanting to do things the “right” or “most optimal” way vs. we’d get a lot more out of the experience if we failed a few hundred times on our own.

The “expert” instructors (me maybe being counted one of them as a black belt) are very valid and are very good at what they do, but I think we can have more ownership, autonomy, and sovereignty over our own training. Ultimately, it is on us doing the learning since we have to do the thing for ourselves against a skilled opponent, regardless of the skill of our coach.

That's not to say that having a good coach isn’t insanely helpful, which I hope to be in order to help shortcut my students and save them years of toil, but I also hope I instill a learning framework in my students that gives them a sense of confidence where they can become their own coach. All the best coaches tend to try to do this.

Claude is an insanely helpful coach and training partner who enables you to accomplish some crazy things on day one. I hope we can look to AIs as less “not thinking” tools and more of sparring partners in helping to develop ideas that can compound over time.

I would be lying if I said I haven't thought of opening up a Jiu-Jitsu Academy. I just also know it's a ton of work for not a lot of ROI early on. Earning my black belt gives me the option to open up a 10th Planet affiliate gym (one of the biggest brands in the space) as long as there isn't another one in a certain geographic radius. This isn’t a bad hedge just in case if we all do get automated out of tech jobs forever, not that I think that will happen.

If you're not in the Jiu-Jitsu community, you may not have heard of 10th Planet, but you may have heard of the founder, Eddie Bravo. Eddie is a regular on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast (one of the biggest podcasts in the world if you've been living under a rock) and is the third most featured guest on the show with a total of 90 appearances at the time of this writing. Joe Rogan is a black belt under Eddie and is one of his best friends.

Eddie is certainly controversial to say the least, but 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) in general is brought up nearly every time he is on the show. Great top-of-funnel marketing. I don't think there's another person more responsible for the growth of Jiu-Jitsu than Joe Rogan, for better or worse.

Jiu-Jitsu and MMA in general may be a “right-coded” thing, but there's plenty of raging lefty lunatics who participate as well.

Jiu-Jitsu isn't inherently a political sport, but it is a tool that can be used for good or for evil

AI coding technology, and I'm strictly limiting myself to the coding aspect because that's what I use most and have the most experience with, in the short term, have and will continue to give companies air cover to lay people off. I think we are still very early and companies just have to figure out that if one AI-enabled developer is good, two is better, ten may be even better, and “as many as you can hire” may be best.

Businesses of the world just have to figure out how much more bottom line they can add per AI-enabled software developer, which was difficult to assess pre-AI even with just regular developers.

Long term, it will be an arms race to get as many of the most skilled AI-wielding developers under one roof as possible. This was true for the “classical” programming arms race that lasted through 2022, and I believe it will be true for this new vibe coding one. We just don't know when the next one will start.

As I said in my previous newsletter, I don't think we're going to run out of problems in the world. I just think these AI tools enable us to take on bigger and hairier challenges without needing to be so involved in all of the implementation details. We can focus on solving the problem at a high level, delivering features that users want, and letting them know that we exist.

We can just assume anything can be programmed by probably anyone. Now it's just a matter of what should be coded and If the end users are aware of this solution.

Taste and Distribution.

[1] I have written about discretionary effort previously, but in short, I believe it is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. It's the extra work that you choose do above and beyond the call of duty. You don't have to do it. It is work that you choose to do in pursuit of Mastery.

I believe the best leaders cultivate a culture where entire teams of people are willing to spend their discretionary effort to accomplish a higher purpose or collective goal. I have seen what discretionary effort has done in my own life and can only extrapolate what's possible across many tens, hundreds, thousands of people working towards one goal. People work jobs at companies, but they may not necessarily spend their discretionary effort there.

I would argue the the biggest achievements of humanity are the result of discretionary effort.

[2] For me, this was Deep Half. Technique selection in Jiu-Jitsu is deeply personal. What you do on the mat is a physical expression of your personality. It demonstrates how you deal with adversity: how you plan to navigate and eventually overcome it. Another part is tactical; what techniques show up often enough and can be exploited in a competition setting.

For me, Deep Half just clicked in that I could get completely underneath somebody's center of mass and then determine where their body was going to go. Going to Deep Half is precariously close to getting passed. But since I knew all the different options because I sat there for thousands of live reps, I know when I'm in danger and when I’m not. Deep Half it's very much a rug pull type of move. The person on top thinks they're winning until at the very last second I open up a trap door and they fall through.

I have a couple of other positions (front headlock) where I'm, in theory, in danger and I'm in a bad position, but I have put myself there many hundreds to thousands of more times than the other person, that eventually it becomes my advantageous position. I'm sure Sun Tzu wrote about this in The Art of War or something.