Matt Van Horn: Never Read the Plan

Matt Van Horn got rid of his IDE. Then he got rid of his text editor. Now he doesn't even read the plan his AI agent writes; he just asks for the TL;DR (Too long; didn’t read) and lets it run. He's the founder behind three open-source projects (Last 30 Days, Printing Press, and Agent Cookie), the former founder of June, the smart oven company that put an NVIDIA GPU on a countertop appliance years before anyone said "agentic," and he's now building a new company in what he calls the "after Claude" era.

In this conversation, Noah and Matt get into what it actually looks like to trust an AI agent with real work, where that trust should stop, and why the calculus changes completely once real customers, real revenue, or real hardware are on the line.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• Why Matt stopped reading the plan, and when that's actually a bad idea
• How building a company after Claude 4.5 changes headcount and strategy
• The simplest way to start learning AI coding by contributing to open source

Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction

(02:15) The case for “dangerously skip permissions”

(03:31) From “don’t read the code” to “don’t read the plan”

(07:45) Why vibe coding died last Thanksgiving

(09:11) Matching your risk tolerance to the stakes

(11:13) Building a company after Claude 4.5

(15:04) Personal productivity with Granola and Claude Code

(16:05) The missing agentic email product

(18:07) How the open source projects feed the business

(20:35) The best way to start contributing to open source

(25:06) There's more than one right way to build now

Resources:

Sponsor: Valet — https://valet.dev — the secure place to share what AI creates.
Follow Valet on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/valetdotdev/

Connect with Noah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahlevin/
Serious People Website: https://seriouspeople.ai/

Connect with Matt on X: https://x.com/mvanhorn

Find Matt on GitHub: https://github.com/mvanhorn

June’s Website: https://juneoven.com/

Lyft’s Website: https://www.lyft.com/

Matt's projects

Last 30 Days: https://github.com/mvanhorn/last30days-skill

CLI Printing Press: https://github.com/mvanhorn/cli-printing-press

Printing Press Library: https://github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library

Agent Cookie: https://github.com/mvanhorn/agentcookie

Agentic engineering

Compound Engineering: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

CE plan: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin/blob/main/docs/skills/ce-plan.md

Claude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-code

OpenAI Codex: https://openai.com/codex/

Products and tools mentioned

Howie: https://howie.com/

Granola: https://www.granola.ai/

Superhuman: https://superhuman.com/

Clicky: https://github.com/farzaa/clicky

Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/

Digg: https://digg.com/

OpenClaw: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw

Hermes Agent: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

cmux: https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux

Ghostty: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty

Podcast reference

Lenny's Podcast with Cat Wu: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7wTqD5zwl8ZitUeplapvBG

Cat Wu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catwu/