# Theo Browne (t3.gg)

#entity

## Summary

Developer, educator, and founder (t3.gg / "Ping"); speaker at AIE. Advocates that engineers must radically expand ambition to keep pace with model progress.

## Current Understanding

Theo's argument is psychological as much as technical: senior engineers underuse frontier models because they scope work to what the *previous* model could do. His prescription — **[[think-wider-not-bigger|think wider]]**, shed developer-identity baggage, treat code as disposable — frames the "models aren't that useful for me" complaint as a scoping problem on the human's side.

His second source in the vault sharpens the disposable-code stance into a discipline: **[[make-more-cheap-code]]** — keep hand-verification of shipped code intact (he explicitly rejects shipping unreviewed slop: "I hate them too. We're on the same side") while generating orders of magnitude more never-shipped code for verification and exploration. Recurring author-move across both talks: locate the bottleneck in a *human habit* (scoping, reading ratios), not in the models.

## Evidence

- Talk "Everything we knew about software has changed" (AIE): model eras, tier shift, breadth-vs-depth, G-brain markdown tier — [[2026-07-14-everything-we-knew-about-software-has-changed]].
- Video "You're reading way too much code": four tiers of code, ship/no-ship line, 100:1 slop-to-ship verification ratio, dumb-model agents as API usability testers — [[2026-07-24-youre-reading-way-too-much-code]]. Mentions his current project **Lakebed** (reads every signature/API there, verifies with slop).
- Built "Ping" (YC — "Zoom for streamers"), which he uses as the "startup → now a side project" example.
- Replaced a PR-triage service with a markdown file on a 9 AM cron (Codex/Claude → S3).

## Related Pages

- Concepts: [[think-wider-not-bigger]], [[code-as-throwaway]], [[make-more-cheap-code]], [[decoupling-identity-from-profession]]
- Timeline: [[ai-agent-evolution]]
- Compare: [[konstantin]] (model-builder's orchestration view), [[allie-miller]] (personal-OS view)
- Comparison: [[theo-konstantin-allie]] — three-lens side-by-side (Theo/Konstantin/Allie)

## Contradictions / Uncertainty

- His model-era names ("Sonnet 3.5", "Opus 4.5", "Mythos/Fable") are rhetorical framing; mapping to shipped model IDs is unverified. Status: tentative.
- His read/write/merge counts (1,000/2,000+/~500 per day) are self-reported illustrations, not measurements. Status: tentative.

## Next Questions

- What does *he* now consider "too big"? (He says he no longer knows.)
