Imagine Naked People Were Stupider. Naked Models Are.
YC partner Garry Tan responds to Kyle Kingsbury's anti-AI essay, arguing that Kingsbury's tests of naked models are like testing an engine on a bench and concluding cars are unsafe. The article details the 'thin harness, fat skills' architecture: skill files (reusable Markdown procedures) constrain model input, resolvers (routing tables) dispatch tasks, deterministic code handles precision operations, and testing covers the full pipeline. Using Kingsbury's own bathroom rendering and stock data hallucination examples, Tan shows how architecture can turn unreliable models into reliable systems, and shares a personal resolver that reduced file misfilings from 10/13 to zero. The automotive metaphor concludes: seatbelts, traffic lights, and crumple zones made cars safe, not skepticism of engines. Targeted at engineers building or evaluating AI systems.