Vibe-Coding an Attention Firewall, w/ Steve Newman, creator of The Curve

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today my guest is Steve Newman, the veteran software engineer who created, rightly, the startup acquired by Google that ultimately became Google Docs, and who is now the founder of the Golden Gate Institute for AI, the nonprofit behind The Curve Conference and author of the Second Thoughts Substack, which is increasingly popular among the AI obsessive set for its grounded, well-balanced, anti-sensationalist, and at times, openly confused analysis. We do eventually get Steve's takes on some of the biggest open questions in AI, including how near or far we may be from a recursive, self-improvement-driven intelligence explosion, how far behind digital AIs, robotics will prove to lag, and whether or not AI will have a major impact on climate change. But the main focus of today's conversation is actually a show and tell of Steve's personal AI toolkit and Vibe-Coding practices.
I wanted to have this conversation because having spent the last few months building up my own ClaudeCode-powered personal productivity stack, and now an autonomous assistant, too, I feel that though I am getting outstanding value from what I've built, I still stand to learn and gain a ton from seeing how someone like Steve, who's been programming professionally since 1985, is using the latest and greatest tools.
As you'll hear, it unfolded exactly as I'd hoped. We walked through a dozen or so bespoke applications that have fundamentally rewired how Steve interacts with the digital world. And for me, these produced a number of light bulb moments where I realized just how much value I've still been leaving on the table. These include, among others, an Attention Firewall that alerts him about important messages without requiring him to constantly check email and messaging apps. A personal reading app that attempts to flag meaningful new ideas and the otherwise overwhelming number of newsletters he's subscribed to. A dashboard that allows him to see the status of his various coding agents at a glance. A Chrome extension that automates common workflows. And a universal logging solution that allows Claude to debug and fix the errors that inevitably pop up.
Along the way, he also describes his strategies for information security and integrity. How he's using mobile and voice interfaces. And, my favorite, his anti-token-maxing philosophy, which he sums up as, The agent's not important.

**Steve Newman** (2:24)
I'm important.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:27)
Because there is quite a bit of screen sharing, this episode is probably best consumed in video form on YouTube. But I think we do a good enough job of narrating that it should work well in audio form too. In any case, even if you don't listen at all, I encourage you to do what I did immediately after recording. Copy the transcript, give it to your Claude code or OpenClaw, and ask it to identify the ideas we discuss that would most meaningfully enhance your personal setup. Since doing this, I've already created a new UI to help me produce the podcast more efficiently, and I'm working on a number of hooks and a personal Chrome extension. So I'll be very interested to hear what your coding agents create for you based on this conversation.
With that, I encourage you all to subscribe to Second Thoughts on Substack. And I hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at what one extremely accomplished builder is building now. With Steve Newman of the Golden Gate Institute for AI.
The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you in part by Google, makers of the Gemini family of models, and much more. As many of you know, due to some unexpected circumstances, for the last few months, my wife and I have been homeschooling our boys on an improvised basis. And when you're making it up as you go, like we are, Gemini's Image Generation Model, also known as Nano Banana, can be a huge difference maker. Whether it's math or reading, whenever I notice a gap in their understanding, I ask Gemini to create a worksheet on that specific concept. And then seconds later, I'm printing a sheet of 6-8 illustrated exercises created specifically for them. So far, I've made worksheets to help teach common patterns of silent letters, vowel pairs, prefixes and suffixes, how adding an E to the end of words changes the preceding vowel sound, the commutative property of addition and multiplication, and more. With any luck, the kids will be back to school in the fall. But this is a teaching technique that I'll take with me into next year and beyond.
Try Gemini's Nano Banana Image Generation Model for yourself in Google's AI Studio or the Gemini app. And check out the quizzes and guided learning features in the Gemini app as well. Thank you to Google for supporting the Cognitive Revolution. And now, on with the show.