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Mighty Brief

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

Start Here

  1. Google rolls out Gemini 3.5 Flash — This is the main morning signal. Google is pushing the cheap/fast tier up into real agentic coding territory, not just incremental consumer polish.
  2. Simon Willison on Gemini 3.5 Flash pricing — The catch is cost. The model looks fast and strong, but several early reactions point out that the “Flash” label no longer means obviously cheaper in practice.
  3. Google overhauls Search around Gemini — Bigger than a model launch. Search is becoming an interface layer for generated workflows, custom UIs, and background agents.
  4. GitHub confirms a breach of ~3,800 repositories tied to a malicious VS Code extension — Worth flagging because it is exactly the kind of agent-era supply-chain risk that can quietly become everyone’s problem.
  5. Trump IRS settlement story is still dominating the political surface area — The policy backdrop still feels unstable and increasingly personalized. Not directly actionable this morning, but it is shaping the mood around institutions.

BM

Live unread scan for dan.wick@blankmetal.ai failed. gog gmail search returned invalid_grant / invalid_rapt, so there is no clean inbox read to summarize without bluffing.
Static board read from MEMORY.md: Rally still looks like the strongest narrative lead, Care Providers of Minnesota still looks like the cleanest scoped AI use case, and Tungsten / Great Hill still read like unblock-or-prune decisions.
Main BM tension remains the same: warm surfaces everywhere, but attention is still fragmented. Today should probably be about choosing which threads deserve force, not collecting more options.

Munger Observer

Opportunity Cost: the open task list is still carrying stale March items. Old priorities keep stealing attention from better current bets.
Margin of Safety: the specific Minnebar reference is stale, but the principle is not. Protect slack early so one surprise does not consume the day.

Personal Thought

This morning’s signal is pretty consistent: judgment, taste, and pruning are getting more valuable at the exact moment raw output gets cheaper. The win is probably fewer parallel bets with more visible conviction.

Quick Scan